Create predictable, hands-free income streams with ThriveCart Subscriptions, the simplest way to manage recurring payments, renewals, and failed rebills across your favorite payment processors.
This guide explains exactly how ThriveCart recurring payments work, from setup to ongoing management, including how Stripe Connect Plus and PayPal recurring billing handle automated retries, renewals, and dunning. Whether you’re running memberships, digital services, or subscription boxes, you’ll learn how ThriveCart recurring revenue management keeps payments flowing and your customers’ subscriptions under control.
How subscriptions are processed within ThriveCart
Subscription billing management gives you full ownership of your recurring revenue. Unlike other platforms that typically ‘own’ your subscriptions and handle recurring billing on your behalf, ThriveCart sets up your subscriptions directly with your payment processor – so you remain in control.
This means that if you ever stop using ThriveCart for any reason, you’ll still continue to receive recurring payments directly from your payment processor – no interruptions, no platform lock-in.
How does this work?
When a customer completes their order through your ThriveCart checkout and purchases one or more subscriptions, the initial payment is processed as a one-time charge by your payment gateway directly. A subscription is created in your payment processor, which begins billing when the first recurring payment is due.
Within ThriveCart , a subscription transaction is created that will show how many recurring payments are expected, and when that next payment is due. It’s worth noting that ThriveCart will not initiate those recurring payments, as they are always actioned within your payment gateway.
On some platforms like Stripe, you may see the subscription marked as “trialing” until the first recurring charge goes through. This is completely normal, see our FAQ on this here.
How are failed recurring payments handled?
Since subscriptions are created directly in your payment processor, the processor handles rebilling the customer when their payment is due, and notifies ThriveCart of the outcome.
In ThriveCart, failed payments are tracked in your dashboard and trigger any related rules, webhooks, Zaps, or other automations you’ve configured.
If the payment failed, then your payment processor will automatically* retry the failed payment and this varies based on the processor where the subscription is held.
For Stripe, they have a few settings and these can be customized. By default, Stripe uses a Smart Retry system that attempts to collect payment up to eight times over a period you configure. It uses data from across the Stripe platform to determine when a retry is most likely to succeed.
Your settings about failed payments can be managed in your Stripe dashboard by navigating to Settings > Billing > Subscription > Manage Failed Payments settings (here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/account/billing/automatic).
Note that with Stripe you can also manually retry a failed payment ahead of Stripe automatically retrying. It requires you to go to the customer’s profile in Stripe, go to their ‘subscriptions’ section, look for the failed/retrying invoice and then click through to the invoice where you’ll see a “Retry failed payment” button near the top.
Important: Do not manually create a new charge as this will not be linked to the subscription. Always retry the existing payment attempt.
For PayPal, they will retry every 5 days, up to 3 times. Then try again at the next rebill period. If payments continue to fail 5 times in a row, they will suspend/cancel the subscription. If the payment was part of a payment plan, and the payment is skipped after 3 failures, it’s added to the end of the plan so the correct amount of charges are processed.
For Authorize.net, you’ll need to manually retry any failed payments, as they are not automatically retried.
Customer updated card but failed payment not charged
When a customer updates their card, either before a scheduled payment or after a failed one, the new card will be used for future charges. If a payment had previously failed, the processor will use the updated card on the next retry attempt.
I changed my processor/account on my product but the recurring payments haven’t moved
Changing the payment processor account on your product within ThriveCart only affects new orders. Any existing subscriptions remain tied to the original payment processor account that handled the initial transaction.
Note for Stripe users:
If you’re using Stripe and having trouble locating payments, they may be appearing in your sub-account under your Stripe Connect+ integration – rather than your main Stripe account. This is a common point of confusion, especially for users who recently upgraded their Stripe integration.
Most payment processors, including Stripe, don’t allow subscriptions to be transferred between accounts. However, if you’re moving from a legacy Stripe setup to Stripe Connect+, we can assist with migrating your existing subscriptions to ensure a smooth transition. Contact our support team for help with this process.
Does the customer receive any emails related to their subscription?
ThriveCart sends payment receipts for both the initial and recurring charges – when enabled in the product’s pricing settings.
ThriveCart does not automatically email customers when their payment fails, but if you are on Pro/Pro+ you can enable Dunning emails to notify customers about upcoming or overdue payments. See more on Dunning features here.
As the vendor, you will automatically receive notification emails about failed payments, if you’ve enabled sales notifications on your profile. See how to enable them here.