How do I manage dunning in Recurly Commerce?

Dunning helps you recover failed subscription payments by setting up automatic retries and customer notifications—maximizing revenue while reducing churn.

Who can access it?

This feature is available on all Recurly Commerce subscription plans.

What is dunning?

Dunning is the retry-and-remind process triggered when a payment fails. Recurly Commerce can retry the charge based on your chosen settings and send alerts prompting customers to update their billing information.

Why use it?

• Maximize collections – Capture more payments with customizable retry schedules

• Proactively notify customers – Guide subscribers to update their billing information after a failed charge

• Flexible outcomes – Choose whether to pause or cancel subscriptions if retries are unsuccessful

How to configure dunning

1. Go to Settings → Dunning in your Recurly Commerce app

2. Choose from three strategies:

   • Standard dunning – Retries every 2 days up to 5 times. Subscriptions cancel if all retries fail

   • Retry after failed billing – Set retry intervals after a failed renewal, and choose to pause or cancel if retries fail

   • Retry before failed billing – Schedule retries in advance of the renewal date, with pause or cancel behavior after failure

Notify customers of payment failure

• Enable the Failed payment method email notification in the Notifications tab

• This email includes a secure link to the subscriber’s portal to update their billing details

How to prompt billing reset

Merchants cannot edit payment methods directly, but you can trigger a reset flow:

1. Go to the Customers tab

2. Find the subscriber and scroll to Billing & Shipping

3. Click Send email to reset—this sends them a secure Shopify-hosted billing update link

How to retry the failed payment

Once the customer updates their billing info:

1. Go to their subscription contract

2. Click Process Now to immediately retry the payment

3. If successful, the contract resumes as scheduled—no change to their future billing cadence

For more details, visit our Recurly Commerce Product Documentation.