Payments can fail for a variety of reasons, sometimes the cause is customers providing wrong card details or not having sufficient funds, other may fail for good reason and do so to minimize the possibility of a fraudulent payment. Below are some cases why payments may fail:
Payments declined by card issuers
When a charge is submitted to the issuer of your customer’s card, they have automated systems and models that determine whether or not to authorize it. These systems analyze various signals, such as your customer’s spending habits, account balance, and card information such as the expiration date, address information and CVC. If your customer’s card issuer declines a payment, you can navigate to your Stripe Dashboard to check the reason why the payment failed. Also, the following Stripe article gives you more information on declines: Payments declined by card issuers.
Blocked payments
Stripe, our payment processing partner, has an automated fraud prevention toolset, Radar, which blocks high-risk payments, such as those with mismatched CVC or postal code values - these measures are put in place to protect your business from fraudsters. You can read more about this on the Stripe documentation: Blocked payments.
What to do when a payment fails
When a payment fails, the recommended steps are:
Check the payment on Stripe to see the reason why it failed.
Communicate with your customer to address the cause of the failure. E.g. if the card failed because insufficient funds, maybe they want to use a different card or you may want to offer a payment plan, or if the card was blocked, maybe they want to use a different card.
Once the underlying issue is addressed, your customer can retry the purchase, or you can manually re-run the payment through your Dashboard as shown below: