Subscription Saver FAQ

Welcome to the Commas Subscription Saver FAQ page. This guide answers common questions about how Subscription Saver helps you recover failed subscription payments, how to configure your revenue recovery strategy, and how to get the most out of your email workflows.

Getting Started

How do I turn on Subscription Saver?

• Open your Subscriptions area and go to Subscription settings

• Under Automatically retry failed payments, turn the toggle on

• A confirmation appears noting the 8% fee on each successful recovery: confirm to enable

• Once enabled, you will see recovery features (retry strategies, per-product overrides, reports, and email templates) within your Subscriptions area

Do I need to configure anything before Subscription Saver starts working?

• Yes. After turning on the toggle, you should:

  • Choose your retry strategy (how failed payments are retried)

  • Set your fulfillment action (what happens to customer access while payments are being recovered)

  • Optionally turn on reminder emails to update expired cards to prevent failures before they happen

  • Review and customize your dunning email templates so customers receive branded, clear communication

• These settings are all accessible from the Subscription settings page

Configuration

What retry strategies are available?

• Subscription Saver offers four strategies, each shown with its retry schedule and an average recovery rate:

  • Rapid: quick successive attempts in the first few days

  • Standard: spaced attempts over about two weeks (the most common choice)

  • Smart Retries: a preset option for adaptive timing (note: this currently follows standard retry behavior)

  • Extended: attempts spread across a longer window (up to ~45 days) for slower recovery

• You can change your strategy at any time from Subscription settings

Can I set different retry strategies for different products?

• Yes. Subscription Saver supports per-product retry overrides

• In Subscription settings, you can add overrides that assign a specific retry strategy to individual products

• This is useful if you have products with different price points or billing frequencies that benefit from different recovery approaches

What does the fulfillment action setting control?

• When a subscription payment fails, you choose what happens to the customer's access:

  • Revoke access: immediately remove access to the product

  • Maintain access: keep access active while recovery is in progress

  • Follow Subscription Saver schedule: manage access based on the recovery timeline (available when retries are enabled)

• Many sellers maintain access during recovery to preserve goodwill and reduce support requests

How many retry attempts are allowed?

• Subscription Saver caps the number of retries per failed subscription, combining automated attempts with a limited number of manual retries

• This limit protects your payment authorization rates and aligns with card network best practices

• Excessive retries can harm your ability to process payments across your business

If I change my retry strategy, does it affect subscriptions already in recovery?

• Subscriptions already in an active recovery cycle continue with the strategy they started on

• Changes apply to new failures going forward

Retrying Payments

How do I manually retry a failed payment?

• From your Subscriptions list, find the past-due subscription and click the retry action

• A confirmation modal will show you:

  • Customer name

  • Product name

  • Manual attempts used

  • Days past due

  • Amount to be charged

  • Remaining attempts

• Confirm to initiate the retry

Can I retry all past-due subscriptions at once?

• Yes. Subscription Saver includes a Retry All Past Due bulk action

• A confirmation modal will appear before processing

• This is useful if you have multiple subscriptions in recovery and want to trigger retries without handling them one by one

Why is the retry button disabled for some subscriptions?

• If the last decline was a hard decline (card reported lost, stolen, or account closed), retrying the same card will not work

• The retry button is disabled in these cases, with a tooltip explaining why

• The customer needs to update their payment method before a retry can succeed

What happens when a customer updates their payment method?

• When a customer adds a new card through their customer portal, it automatically becomes their new default payment method

• Subscription Saver will attempt to charge the new card for the outstanding balance

• This removes friction from the recovery process

Subscription Saver Emails

What emails does Subscription Saver send to customers?

• Subscription Saver supports five email templates in the dunning sequence:

  • Immediate Failure: sent when a payment first fails

  • Step 2 Reminder: sent at the second retry attempt

  • Step 3 Reminder: sent at the third retry attempt

  • Final Notice: sent when the last automated attempt is made

  • Manual Retry: used when you trigger a retry yourself

• Each template supports variables like {first_name}, {product_name}, {retries_remaining}, {next_retry_date}, and {portal_link} so messages are personalized

Can I customize the emails?

• Yes. Each template can be edited from the Email Templates area

• You can also customize the overall look with:

  • Logo upload

  • Font selection (10 fonts available)

  • Button color picker

• Use the test send option to preview any template in your inbox before it goes live

Do manual retry emails count as part of the automated dunning sequence?

• No. Manual retries and their emails are separate from the automated step progression

• Manually retrying a subscription does not advance or interfere with the automated schedule

Reports and Analytics

What reports are available?

• Subscription Saver provides two report views:

  • In Recovery: subscriptions currently being retried (active recovery)

  • Delinquent: subscriptions that have exhausted retry attempts without successful recovery

• You can sort and filter by start date, customer name, product, price, next billing date, decline code, and recovery step

What analytics does Subscription Saver track?

• The Analytics area gives you a dashboard with:

  • Total Revived: dollar amount recovered

  • Revival Rate: percentage of failed subscriptions successfully recovered

  • Subscriptions Revived: count of recovered subscriptions

  • Avg Time to Revival: how long recovery typically takes

  • Total in Revival: subscriptions currently in the recovery pipeline

  • Total Delinquent: subscriptions that were not recovered

  • Revival by Attempt: which retry attempt is most effective

  • Top Decline Reasons: breakdown of why payments are failing

  • Email Performance: sent, opened, clicked, and recovered for each email step

• You can filter by date range and export data as CSV

How do I use these metrics to improve my recovery rate?

• Decline reasons: if most failures are hard declines, recovery will be low regardless of retry strategy. Focus on prompting customers to update payment methods.

• Revival by attempt: if most recoveries happen on attempt 1 or 2, your retry strategy timing is working. If very few recover on later attempts, consider whether Extended timing would help.

• Email performance: low open rates suggest your subject lines or sender reputation need attention. Low click rates suggest the email content or call-to-action is not compelling.

Billing and Recovery Fee

What is the recovery fee?

• When Subscription Saver successfully recovers a past-due payment, Commas applies an 8% fee on the recovered amount

• You are reminded of this fee when you enable the feature, and it applies only to payments that are successfully recovered

When is the recovery fee charged?

• The fee is applied when a past-due subscription payment is successfully recovered through Subscription Saver

Is the recovery fee refunded if the customer later requests a refund?

• The recovery fee compensates for the recovery service provided. If the customer is later refunded, a portion of the recovery fee may be reflected in the refund breakdown shown at the time of refund.

Where can I see recovery fee charges?

• These charges are integrated into your payout reporting within Commas

Subscription Statuses

What does "Past Due" mean?

• Past Due is the status assigned to a subscription when a renewal payment fails

• It replaces the previous behavior where failing subscriptions still showed as "Active" with misleading renewal dates

• Past Due gives you clear visibility into which subscriptions need recovery attention

What do the negative "Days Until Renewal" values mean?

• A negative value tells you how many days a subscription is overdue

• For example, "-5 days" means the payment failed 5 days ago and has not yet been recovered

What happens after all retry attempts are exhausted?

• Once the retry attempts are exhausted, the subscription moves to a terminal state

• The subscription will appear in the Delinquent report

Troubleshooting

I turned on Subscription Saver but I do not see the recovery features.

• These features are gated by the Subscription Saver setting

• Make sure the toggle under Automatically retry failed payments is fully enabled in Subscription settings

• If they still do not appear, try refreshing the page

• If the issue persists, contact Commas support

A subscription shows Past Due but I cannot retry it.

• Check the decline reason

• If it is a hard decline (card lost, stolen, or account closed), the retry button will be disabled because retrying the same card will not succeed

• The customer needs to update their payment method first

My analytics page shows 0s even though I have past-due subscriptions.

• Analytics reflect recovery outcomes over time

• If you just enabled Subscription Saver, data will populate as retry attempts are made and outcomes are recorded

• Allow some time for the system to process events before expecting dashboard data

A customer says they updated their card on their portal but the subscription is still past due.

• After a card update, Subscription Saver will attempt to charge the new payment method

• If the charge succeeds, the subscription will return to active status

• If the new card also fails, the subscription remains past due and the decline reason will update

• Check the subscription detail for the latest status

Email Template Variables

Each of the five dunning email templates supports the following variables, which are automatically replaced with the customer's actual data when the email is sent:

• {first_name} — the customer's first name, used to personalize the greeting

• {product_name} — the name of the product tied to the subscription, so the customer knows exactly what payment failed

• {retries_remaining} — the number of automated retry attempts still left, which can create urgency for the customer to act

• {next_retry_date} — the date Subscription Saver will next attempt to charge the card, so the customer knows the timeline

• {portal_link} — a direct link to the customer's billing portal, where they can update their payment method without needing to log in elsewhere

Using these variables means you can write one template per dunning step and have it read as a personalized, specific message for every customer, rather than a generic notice. They're available across all five templates (Immediate Failure, Step 2 Reminder, Step 3 Reminder, Final Notice, and Manual Retry), so the same personalization carries through the entire recovery sequence.

Feedback

You are among the first sellers using Subscription Saver, and your feedback directly shapes the product. If you encounter unexpected behavior, have suggestions, or notice anything that does not work as described here, please reach out to your Account Manager. Your input is valued and we would love to hear your thoughts before we roll this out more broadly.