KNOWLEDGE HUB

Manage recurring payments

In this chapter you’ll learn how to ensure recurring card payments are uninterrupted.

If your business model depends on regular, repeating payments, you don’t want these unnecessarily uninterrupted — and neither does your customer. For this reason many businesses decide to keep their cards on file.

Keep your cards up-to-date

When storing the cards on behalf of your shoppers, you have to make sure their details are up-to-date — even in if the card is lost, stolen or expired. For this purpose the card schemes provide Account Updater services that let businesses and acquirers replace invalid card numbers with new ones.

Adyen Account Updater

Adyen Account Updater works in real-time to ensure your cards-on-file are valid. We connect you to Visa and Mastercard Account Updaters without you having to formally enroll with the schemes and demonstrate compliance, which is handled by us. So, whether the transaction happens today or two years from now, you can be sure the card is up-to-date.

Automatic retries

Payments often fail because of an outage or downtime in the patchwork of legacy systems that make up the traditional payment flow. To limit the impact it’s worth retrying payments that fail because of technical reasons.

Here’s an example.

HelloFresh was experiencing a high rate of refusal due to technical issues. To combat this, Adyen identified when and why the transaction had failed, and retried it immediately again via a different acquiring route.

Fine-tune your billing strategy

There’s not much you can do if your customer has insufficient funds. But you might be able to increase the odds of a successful payment if you bill them at the right time of the month.

The graph below shows the refusals due to insufficient funds in different countries. The UK, for example, sees a spike in refusals toward the end of the month, just before payday.

Refusals due to insufficient funds

”Retention is obviously our primary goal, and the optimum outcome for that would be a successful authorization on the first rebill attempt... But if you’re looking for one key metric to base your rebill strategy around, country is definitely the most important and where you’ll find the most consistent trends in behavior.”

Process subscription and recurring payments with Adyen

Adyen offers integrations to key subscription management systems, including Aria, Demandware, Magento, and Zuora. You’ll benefit from a range of features like Adyen Account Updater, and Auto Retries.

Get the full guide

Download your copy of "Payments 101 for fast-growing businesses"

 

Are you looking for test card numbers?

Would you like to contact support?