Pending and unsuccessful payments

When a payment shows as Pending in a user's account, it's usually due to the user's payment method no longer being valid:

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In the past, we would try to charge the user's card once a day. We'd email the user every 5 days to let them know that the payment failed. PayPal complained about the large number of requests to their servers, so we are now attempting to charge the user only every 5 days. 

Emails & Auto-cancellation

The user receives an email from us a month before their credit card is expiring. This gives them the chance to update their payment details before we try charging them for the renewal. The email is titled: "Your credit card expires next month".

We only send these emails for payments made using a credit card. We do not have the necessary information to do this for users paying with Shopify or their PayPal account. 

If a renewal payment has failed, we send the user an email titled "Unsuccessful Payment on your Subscription". This goes out to users with credit card or PayPal payments. We send the email every 5 days for a total of 20 times. If the user doesn't update the card details and the payment still fails after the 20 unsuccessful attempts, the user's subscription auto-cancels.  

Between Cancellation and Auto-cancellation

If a user cancels their upgrade while they are still in the dunning process, they will continue receiving the "Unsuccessful Payment on your Subscription" email until the subscription auto-cancels. This is because technically they still owe us money for the time where they had the upgrade active without making a payment. The outstanding payments are annulled once the subscription auto-cancels. 

"I'm unable to download the invoices as the download button is not available."

This is also due to the user's payment method no longer being valid. You'll be able to download the invoices for them in TSH but they will not have the Charged Date, Sub Total and Total Amount on them since the payment stopped coming through.

Also, if you see the pending status in user's TSH, feel free to use the following text:

"The pending status usually happens when our system is unable to charge your payment method due to expired credit or your bank declining the transaction.

We may offer you 2 workarounds for this:

1. You can either reach out to your bank to inquire about why your payment isn't going through or 2. You can change your payment method so we can charge your other credit card. Please refer to the following article to learn more: How do I update my payment details?

Once the payment goes through, the feed will show correctly on your end, too."

"Payment failed. Please ensure your information is correct and try again."

In that case, ask them to send a screenshot of what they have on their screen and web console whenever they try to purchase a subscription and escalate to the #engineering channel.

You may also advise them to try clearing their browser's cache and cookies or using different browsers/devices and see if that helps while you wait for an update from engineers.