Subscribers
In plain English
This is the list of actual people subscribed to you, and what's happening with each one.
Four things a subscription can be:
- Active — everything's working. They're being billed and receiving orders.
- Paused — temporarily stopped, by them or by you. Still a customer; nothing is being billed.
- Failed — their payment stopped working. This is the important one. They didn't decide to leave; their card expired, or their bank declined it. Three failed attempts in a row and it's marked failed.
- Cancelled — they chose to stop.
The difference between failed and cancelled is the single most valuable thing on this screen. A cancelled customer decided they didn't want you any more, and winning them back is hard. A failed customer still wants you — they just need to be told their card stopped working. Most of them will fix it if you ask.
Plenty of shops lump both together as "churn," go and build a big retention campaign, and never notice that a third of the problem was expired cards.
How to use it
- Click "Subscriptions" in the left-hand menu, then the "Subscribers" tab.
- Sort or scan for anything marked "failed." Do this weekly — it's the highest-value thing on the screen.
- Email those customers with a link to update their payment details. Most will.
- Look at paused subscriptions. A long pause often means "about to cancel" — a friendly check-in helps.
- To stop billing someone, use pause rather than cancel wherever possible.
- To add someone manually — a phone order, or moving them from another system — use the manual enrolment option.
⏱ ~10 min/week · 💳 Pro+ · 🎯 Stop losing customers who never chose to leave
Why this matters for your business
Involuntary churn is the most under-managed problem in subscription commerce. Cards expire. Banks decline transactions for reasons nobody can explain. Customers get new cards after fraud. None of this has anything to do with whether they still want your product.
Industry-wide, a meaningful share of all subscription cancellations start as a payment failure rather than a decision. And the recovery rate when you actually contact those people is high — usually well over half — because they weren't trying to leave in the first place.
The catch is that it's invisible unless you look. From your revenue report, a failed payment and a deliberate cancellation look identical: the money stops. So teams see churn rising and respond with retention campaigns, discounts, and win-back offers — all aimed at persuading people who never needed persuading.
This screen separates the two. Ten minutes a week on the failed list is usually the best-value retention work available to you, and it costs nothing but an email.
The second thing worth understanding is pause. Merchants instinctively resist it — a paused customer isn't paying. But the alternative isn't "keeps paying"; it's "cancels." Someone going away for two months, or with too much product already, will cancel if pausing isn't offered. A pause keeps the relationship, the payment details, and the habit.
What this typically unlocks
| What you get | Typical result |
|---|---|
| Failed payments recovered | Typically 50–70% when contacted |
| Reported churn after separating the two | Often 1–3 points lower than assumed |
| Retention spend aimed at the right problem | Yes — instead of at expired cards |
| Customers saved by offering pause | Meaningful — pause beats cancel every time |
| Time required | ~10 min/week |
What you actually get
The four states
| State | What happened | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Billing normally | Nothing |
| Paused | Temporarily stopped | Check in if it's been a while |
| Failed | Payment stopped working | Contact them — highest priority |
| Cancelled | They chose to stop | Win-back campaign, separately |
How a subscription becomes "failed"
| Attempt | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1st failure | Recorded. Subscription stays active and is flagged |
| 2nd failure | Recorded. Still active, still flagged |
| 3rd failure | Marked failed |
| Any success | Counter resets to zero, back to fully active |
The window between the first failure and the third is your opportunity. A customer contacted after the first failure fixes it far more often than one contacted after the third — by then they've had weeks with no deliveries and may have replaced you.
Watch for flagged-but-still-active subscriptions, not just the ones already marked failed.
What you can do with a subscription
| Action | Effect | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Pause | Billing stops, subscription survives | They want a break, or you're out of stock |
| Cancel | Ends it | They've genuinely asked to stop |
| Create manually | Adds a subscriber directly | Phone orders, migrations |
Pause vs. cancel
| Pause | Cancel | |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | Kept | Ended |
| Payment details | Kept | Gone |
| Restart effort | One click | Full re-signup |
| Typical return rate | High | Low |
Offer pause first, always. The customer who wanted a break and was only offered cancellation is a customer you've lost for no reason.
Manual enrolment
Adding a subscriber directly is useful for:
- Phone or wholesale orders
- Moving subscribers over from another system
- VIP arrangements set up by hand
- Fixing a sign-up that failed part-way
Make sure the customer has actually agreed. A subscription someone didn't knowingly sign up to produces a chargeback and a complaint.
How it works (without the technical bits)
Real merchant scenarios
Scenario A — A third of "churn" was expired cards
Setup. Meal-kit business, monthly cancellations up from 4% to 7% over two quarters. A retention campaign was being planned — budget roughly £15,000.
What the Subscribers screen showed:
| State | Count |
|---|---|
| Active | 2,140 |
| Paused | 180 |
| Failed | 68 |
| Cancelled (that quarter) | 142 |
68 of the 210 lost subscriptions were payment failures, not decisions. Nearly a third.
Action. One email to those 68 with a link to update their card.
| Result | |
|---|---|
| Updated within 9 days | 41 |
| Updated within 30 days | 47 |
| Never responded | 21 |
Monthly cancellation rate fell from 7% to 4.6% — from a single email.
The retention campaign still ran, but scoped to the real problem and at a fraction of the budget.
Scenario B — Catching failures at attempt one
Setup. Coffee subscription, contacting customers only once marked failed — after three attempts, roughly six weeks after the first failure.
Recovery rate: 31%.
Change. Started contacting after the first failure, while still active.
| Contacted after 3 failures | Contacted after 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Recovery rate | 31% | 74% |
| Average days to fix | 19 | 3 |
| Deliveries missed | 2–3 | 0 |
Why the gap is so large. After six weeks with no delivery the customer has bought coffee elsewhere and the habit is broken. After three days, nothing has changed except a card number.
Scenario C — Pause saving a subscription
Setup. Supplements brand didn't offer pause. Customer support answered "can I stop for a couple of months?" with "you can cancel and re-subscribe later."
Almost nobody re-subscribed. Of 210 who cancelled with that reason over six months, 18 came back.
Action. Made pause the standard answer.
| Cancel-and-return | Pause | |
|---|---|---|
| Returned to active | 8.6% | 81% |
The customer's request was identical in both cases. Only the option offered changed.
Scenario D — Manual enrolment done wrong
Setup. Merchant manually enrolled 40 wholesale customers who'd verbally agreed "in principle" to a standing order.
Result. 11 chargebacks, 6 complaints, and a payment-processor warning.
What went wrong. "In principle" isn't consent to a recurring charge. The customers hadn't agreed to specific amounts on a specific schedule.
Fix. Cancelled all 40, refunded, and re-enrolled properly with written confirmation of amount and frequency. 34 of 40 signed up willingly.
The lesson. Manual enrolment is a legitimate tool that needs real agreement behind it.
Best practices
✅ Check for failed payments weekly. Best-value ten minutes in the module.
✅ Contact after the first failure, not the third — Scenario B.
✅ Offer pause before cancel, always.
✅ Track failed and cancelled separately in your own reporting. Merging them hides a fixable problem.
✅ Check in on long pauses. Two months without resuming often means gone.
✅ Get explicit agreement before manual enrolment, including the amount and the schedule.
❌ Don't count payment failures as churn. Different problem, much better odds.
❌ Don't cancel a subscription the customer hasn't asked to cancel. Pause it.
❌ Don't wait for the "failed" label before acting.
❌ Don't enrol anyone who hasn't clearly agreed — Scenario D.
Plan tiers
| Capability | Free | Starter | Pro | Agency | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subscriber list with states | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Failed-payment tracking | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pause and cancel controls | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Manual enrolment | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| At-risk revenue value | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-store subscriber view | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
Frequently asked
What's the difference between failed and cancelled? Failed means their payment stopped working. Cancelled means they chose to stop. Failed customers usually still want your product.
How many failures before it's marked failed? Three consecutive. A successful payment at any point resets the counter.
Can I retry a failed payment myself? The customer needs to update their payment details. Your job is to tell them — the fix is on their side.
Does pausing lose their payment details? No. That's what makes resuming a single click.
How long can a subscription stay paused? There's no limit, but check in after a couple of months — long pauses often turn into quiet cancellations.
Can I see why someone cancelled? Only if you collect a reason at cancellation, which is worth doing.
What's the money value of my failed subscriptions? See MRR & churn — it shows exactly how much recurring revenue is at risk right now.
Should I discount to save a failing subscription? No. A payment failure isn't a price objection. Discounting people whose card expired gives away margin for nothing.
See also
- Subscriptions overview — how the module fits together
- Plans — the offers behind these subscriptions
- MRR & churn — the money value of at-risk subscriptions
- Revenue Leaks — failed payments as recoverable money
- Customer 360 — the full customer picture
- Journeys & automations — automating the payment-failure email
- Email channel — sending the recovery message