

If you're not checking your customers' expired cards, you're losing money - mparramon
http://www.developingandstuff.com/2014/10/if-youre-not-checking-your-customers.html

======
aculver
Hey. I'm the Andrew who runs the Churn Buster product mentioned by patio11.

Very clever of you to think to email customers before their credit card
expires. :-) We had the same idea and it was a feature in the original release
of our product, but after several months we actually found that only about 30%
of cards set to expire actually started failing payments within two months of
hitting the expiration date, and after two months failure rates just return to
normal. So, even with a healthy 50% conversion rate on the email campaign, we
were only retaining about 1.5 customers per 10 that we sent 3 emails to.
Furthermore, the email notifications to the customers who very likely didn't
need to receive the email were triggering cancelations from some customers as
they re-evaluated their purchasing decision in front of a "you owe us money!"
email instead of a sales page promoting the benefits they're receiving. :-)
For that reason, we no longer send out these emails by default. There are
still some businesses where this makes sense, but they're definitely the rare
exception and not the rule.

Furthermore, we found that a very decent chunk of failed payments (maybe
15-30%?) will sort themselves out automatically with no intervention if you
just try them a few times over a few days. Again, no need to email these
customers and waste their time unless there is a time sensitive delivery that
needs to go out or something similar.

So, for those two reasons we choose to wait until the third failed payment
attempt before we start emailing the customer. But once we hit that third
failed payment attempt, we really go to town trying to get in touch with the
customer and get them current. We've got all sorts or tricks up our sleeves
for this, including a real person with a great British accent who will call
customers on the phone.

Happy to answer any questions you or anyone else may have about solving this
problem. It really isn't something many subscription service providers think
about when they're building their business. Feel free to reach out any time at
andrew@churnbuster.io .

~~~
glimcat
Great example of issues I would probably _never_ catch if I tried to implement
all of this in-house. It just wouldn't get that level of attention once it was
already working.

"Oh, that's easy, I could implement all that in a weekend" \- One, no. And
two, no. Problems are always deeper than they seem, and it's usually the extra
90% that determines how well it works.

------
patio11
See also BeStunning.net, which takes care of this for you, or ChurnBuster.io,
which decides to wait for a failed payment (Andrew the founder says outdated
CCs will still pass through many payments) and then follow up with a
combination of email and real live human phone calls.

~~~
mparramon
Thanks! We're not using Stripe though, do you know of any solutions that do
not depend on it?

~~~
matthewlehner
I'm fairly certain that Churnbuster now supports other payment processors and
gateways beyond Stripe.

~~~
aculver
First let me say that there is no support like Stripe support. :-) I'm always
greatly relieved when onboarding with a customer and they both use Stripe
_and_ Stripe subscriptions. But to your point, I _may_ know something about
Churn Buster supporting folks not using Stripe subscriptions or even using
other payment processors. Email me at andrew@churnbuster.io for more
information. :-)

------
tzs
As Braintree eloquently put it, "Credit cards aren't like milk--they're still
good after expired" [1]. If the account itself is still valid and still has
the same number, charging it will often still work for recurring payments.
I've heard conflicting advice from different payment processes as to how to
submit a recurring charge on a card that is expired (but was not expired when
the original transaction was submitted). I've heard both (1) set the
expiration to 0000, and (2) set it to some future date (original + 3 years,
e.g.).

If the account number has changed, then you are out of luck--unless it is a
Visa or MasterCard and you subscribe to Visa or MasterCard's recurring billing
update service [2], which takes an account number and (sometimes [3]) will
tell you if the account has a new number and/or expiration date and will give
you that new information.

[1] [https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/credit-cards-arent-
li...](https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/credit-cards-arent-like-milk---
theyre-still-good-after-expired)

[2] I'm not sure if this is generally available or is only offered to
merchants who meet certain volume and reliability requirements.

[3] It's up to the issuing bank whether or not the update service is
supported.

