Reduce failed payments with Success+

What is Success+ and what does it do?

Success+ is a payment intelligence and automation product that uses machine learning to manage and reduce payment failures. When a payment fails, Success+ retries it on the date it’s most likely to succeed, recovering on average 71% of failed payments.  

What payments does Success+ retry?

Success+ will only retry payments that fail due to NSF (Non-sufficient funds). You can see a breakdown of reason codes below:

*MS03 only applies to the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and Slovakia

How to use Success+

Enabling Success+

Success+ is enabled via the GoCardless dashboard. 

1. Log into the GoCardless dashboard and navigate to the Success+ page. Or follow the link here.

2. Click Turn on Success+

3. Choose the scheme/schemes you want to enable Success+ for

4. Choose the configuration that suits your business. We offer a default preset with the highest chance of recovery. 

5. Click Enable retries for… to enable Success+

Using Success+ through API

As mentioned above, configuration for Success+ is done via the GoCardless dashboard, even if your business uses GoCardless via API. However, API merchants do have the additional ability to decide whether Success+ should be applied on each payment they submit, via a boolean flag. This is useful if your business wants to create its own rules about when Success+ should apply to different customers or payment types. 

The Success+ flag

The flag retry_if_possible is used to control whether Success+ is enabled on a payment. The following payment types support this boolean flag:

• Individual payments

• Instalment schedules

• Subscriptions

For API users enabling Success+, the flag is mandatory and by default, the flag will be set to false.  If you are enabling Success+ as a partner, the flag will automatically be set to true unless specified otherwise. 

Using Success+ with individual payments

Creating payments

When creating a payment, set retry_if_possible to true. This will enable intelligent retries if the payment is eligible.

Updating payments

If a payment has been created with retry_if_possible set to true, then it can be updated to false. This will prevent the payment from being automatically retried in the event of a failure.

Using Success+ with Instalment Schedules

When creating an instalment schedule set retry_if_possible to true to ensure that all instalment payments created are automatically retried upon failure.

Using Success+ with Subscriptions

When creating a subscription set retry_if_possible to true to ensure that all payments created for the subscription are retried automatically upon failure.

Further information

For further information, visit the API Reference for Success+ here.

What to do if a payment is going to be retried

• After any payment_failed event with will_attempt_retry set to true, we will send a payment:resubmission_requested event. 

• You can treat this exactly the same as a manual user-triggered retry - the payment will be re-attempted on the new charge_date and will go through the normal payment flow.

How to know which payments will be retried

• You can use the will_attempt_retry flag on the payment:failed event to identify payments which will be intelligently retried. 

• If the flag is set to true, then the payment will be intelligently retried. 

• If set to false, the payment will not be retried and then you can retry the payment manually.

How to stop a payment being retried

• ​​To stop a payment from being retried, call update payment endpoint with retry_if_possible set to false

• While the initial payment will still continue, it will not be automatically retried.

• The payment status must be in "pending_submission" for it to be updated successfully