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Glossary

Dunning

Also known as: Failed-payment recovery

Dunning is the automated process of recovering a failed subscription payment — retrying the declined charge on a schedule and prompting the customer to update their payment method — so a recoverable card failure doesn't silently cancel the subscriber.

Failed payments are one of the quietest causes of subscription churn: a card expires or is declined, the renewal fails, and a customer who never intended to leave is effectively cancelled. Dunning is the system that fights that. It retries the charge on a smart schedule (cards often succeed on a later attempt) and sends the customer branded emails asking them to update their card.

Effective dunning recovers revenue that would otherwise be lost with no acquisition cost — it's saving customers you already have. It's one of the highest-ROI mechanics in subscription commerce.

Curobi runs automatic dunning on every plan: it retries failed charges on a smart schedule and emails customers to update their payment method. Promoting Shop Pay at checkout compounds the effect, since it keeps card details current across its network.

Related terms

  • Churn — Churn is the rate at which subscribers cancel or lapse over a given period — the share of recurring customers a business loses — and it is the single most important number in a subscription business because retained revenue compounds while churned revenue must be re-acquired.
  • Cancellation Save Flow — A cancellation save flow is the sequence a subscriber sees when they try to cancel — presenting an alternative such as pausing, skipping a delivery, changing frequency, or a retention offer — designed to keep customers who would otherwise leave over a fixable, temporary reason.
  • Subscription Contract — A Subscription Contract is Shopify's native record of a recurring agreement between a store and a customer — it stores what is being sold, how often it renews, the price, and the vaulted payment method, and Shopify uses it to create each recurring charge.

← All subscription commerce terms