Which plan retries a declined rebill

Before you compare dunning tiers, see how rebills stay on one MID.

What rebill management and dunning software actually do

A buyer who cancels made a choice. A declined card is a charge that failed, and that buyer may still want the product. SamCart's help center calls the repair work dunning: retry the charge, and ask the customer to update an expired or declined card before the renewal is lost.

Rebill management is the set of jobs around that renewal.

• Schedule the next charge on the subscription.
• Decide when the processor should try the card again.
• Send the buyer a way to put a new card on file, usually by email.

Failed payment recovery is the name for charges that succeed on a later try. Some CRMs also sell a recovery add-on beside the dunning in the license.

A card that keeps failing can show up later as a dispute. The chargeback ratio checker compares your dispute ratio with the Visa and Mastercard thresholds.

Continuity billing software for a DTC or nutra offer

A trial that rolls into a monthly bottle, and a subscribe-and-save on the same cart as the ad, bill on the funnel's own gateway. Checkout Champ's pricing page includes subscription billing on any merchant account you connect, with no extra subscription fee on top of the platform plan.

A merchant of record is a different contract. That company sells to the buyer, handles the tax, and pays you a share. The renewal sits on their books. For software and downloads, read the merchant of record guide.

On these continuity stacks the renewal bills the account that stored the card on the first sale. The MID routing guide for subscription and rebill offers is where you sort out which account that is. The account still has to be approved for the offer. That application is covered by high-risk merchant account providers.

High-volume stacks, where the retry is a gateway rule

When renewal volume is high and several merchant accounts are active, an email asking for a new card does not clear the decline at the processor. The retry has to be a rule on the gateway.

Sticky.io's price list puts continuity billing and smart dunning inside the CRM + Checkout license. Recovery is a second product on that same page. It is performance-based, and you pay only when revenue is recovered. You get the percentage on a custom quote.

A reviewer on Capterra called the product expensive and the billing screens a mess, and said they were planning a replacement. That cost is a real drawback on a license aimed at high volume. Read the Sticky.io review for the CRM that comes with the license.

Konnektive's homepage lists dunning beside load balancing and programmable transaction management. Decline Salvage is on the same feature list. Recycle Billing reattempts a soft-declined rebill up to nine times, and the profile can lower the price on a later try. Extended rules can send that try to another gateway. When every attempt has failed, or the decline is hard, the subscription moves to Recycle Failed.

konnektive.com does not publish a monthly price. The figure comes from a demo, which the Konnektive review describes.

Checkout Champ is the option in this group with a price on the website. Growth and Enterprise are both on the pricing page. The homepage advertises optimized rebill rates and intelligent billing logic beside multi-processor routing. That line is the company's. Order handling is written up in the Checkout Champ review.

Hosted carts, where dunning sits on a higher plan

A creator, or a smaller DTC brand, usually wants the checkout hosted and the subscription attached to the product. On these carts the retry is a feature of the higher plan.

PayKickstart's retention page lists the recovery tools together: a reminder before the card expires, notices by email, SMS, voicemail and in-app message, smart retries, and a cancellation-saver flow. The plan table starts with a monthly fee capped by revenue, a 14-day trial, and a Launch option that takes a share of revenue instead of that fee.

Sellers writing on G2 describe the configuration as heavy work. Budget that time before you count on the retries, and read the PayKickstart review for how the cart is configured.

SamCart's plans put Subscription Saver on Pro. Core leaves it off the list. For Stripe and SamPay recurring subscriptions, the help article sets charge attempts on day 1, day 3, day 5 and day 7 after the first failure, with an email to the customer each time. After the fourth miss the subscription is marked Delinquent and cancelled.

SamCart also publishes recovery stories with large percentages. Those stories are the vendor's. The four-attempt schedule is what the help article specifies. The cart is covered in the SamCart review.

ThriveCart's feature list places Failed Payment Recovery (Email Dunning) and Subscription Dunning on Pro+. Standard can sell a subscription. Dunning is the Pro+ line on that list. See the ThriveCart review for the rest of the cart.

If the subscriptions already run in Stripe, and you are not buying a funnel cart, Stripe Billing includes Smart Retries and dunning emails you can edit for a failed charge or a card about to expire. The same page lists a card account updater. Stripe says businesses using Stripe recover 55% of failed payments on average. That figure is Stripe's. The Stripe review is about the processor, not a continuity CRM.

Failed payment recovery beyond the inbox

Sticky.io's Recovery page draws the line in a headline: email cannot fix a decline. What that page markets instead is a retry timed by their system, logic that reads the decline code, and routing of the failed rebill across gateways. That product is the quote-only Recovery add-on.

The built-in versions are the recycle profile, the day-by-day schedule and the smart dunning inside the CRM license. Those run without a second contract. Buy the performance add-on if you want that vendor to run the retry rules and charge you only for revenue that comes back.

After several failures, the problem shifts from a missed renewal to a dispute. Chargeback management software is what you add once the same renewal has failed more than once.

My take

I would start with Checkout Champ when I need a published price and a gateway retry, and with SamCart Pro when the product is hosted and the list is still short. PayKickstart is the one I would choose when the reminder also needs a text or a phone message, which its retention page lists. If the subscriptions already live in Stripe, I would stay on Stripe Billing. I would skip SamCart Core and ThriveCart Standard for this job, because those plans leave the retry off the feature list. I would judge Sticky.io by whether renewal volume can carry the license, and Konnektive by whether a demo quote is acceptable.

I would settle which account stores the card before paying for a higher tier. Vendor recovery percentages stay in the marketing column until a help page states the schedule.

Your next step

See how rebills stay on one MID. Then choose the plan whose feature list includes the retry. The other guides are on the Best of page.

Sources

• SamCart help: Subscription Saver dunning
• SamCart pricing
• Sticky.io pricing
• Sticky.io Recovery
• Sticky.io on Capterra
• Konnektive homepage
• Konnektive Recycle Billing
• Checkout Champ pricing
• Checkout Champ homepage
• PayKickstart revenue retention
• PayKickstart pricing
• PayKickstart on G2
• ThriveCart features
• Stripe Billing