A subscription renewal fails.
The customer still wants the service—nothing else has changed. Yet the card declines, the mandate drops, and revenue quietly disappears.
Rather than being the exception, this is a familiar, costly pattern for many subscription businesses. Failed payments account for up to 50% of total churn, resulting in millions in preventable revenue loss each year.
In a recent webinar hosted by The Paypers in collaboration with IXOPAY, experts Jacob Boggess, Jobe Harrison, and Liam Castagna unpacked why these failures happen. And how merchants can fix them.
This recap distills their most practical, tested strategies to improve renewal rates and protect recurring revenue. Clip highlights from the discussion are included throughout.
The State of Subscriptions: Why the Model Keeps Growing
Even in uncertain markets, subscriptions keep expanding because they offer something both sides desperately need: predictability.
You get steadier, more forecastable revenue, while your customers get fixed, “utility-like” monthly costs they can plan around, whether it’s for food, entertainment, or pet supplies.
But growth doesn’t mean simplicity. As Jacob Boggess, Account Manager at IXOPAY, points out, you’re still dealing with expired cards, outdated payment data, shifting regulations, and all the hidden layers inside the “payments onion.”
Reliable payments mean your renewals keep firing even when cards expire, details change, or a processor goes down. If your system can recover those payments automatically, you protect revenue you’d otherwise have lost without any involvement of the customer.
New Subscription Merchants May Underestimate Complexity
If you’re new to subscriptions, it’s easy to assume you can “just run rebills.” But as Jacob explains, there’s a whole payments onion beneath the surface, layers that most first-time subscription merchants overlook. These include:
Expired or reissued cards that silently break your renewal flow.
Virtual or one-time-use cards that will never authorize again after the first payment.
Unpredictable consumer behavior, like customers signing up for a three-month “trial mindset” when you’ve forecasted a 12-month lifetime value.
Cancellation rules and regulations, where a hard-to-cancel subscription can land you in consumer-complaint Reddit threads, or worse yet, earn you a chargeback.
As Jacob points out, not every card should be stored for recurring billing. Virtual cards, gift cards, and reseller-driven payment abuse often look like easy conversions, when in fact they never authorize past the first cycle.
Liam Castagna of zooplus sees this firsthand: some failed payments aren’t “problems to fix” at all, but intentional misuse from groups who were never going to renew. Add to that the internal tug-of-war. Marketing teams pushing for maximum signups, while your payments team needs durable, high-LTV customers. That’s when the real complexity becomes clear.
If you’re not filtering for the right customers and the right cards upfront, you’re setting yourself up for avoidable churn.
What Reliable Payments Actually Mean
When Liam talks about reliability, he keeps it simple: “For me at zooplus, it’s keeping that mandate live.”
For you, that translates into a payment flow that keeps running without pulling your tech team off their roadmap. In practice, reliability means:
Mandates stay active, so customers who want the service never lose it due to avoidable technical failures.
Minimal manual fixes, because every emergency bug patch or payment-recovery scramble derails weeks of engineering time.
No single catastrophic error, because one mandate drop affecting thousands of customers can consume your entire quarter in firefighting.
Ultimately, reliable payments equal stability with as little merchant intervention as possible.
Why Subscription Payments Fail, and Which Failures You Can Prevent
Consumer-side failures
Payment failures often start with the customer’s card. As Jobe Harrison (Sr. Solutions Architect, IXOPAY) explains here:
The most common consumer-driven issues include:
Outdated card info - expired cards or reissued PANs after fraud events.
Fraud-related reissues - customers lose a card, report fraud, or get a new number without updating you.
Customers not updating billing - even loyal users forget, leading to soft declines you could have prevented with account updater tools.
Merchant/processor-side failures
Not every failure comes from the customer. You may also face:
Single-PSP bottlenecks that block all renewals when your processor is down.
Network outages that break transactions mid-flow.
Soft declines that could be recovered instantly with fallback routing instead of waiting days.
C. Hidden issue: cards that will never authorize again
As previously noted above, some cards – virtual cards, gift cards, disposable numbers – should never enter your system at all. BIN blocking prevents first-cycle “false positives” that will fail every subsequent rebill.
Building a Flexible, High-Performance Payment Stack
A resilient subscription business doesn’t happen by accident; you build it layer by layer. IXOPAY’s maturity journey gives you a clear roadmap to follow:
Start with the basics:
Universal token: Own your data from day one so you’re not locked in to a single PSP.
Network tokens: Increase auth rates and keep cards “evergreen” as issuers update credentials, shielding your renewals from the #1 cause of failed payments: outdated card data.
Add resilience:
Multiple PSPs: Avoid single points of failure and gain leverage on pricing and performance.
BIN data: Route transactions intelligently based on card type, issuer, or region; before the payment even hits a processor.
Strengthen trust and security:
Layer fraud tools + 3DS where needed, without adding friction for loyal customers.
Evolve into full orchestration, so you manage processors, payment methods, compliance, and routing from one platform, not scattered systems.
Because it takes 17 new customers to replace one loyal subscriber, as Liam notes, your payment stack plays a critical role in revenue retention.
Compliance & Customer Experience: Making It Easy to Say Yes
New regulation is tightening the rules around express consent, transparency, and cancellations. You can’t assume continued usage equals permission anymore. Customers must clearly understand they’re enrolling in a recurring charge, how much it costs, how often they’ll be billed, and exactly how to cancel.
And that cancellation has to be as easy as signing up. No extra hoops to jump through, no hidden steps.
As Jacob warns, merchants must be explicit about using account updater services. If a customer expects a “soft cancel” and you update their card silently, you risk chargebacks.
The good news: compliance doesn’t add friction. In the long term, it reduces it.
Transparent terms and effortless cancellation actually strengthen customer trust and reduce churn.
Concluding Note: The One Thing You Should Do Tomorrow
Failed payments aren’t an inevitability. With the right tools and strategy, you can reduce them to near-zero.
If you make just one move tomorrow, follow Jobe Harrison’s advice: implement Card Account Updater. It’s the fastest, lowest-lift way to recover renewals you’re currently losing to expired or reissued cards.
As Jobe puts it, this single tool keeps billing friction-free for the customer. Almost invisible. The payment goes through without interruption, churn drops, revenue stabilizes, and the customer keeps enjoying the service without any unnecessary friction. Everyone wins.
For the full breakdown, watch the complete webinar. And if you’re ready to upgrade your payment stack, download our guide to subscription payments.