Dunning is the process of recovering failed payments on subscription or recurring billing. When a card declines, the platform retries on a schedule + communicates with the customer to update payment information.
Standard retry schedule: day 1, day 3, day 5, day 7. Each retry paired with email + SMS reminding the customer + offering a one-click portal link to update card.
Recovery rate from a well-designed dunning programme: 30-50 percent of failed payments recovered (versus 10-20 percent for poor dunning + 50-70 percent for AI-driven dunning like Stay AI's).
Card-update friction is the silent killer: a 3-step flow vs a 1-step deep link makes a 10-15 percent recovery rate difference. See our D2C subscription architecture for the dunning discipline.