ThriveCart automatically alerts you whenever a customer cancels a subscription or recurring payment plan, so you’re never caught off guard by changes to your recurring revenue.
With real-time cancellation notifications, you can stay informed the moment a cancellation happens, quickly see which products are impacted, and—when available—understand why a customer chose to cancel. This insight helps you take timely action to address issues and reduce churn.
What Triggers a Cancellation Notification?
You’ll receive an email notification when ThriveCart records a cancellation of any recurring payment arrangement, including:
- Standard subscriptions
- Subscriptions with limited rebills
- Split-pay plans
- One-time payments with a trial
Note: A “subscription” here refers to any setup with future/recurring payments, not just traditional subscriptions.
How the Notifications Work
- Notifications are sent to the product owner (this may be the account owner or a sub-user if they are set as the product owner).
- Emails are similar in format to sales notifications.
- Each notification includes:
- A copy of the customer’s original receipt for reference.
- Details of the product cancelled (customers may have multiple subscriptions in one order).
- The reason for cancellation if known (for example, vendor action, customer cancellation, payment processor failure).
- Who initiated the cancellation (with email address if available).
Example Notification:
- Subject: “Cancellation Notice: Invoice #” Explains this is a cancellation notice, detailing the invoice # of the original purchase.
- Body:
Recurring payments have been cancelled!
Your customer {{customer_email}} has had their subscription cancelled for {{product}}. It has been cancelled due to:
Cancelled {{where}} {{by who}}
- Receipt: A copy of the customer’s original purchase will be included below the above notice for easy reference.
These notifications are for vendors only. Customers do not receive a cancellation email through this feature.
Important Notes About Cancellations
- Automatic subscription cancellations:
If a new order cancels an old subscription (e.g., via an upgrade flow), the vendor will still receive a cancellation notification. - Same-funnel cancellations:
If an upsell cancels a front-end product within the same order, a separate cancellation notification email will not be sent. This is instead reflected in the sales/receipt notification.
Enabling or Disabling Cancellation Notifications
- Go to My Profile > Notifications.
- Locate the checkbox for “Email me notifications when I make sales or if recurring payments fail”.
- If enabled → you will receive cancellation emails (as well as other notifications).
- If unchecked → you will not receive these notifications (or other notifications).
At this stage, there are no granular notification settings; the checkbox applies globally to all notifications.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Q: Will the customer also be emailed about their cancellation?
- A: In short, no. ThriveCart does not send automatic subscription cancellation emails to customers, but these can be sent from either your payment gateway or by setting an Automation rule on your product.
You can also click the “Invoice” button from a customer’s transaction within ThriveCart to then click “Re-send” to email that final invoice to your customer.
- A: In short, no. ThriveCart does not send automatic subscription cancellation emails to customers, but these can be sent from either your payment gateway or by setting an Automation rule on your product.
- Q: Can I customize these notification emails?
- A: These emails cannot currently be customized, as they serve as a notice from ThriveCart to you. If you’re wanting to customize messaging to your team related to cancellations, we would recommend setting up an automation, webhook, or even utilizing an integration such as Slack or Google Sheets to be updated when a cancellation happens.
- Q: The reason I’m seeing in the notification is that Stripe/PayPal cancelled the subscription, but it’s not clear why, where can I get more information?
- A: Often this would be related to failed recurring payments hitting your payment processors retry limit, but we may not have received the reason from them. You would be able to see the processors reason for cancellation by looking up that customer’s subscription within your processors dashboard directly. We also have more details on the reasons for cancellations in our guide here.