Managing order errors

Understanding and managing order errors allows you to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience while ensuring you receive payment for processed orders.

This guide explains how to access the Order errors page in your Recharge merchant portal, manage order errors, and configure your store settings.

Accessing the Order error page

Use the Order errors page to understand customer errors and how they impact your store. The Order Errors page is located in your Recharge merchant portal:

1. Click Customers in the merchant portal and select Orders from the dropdown. 
2. Select Order errors from the dropdown options. 

The Order errors page groups and categorizes order errors, providing insights into the error, how it occurred, and resolution steps. Order errors are divided into the following categories:

• All active errors
• Missing variants
• Inventory
• Store setup
• Payments
• Other
• Archived

View each tab in the Order errors page to learn more about a customer's order error, why it occurred, and how to resolve any errors.

Use the filters on each tab to locate specific orders by customer, or error type, or use the date filter to view order errors for a specific period.

Understanding the Order errors page

Understanding and managing order errors allows you to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience while ensuring you receive payment for processed orders.

Review the following sections to understand each tab in the Order errors page:

• All active errors
• Missing variants
• Inventory
• Store setup
• Payments
• Other

All active errors

Active errors are orders that failed to process but can still be recovered. Recharge retries some errors automatically, while other errors require you to investigate, update, and manually retry the order. See Error types to understand what order errors require manual intervention.

Missing variants

Recharge uses the variant ID assigned by your ecommerce platform to create customers' orders. Missing variant errors occur when the variant ID on at least one line item on the order no longer exists in your product catalog. 

You can update the associated variant ID and manually retry the order to resolve the issue. See Troubleshooting variant not found errors for detailed instructions.

Inventory

Recharge checks the inventory levels for your products before attempting to process an order. Orders may result in an error depending on your inventory settings. Specifically, inventory error messages are shown if your settings are configured to create the order only if inventory is available. 

You can update the inventory levels in your ecommerce platform to resolve this issue. These orders are automatically retried after the original order date. See Troubleshooting insufficient inventory errors for detailed instructions.

Store setup

Order errors can occur depending on your store settings. These issues are related to settings that the order relies on for processing, including:

• Payment integration
• Shipping setup
• Tax settings

Investigate each order and follow the specific resolution steps provided to resolve the issue. See Charge error messages for a list of specific errors, and the resolution steps required to fix the error.

Payments

Your linked payment gateway may return an order error message. These orders often fail because the customer's bank declined the transaction. 

Some payment-related order errors are retried automatically, while others will always result in a failed attempt because the customer needs to update the payment method on file. It is important to investigate the individual error to understand the required resolution steps. See Charge error messages for a list of specific errors, and the resolution steps to fix the error.

Other

Errors categorized in the other category are rare and do not fit in any additional category. 

Investigate each order and follow the specific resolution steps provided to resolve the issue. See Charge error messages for a list of specific errors, and the resolution steps required to fix the error.

Archived

The system retried these errors the maximum number of attempts before declaring them closed. Use the Archived tab to view declined and max retry orders. 

Additional action is not required for these orders.

Viewing order error messages

You can view a full error message in your Recharge for more context and guidance on next steps.

Accessing the order error message

1. From the merchant portal, click Customers and select Customers.
2. Search for and select the specific customer.
3. Open the Errors section on the customer's profile.
4. Click the error type link under Charge status to open the More event information panel.
5.  Review the Message field for the full error details.

Included information

The More event information panel includes several helpful fields:

• Message: The full error details returned by the payment processor or eCommerce platform.
• Billing attempt ID: A unique identifier for the billing attempt. Shopify Support may request this ID when investigating payment failures.
• Charge amount: The amount Recharge attempted to collect.
• Charge attempts: The number of times Recharge has attempted to bill the customer.
• Payment gateway: The payment gateway used for the charge (for example, Shopify Payments).
• Payment method: The customer’s payment method used for the attempt.
• Order ID: The associated Shopify or BigCommerce order ID.
• Address ID: The customer’s address reference used during the billing attempt.
• Recharge error code: A Recharge-specific code that may help support teams identify the type of error.

The exact fields you see vary depending on the type of charge and the details returned by your payment processor or eCommerce platform.

Refer to Understanding order error messages for steps to resolve the error.

Error types

The following table outlines which errors are retried through the standard dunning process, versus errors retried through a Failed Payment Recovery Strategy. Errors that are not retried by either process must be manually retried.

Understand the retry process

If a customer's charge fails to process, Recharge retries the charge the next day. Charge errors are automatically retried according to your automatic retry settings at 4 PM ET on the charge retry date.

The dunning process only counts payment-related errors as charge attempts. Customers receive a card declined email the first time the card is declined, and the order cannot be processed. However, the card declined notification is not sent after every retry attempt. Instead, it is sent after any attempt, seven days after the last notification was sent. 

If the error relates to a payment error that must be manually retried, Recharge follows your store's dunning/retry configuration and only retries the charge on the configured schedule.

If your business needs additional charge retries outside of Recharge’s automatic dunning process, you can manually retry the charge or create a Failed Payment Recovery strategy.  

Example

If you set your retry logic to retry a failed charge every five days, an initial card-decline email will be sent on the day of the charge failure after the first decline. The charge will be retried the next day. 

If the previous attempts fail, the next retry will occur on the sixth day. Recharge does not send the customer an email because a card decline notification was sent within the last seven days. On the next retry attempt during the 11th day, a card decline notification will be sent to the customer. 

Retry settings

Recharge retries the most common charge error types, but some charge errors must be manually retried either due to configuration issues or the customer needs to be involved. See Error types for a detailed list of charges that are automatically retried, and what charges are manually retried.

Expired cards are retried on Shopify charges as requested by Shopify. Recharge does not automatically retry expired cards for stores using Stripe, Braintree, or Authorize.net. 

Understand card declines

Cards can decline for many reasons, usually related to the customer's bank or credit card provider. When a card declines, Recharge sends the customer an email prompting them to update their payment information.

If the customer updates their card, Recharge retries the charge the following day provided the charge falls within the Automatic recovery period with card update window (found in your Failed Payment Recovery settings). Contact Recharge Support if you need to update this setting.

At the same time, Recharge updates the decline error to CARD_UPDATED_NOW_PENDING_NEXT_ATTEMPT. This error remains until Recharge retries the charge. If the charge is outside the recovery window, this status remains indefinitely and Recharge does not retry the charge.

Recharge never receives specific reasons for card declines from banks. Most often, banks flag certain charges as a precaution, especially if they don't recognize the company name. If a customer continues to see card decline errors even after updating their card, they should contact their bank to investigate the issue. 

Understanding the automatic recovery period settings

Recharge offers two automatic recovery period settings to determine how long failed charges are eligible for automatic retry attempts.

You can view the automatic recovery period settings in your Failed Payment Recovery settings:

1. In the Recharge merchant portal, select Churn tools, then click Failed Payment Recovery.
2. Click Settings.

Automatic recovery period

Determines the number of days after the original charge date that Recharge automatically retries eligible failed charges, including payment and inventory errors.

Automatic recovery period with card updated

Determines the number of days after the original charge date that Recharge automatically retries a failed charge if the customer updates their payment method during that window.

Edit the automatic recovery period settings

You cannot edit these settings. Contact the Recharge support team to update the number of days between retries.

Updating payment methods for linked addresses or subscriptions

Recharge automatically schedules linked subscriptions to be retried at the next charge retry cycle when a customer updates or replaces one of their payment methods, and their payment method is used with one or more addresses/subscriptions.

Recharge retrieves all error charges associated with any linked addresses. 

The number of times the charge was previously tried will get reset. The next try date is set to tomorrow and set the state of the charge to CARD_UPDATED_NOW_PENDING_NEXT_ATTEMPT. All subscriptions that were cancelled due to max retries reached will be identified and reactivated.

Download the charge errors export

Recharge provides a CSV report that lists all of your store's charge errors:

1. In the merchant portal, click Tools & apps and select Exports.
2. Click Create export and choose Orders - Errors as the export type.
3. Set your date range and enter your email to receive the export.
4. Click Create export.

Working with your payment processor

For more information on failed charges, declined charges, and fraud filters, reach out to your specific payment processor:

• Shopify Payments: Troubleshoot Shopify Payments
• Stripe: Understanding declines and failed payments
• Braintree: Transactions - Declines
• Authorize.net: Why was my transaction declined?