Dunning management software automatically handles failed recurring payments. When a subscription renewal is declined, it retries the charge on a schedule, emails the customer to fix the problem, and shows your team which subscriptions are at risk. The goal is to recover revenue from customers who never meant to cancel.
SubzWallet is dunning management software built for Shopify subscription brands. It runs on Shopify's native subscription contracts, so saved cards stay in Shopify, and it treats every failed renewal as revenue to recover rather than a lost subscriber. For the basics of the term, read What is dunning management (what is dunning management).
Why Failed Payments Matter for Subscription Brands
Failed payments cause roughly 20-40% of all subscription churn, according to Recurly's 2026 benchmarks. This is involuntary churn. The customer liked the product, kept the subscription and never clicked cancel. Their card expired, hit a limit or was declined by the bank, and the renewal did not go through.
Failures are common. Recharge platform data puts first-attempt failures at about 7% of recurring charges. On a store with 2,000 monthly renewals, that is around 140 orders a month that need a second chance. Without dunning, many of those subscriptions quietly stop.
Timing matters too. Recurly reports that about 90% of recovered failed payments are recovered within the first 10 days, and that smarter retry strategies add 10-20 percentage points of recovery over basic retries. In other words, the first days after a decline decide most of the outcome, and how you retry changes the result.
Involuntary churn is also the cheapest churn to fix. You do not need to win the customer back with a discount. You need to retry at sensible times, tell them clearly what happened, and make sure the order still makes sense to send. That is the job of dunning software.
How SubzWallet Recovers Failed Payments
Here is what happens in SubzWallet when a renewal fails. Everything below is live in the app today.
- 1The renewal is charged on its billing date through Shopify, using the card the customer saved at checkout.
- 2If the charge is declined, SubzWallet retries it on your schedule: anywhere from 0 to 10 retries, 1 to 14 days apart.
- 3The customer gets branded reminder emails that match your store, with a secure link Shopify emails them to update their card. Your team can also send a payment-update email from the admin.
- 4The subscription moves into the failed tab and appears in the alert center, so your team can see it the same day.
- 5If the last retry fails, the final action you chose runs: skip that order, pause the subscription or cancel it.
- 6If the order failed because a product was out of stock, it follows its own settings: kept as owed and retried, with staff notifications (more on this below).
Because SubzWallet is built on Shopify's native subscription contracts, there is no separate payment vault to keep in sync. Orders, customers and saved cards stay in Shopify, and each order is tagged with the subscription number so your team can trace it.
Reminder emails do most of the customer-facing work. For copy you can adapt, see our dunning letter templates (dunning letter templates). For retry timing, email sequences and the metrics to track, read the full guide to fixing failed subscription payments (failed subscription payments dunning guide).
Out-of-Stock Renewals: Recovered, Not Lost
Not every failed renewal is a card problem. Sometimes the payment would have gone through, but a product in the order is out of stock. Many subscription setups treat this as a failure or skip the order, and the revenue is gone even though the customer still wants the product.
SubzWallet handles these with separate out-of-stock settings: the order is kept as owed and retried, and your staff are notified. The customer also gets a choice in the customer portal:
- Swap the out-of-stock item for another product from the list you allow
- Send the rest of the order now, without the missing item
- Wait until the item is back in stock
Your team sees these subscriptions in their own out-of-stock tab, separate from card declines, so the fix is clear: restock, suggest a swap, or let the customer decide. Inventory can be counted from all of your locations or only the ones you choose.
Alert Center and the Failed Tab
Dunning software is only as useful as what your team can see. SubzWallet gives you two views.
Alert center
The alert center lists every failed and at-risk subscription along with the products blocking them, as a restock-needed list. If one product shows up again and again, that points to a stock or pricing problem rather than a card problem, and you can fix the cause instead of chasing each order.
Failed tab in the subscription list
The subscription list has tabs for upcoming, failed, out of stock, paused, cancelled and expired subscriptions, each with a real count and search. The failed tab is the daily working list for whoever owns retention. Staff roles and permissions are on every plan, so you control who can edit next orders or take action on a subscription.
Analytics sit next to these views: MRR, churn, LTV, cancellation reasons and an at-risk subscribers view, so you can see how much churn your team is fighting and where it comes from.
What to Look for in Dunning Software
Whether you choose SubzWallet or another tool, use this checklist when comparing dunning management software for Shopify subscriptions:
- Scheduled retries: failed renewals are retried more than once, on a sensible schedule, not just a single attempt.
- Branded customer emails: reminders match your store and tell the customer exactly what happened and what to do.
- Native Shopify contracts: saved cards stay in Shopify, so there is no separate vault and no lock-in when you switch.
- Out-of-stock handling: stock failures are kept separate from card failures and are not simply dropped.
- A clear failed-payments view: one list with counts and search, plus an alert view that shows which products are involved.
- Reporting: MRR, churn, cancellation reasons and at-risk subscribers in one place.
- Integrations: subscription events sent to Klaviyo for email and to Gorgias for support.
- Human help: someone who sets up and tunes your dunning, not just a help-center article.
- Honest pricing: what the plan costs, what share of sales it takes, and whether dunning is on the plan you can afford.
Be careful with recovery-rate claims. A recovery percentage depends on your price point, card mix, product type and how long the vendor counts as "recovered". Ask how a number was measured before you compare it with another one.
SubzWallet vs Typical Subscription Apps
The table above compares SubzWallet with what you usually find in Shopify subscription apps. Most apps retry failed payments; the differences are in how out-of-stock renewals are handled, how clearly your team sees failures, and who helps you set it up. Features and prices change, so check each vendor's current pricing and documentation before you decide. You can see the full feature list at /features.
Your Dedicated Team
Every paid plan includes a dedicated developer and account manager for your shop. They set up your dunning emails, your out-of-stock options in the portal and your retention flows, then review failed-payment numbers with you and adjust as results come in. Scale adds priority support and a dedicated Slack channel.
Dunning is not set-and-forget. Card mixes change, products go out of stock and email copy gets stale. Having people who know your shop makes it much more likely the setup keeps working a year from now.
Plans start with Free for up to 50 active subscriptions. Launch is $99/mo plus 1% of subscription sales, Growth is $299/mo plus 0.7%, and Scale is $499/mo plus 0.6%. There is no per-order flat fee. See /pricing for details and free trials.
Moving From Loop or ReCharge
Merchants have moved to SubzWallet from Loop and ReCharge, and migration is free on every plan, including Free. You can import a CSV yourself or let our team do the whole move.
- Saved cards already live in Shopify, so customers never re-enter them.
- Billing is switched over on a date you agree with us, so nobody is charged twice.
- For Loop, we use a read-only Loop API key. Subscriptions are created paused, checked, then switched on.
- On paid plans, your account manager helps set up your dunning emails and portal options as part of the move.