For WordPress membership sites on Stripe
Recover failed WordPress membership payments on Stripe
Paid Memberships Pro, MemberPress and Restrict Content Pro bill each membership as a Stripe subscription in your own Stripe account. When a renewal fails, Creator Dunning emails the member in your name with the amount and a link to pay, then every three days for 30 days, and it stops when they pay.
FromJane's Field Notes Billing
Reply-tojane@example.com
SubjectYour $8.00 payment to Jane's Field Notes didn't go through
Hi Sam,
We couldn't process the $8.00 payment for your Jane's Field Notes subscription. Your subscription stays active for now, but we'll need an updated payment method to keep it that way.
Update your payment method and pay now
If you've already resolved this, you can ignore this email. Reply to this message if you have any questions.
Jane
$8.00 recovered
Sam updated their card · 2 days later
WordPress membership plugins today
Each of these plugins can send a failed-payment notice if you have switched it on. It goes out when Stripe reports a failed charge and asks the member to log in to your site and update their billing details. Members who have forgotten their password, or never open the notice, lapse when Stripe's retries run out.
How Creator Dunning connects
Your plugin's Stripe gateway creates each paid membership as a subscription in your Stripe account. Creator Dunning connects to that same account through Stripe's authorization and reads subscriptions and invoices. Nothing is installed on your WordPress site, and when a member pays, the payment reaches your plugin through its Stripe webhook like any other renewal.
Common questions
Before you connect.
Which plugins does it work with?
Paid Memberships Pro, MemberPress and Restrict Content Pro, when the Stripe gateway bills the membership as a recurring Stripe subscription. Renewals taken through PayPal or WooCommerce Subscriptions never reach Stripe as subscriptions, so we can't see them. If you're not sure, connect and the audit will show whether your renewals appear.
Will members get two emails?
They can, if your plugin's failed-payment notice is on. Keep both, or switch the plugin's off in its email settings (Paid Memberships Pro: Email Templates; MemberPress: Settings, Emails; Restrict Content Pro: Settings, Emails) so members hear from you every three days and nothing more.
Do members have to log in to my site to pay?
No. The link in our email goes to Stripe's hosted invoice page for that invoice, where the member updates their card and pays without a password. Your plugin then records the renewal from Stripe as usual.
Roughly one in ten renewals fails
Most of them are fixable.
Involuntary churn is 20–40% of all subscription churn, and Stripe's default retries recover only 25–35% of failed consumer payments. A timely, personal email closes most of that gap. See the numbers and sources.