Cancellation & Dunning Management in Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout

Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout offers flexible options for your cancellation and dunning management.

Using the cancellation management settings, you can determine the process your customers must follow in order to cancel their subscriptions within the customer portal. 

Dunning management will help you manage situations on your store when transactions fail. You can customize your dunning process to help reduce the number of subscription cancellations due to failed transactions.

This article walks you through the functionality and setup of both features.

Video Walkthrough

Cancellation management

Bold Subscriptions offers valuable management tools to allow you to decide what happens when your customers attempt to cancel their subscriptions.

Within the cancellation management settings, you can enable one of two optional flows:

• Provide cancellation instructions
• Customer retention flow

If you choose not to enable either of these options, your customers are able to immediately cancel their subscriptions—provided you've enabled this permission within the customer portal settings.

Read more about the functionality and setup of each cancellation option below.

Provide cancellation instructions

This option allows you to display a message when your customers attempt to cancel their subscription. This is a good option if you would like to have your customers email or call you before cancelling.

Example:

Customer view in the customer portal

Cancellation instructions setup

To provide cancellation instructions, please follow the steps below.

1. From within Bold Subscriptions, select Settings, then Cancellation management.
2. Select Provide cancellation instructions.
3. Enter your desired text in the editor.

   

4. Click Save.

Customer retention flow

This feature provides a list of cancellation reasons that your customer must choose from when cancelling their subscription. This is ideal if you want to allow your customer the flexibility to cancel and gain insight to their reasons why. 

By default, the following reasons are included in the settings:

• I have too much of the product.
• Cost is too high.
• No longer interested.
• Will resubscribe in the future.
• Other. This will bring up a text field for your customers to submit their own feedback.

You edit or add to this list, or create your own list of custom reasons.

Example:

Customer view in the Customer Portal

Pro-Tip: To view your customer's cancellation reasons, you can create a Cancelled subscriptions report. For more information, please visit Dashboard Analytics, Reports & Activity Logs.

Customer Retention Flow Setup

1. From within Bold Subscriptions, navigate to Settings > Cancellation management.

2. Select Customer retention flow.
3. Optional: Delete, edit, or add a cancellation reason.
   1. To delete a reason, select the red X to the right of the reason.
   2. To edit a reason, select the pencil icon to the right of the reason, enter your text and select Update reason.

      

   3. To add a reason, select Add cancellation reason, enter your text and select Add reason.
4. Optional: Add more reasons.
5. Select Save.

Dunning Management

Bold Subscriptions offers a few different options to help you manage situations when your customer's transactions fail. You can customize your dunning process to help reduce the number of subscription cancellations you receive due to failed transactions.

You can also send an email to your customer when their credit card is declined. This can be enabled in the Settings > Email notifications > Transaction Failed. When receiving this email, your customer will be guided to their customer portal to update their payment information.

If the card used to make the payment is successfully updated, the order will process at 12AM for your store's timezone. If the payment is unsuccessful, the app will attempt to recharge the credit card every 24 hours until the charge goes through, or until the order is cancelled.

To set up your dunning management process in Bold Subscriptions, please review the sections below.

Pro-Tip: Your customer's failed transactions can be found in the Failing payments report. You can download a CSV file of this report from the Bold Subscriptions Dashboard > Reports. For more information, please visit Dashboard Analytics, Reports & Activity Logs, and view Reports.

Setup

Step 1: Select a max number of retries

With this feature, you are able to set how many times a subscription payment gets retried after the transaction has failed. You can select from 1 to 15 retries.

To adjust these settings, please follow the steps below.

1. From within Bold Subscriptions, select Settings, then Dunning Management.
2. Within the Manage failed payment flow, select the maximum number of retry attempts.

Step 2: Decide what happens when the orders fail

Once the maximum number of retries has been met, Bold Subscriptions automatically cancels the subscription. You can adjust these settings so that the order is paused instead, and when your customer edits their payment information, the order will resume.

To adjust these settings in Bold Subscriptions, select one of the options under Once the subscription reaches the maximum number of failures.

• Cancel subscription: This moves the order to the inactive subscribers list. When your customers orders are moved here, they do not count towards your active subscriptions count in the in-app analytics.

  Note: You need to reactive the subscription to allow your customers to update their payment information.

• Pause subscription: The paused subscriptions still count toward your store's subscriptions analytics until they are cancelled. Your customers can update their payment information for a paused subscription.

  Note: The order resumes after the customer has updated their payment information. Alternatively, you can resume the subscription in the admin.

• Skip failed order: Skipping an order on your store is beneficial to give your customer more time to adjust their credit card information.

Step 3: Select the number of days between retries

Bold Subscriptions allows you to set the time between retries for your customers' credit cards after they fail. This gives your customers a chance to update their credit card information without risking the subscription being cancelled.

The number of days chosen is the number of days between retries. This doesn't include the order date.