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According to our data, soft declines account for roughly 70-90% of all failed card-not-present payments. While that might seem manageable at first glance, it becomes a major issue as your transaction volumes climb – especially for businesses with a recurring billing model.
In sectors like consumer subscription services (CSS), where Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are high, even a 20-30% failure rate can quickly spiral into a cash flow problem. When recurring payments fail, the impact on your bottom line is immediate, and stakeholders start asking tough questions.
At this point, increasing payment success rates becomes a top priority for Finance and Revenue Operations teams.
Retrying failed payments is one of the core strategies for recovering lost revenue. But the problem with traditional static retry strategies is that they feel more like a guessing game full of trial and error, rather than an effective revenue recovery tool. Static retry schedules force businesses to treat every payment failure the same, ignoring the unique factors that increase the likelihood of success.
The result? More failed payment retries, missed opportunities, higher transaction fees, and time wasted on a process that could be automated.
At Solidgate, we’ve worked with hundreds of digital businesses to optimize their payment processes and performance. We know the pain of lost revenue from failed payments, and we’re laser-focused on billing optimization to keep you paid, consistently.
That’s why we built smart retries – a powerful, AI-driven feature that helps businesses boost revenue recovery, reduce involuntary churn, and optimize payment retries by intelligently determining the best time to retry each failed payment.
Table of Contents
What are smart retries?
Smart retries is an intelligent payment recovery system that leverages machine learning to automatically select the best time to retry failed payments. Unlike traditional retry strategies that follow fixed schedules, smart retries adapt to individual payment history, user profiles, transaction context, and global trends, optimizing the likelihood of successful payments.
The system evaluates multiple factors, including:
- Customer behavior & profile: How long they’ve been subscribed, their payment history, and location.
- Perfect timing: Local time zones, weekdays vs. weekends, even salary days or holidays that affect spending.
- Payment details: Method, card type, decline reason, amount, and currency.
- Proven patterns: What’s worked before for your business, geography, similar companies, and banks around the world.
With all these insights, smart payment retries automatically find the best moment to try again, helping you recover more revenue while keeping the customer experience smooth. For Solidgate merchants, smart retries are enabled by default with four retries over a four-week period; but you can adjust these settings to suit your business needs.
Why smart retries outperform static retries in revenue recovery
Smart retries isn’t just a feature – it’s a revenue optimization tool that helps you recover more revenue and accelerate your cash flow. Here’s why smart retries are more effective:
| Feature | Smart retries | Static retries |
| Retry timing | Automatically selects the best retry time based on historical data and real-time patterns. | Fixed retry windows, often based on arbitrary time intervals. |
| Adaptability | Learns from recent data to adjust strategies based on customer behavior, bank policies, and market conditions. | Static rules that don’t adapt to changing customer behavior or market conditions. |
| Context-aware optimization | Optimizes retry logic based on transaction type, payment history, and timing, increasing payment success. | No consideration of context; one-size-fits-all rules without deep data evaluation. |
| Continuous improvement | Each retry adds data into the system, improving predictions over time. | No learning mechanism; rules remain static unless manually updated. |
| Data-driven decisions | Decisions are based on statistical evidence and real-time data, not intuition, ensuring better success rates. | Decisions are based on fixed rules, often without statistical insights. |
The business benefits of implementing smart retries
✔️ Recover more revenue
Smart retries feature helps recover lost revenue by automatically retrying failed payments, reducing the likelihood of transactions slipping through the cracks. Without having to rely on manual intervention, your cash flow remains stable and predictable, ensuring you get paid faster without leaving money on the table.
✔️ Boost customer retention
Failed payments lead to service interruptions that frustrate customers, leading to involuntary churn. Smart Retries minimizes this risk by ensuring retries happen at the most opportune times, keeping your subscribers active and engaged. This reduces the likelihood of losing customers over something as avoidable as a temporary payment issue, directly benefiting lifetime value (LTV).
✔️ Decrease operational load
Managing payment retries manually is time-consuming and inefficient. With smart retries, you can automate the entire retry process, eliminating the need for manual tracking, adjusting schedules, or making guesswork decisions. This saves valuable time, allowing your team to focus on growth initiatives rather than being bogged down in payment recovery tasks.
Proven results you can expect
Smart retries deliver measurable improvements. Here’s what our beta tests and early users have seen:
✔️ ~51–67% improvement in first retry conversion: The first retry is now significantly more likely to succeed.
✔️ ~2% increase in subscription cohort revenue: Smart retries help you recover more revenue from each cohort.
✔️ ~23.6% faster revenue received: Merchants are earning their revenue in 23 days instead of 30, speeding up cash flow and reinvestment.
✔️ ~10–15% reduction in declines within subscription cohorts: The system reduces declines, especially within active subscription cohorts.
✔️ ~42.1% reduction in wrong-time orders: Fewer retries are made at the wrong time, which increases payment success, reduces transaction fees, and improves your relationships with banks.
✔️ ~2.1% increase in invoice conversion: More invoices are getting paid thanks to better retry timing.
What’s next?
We’re constantly improving smart retries to maximize their effectiveness. Here’s what you can expect in the coming months:
- Sharper accuracy with real-world data: We’re continuously retraining the model on millions of transactions, so your retries get smarter over time without you lifting a finger.
- Tailored strategies for your segments: We’re adding advanced heuristics to fine-tune retries by customer type, geography, or industry, ensuring that every retry works harder for you.
- Deeper understanding of decline reasons: By analyzing decline codes across banks and regions, smart retries will proactively turn insights into better recovery rates for your business.
Enable smart retries now and stop losing revenue
By automating payment retries and timing them based on intelligent, data-driven logic, you can recover more revenue, accelerate cash flow, reduce churn, and streamline operations. Whether you run a subscription business or sell digital goods or services, smart retries will help you get paid faster and more consistently.
Solidgate merchant?
You can enable smart retries with a few clicks in the Solidgate HUB or via API. For instructions, visit our payment guide or simply contact your account manager.
Not with Solidgate yet?
If you’re looking to improve your payment performance across different markets, explore our website or reach out to our team to learn more about our payment solutions.
