Failed Payments and Retries

When a payment fails, WineView classifies the failure into one of five categories. The category determines what happens next — most importantly, whether the member is notified.

Charge Failure Categories

Category	What it means	Member emailed?	Typical cause
Card Declined	The customer's card was rejected by their bank — insufficient funds, fraud hold, expired card, billing-address mismatch, 3D Secure failure, etc.	Yes — automatic email with a payment retry link	Issuer-side decline
Radar Block	Stripe's fraud-detection system (Radar) blocked the charge	No — silent at your discretion	Suspicious payment pattern or flagged IP
Stripe Infrastructure	Temporary platform issue (rate limit, transient API error, network timeout)	No — usually resolves on automatic retry	Stripe-side outage or throttling
Configuration	Your Stripe account, product, or webhook is misconfigured (e.g., account not verified, missing capability)	No — needs operator action, not member	Account setup issue
Unknown	Failure didn't match any known classifier	No	Edge case for investigation

Why doesn't every failure email the customer? Only Card Declined is something the member can fix themselves (update their card). Other categories indicate problems on Stripe's side or yours, so emailing the member would only confuse them. WineView's dashboard action items surface those for you to resolve directly. The automatic pause that follows a failed charge also deliberately suppresses the usual "membership paused" email — the member already gets the payment-failure notice, so a pause email on top would be redundant.

What Happens When a Payment Fails

A failed charge does not change the member's status to a "past due" or "payment failed" state — there is no such status. Instead:

An outstanding balance (a bill) is opened on the member, recording what they owe, the failure reason, and the number of attempts so far.
The membership is automatically paused while the balance is outstanding. For subscription clubs this also halts the automatic recurring charge so the member isn't repeatedly billed against a card that's failing.
The failure appears on your dashboard's Needs Your Attention bell as an action item, and a "Past Due" indicator appears on the member alongside their (now Paused) status badge.
If the category is Card Declined, the member receives an email with a payment retry link they can use to update their card and pay the balance.
The reservation tied to the failed charge keeps its normal lifecycle status (e.g., Confirmed) with the outstanding balance attached — its payment shows as failed because a balance is open. Inventory remains held until the balance is resolved, the reservation is cancelled, or you intervene. See Inventory Holds and Blocking Issues for details.

When the balance is fully resolved, the membership is automatically resumed — unless the member has other outstanding balances, in which case they stay paused until all of them clear. See Member Statuses for how pausing interacts with fulfillment.

The Outstanding Balance Lifecycle

An outstanding balance has just two states: Outstanding (open, the member owes money) and Resolved (closed). A resolved balance also records how it was cleared — for example: paid by Stripe's own retry, paid by the member, charged again by staff, marked paid externally, waived, or auto-cleared because the underlying reservation or subscription was cancelled.

Each failed retry increments the attempt count and updates the latest failure reason on the balance, so you always see the most recent decline message.

Resolving an Outstanding Balance

A single action recovers any failed charge: charge the saved (or a newly selected) card. Members and staff use the same mechanism; staff also have two additional options.

Member self-service

The email retry link (or a banner in the member portal) takes the member to a retry page where they can update their card and pay the balance without contacting you:

Release charges land on a Release Payment Retry page showing the order breakdown.
Customer-choice overage charges land on a Payment Required page where the member can pay the overage or adjust their selection back down to their tier's base before retrying.
Any balance can also be paid from the member's Payments page.

Staff actions

From the member sidebar, each outstanding balance offers:

Retry — charge the member's saved card immediately. Useful after the member tells you they've updated their card.
Mark Paid Externally — record that the member paid out-of-band (cash or check). This resolves the balance without running a card.
Waive — forgive the balance. For a subscription invoice this voids the underlying Stripe invoice; for a reservation-based charge this cancels the reservation and restocks its inventory.

One thing staff cannot do is pay a customer-choice upgrade on a member's behalf — the upgrade reflects the member's own wine selection, so that retry has to come from the member (who can also dial their selection back to base to avoid the overage).

When a member opens their Payments page, any outstanding balance surfaces as a banner at the top with a single Pay Now action. The banner routes them automatically to the right place — the release retry page, the Payment Required page, or an inline retry — so members never have to figure out which page to visit.

Staff-Initiated Retries

From your dashboard:

Member sidebar — the outstanding-balance card exposes Retry, Mark Paid Externally, and Waive against the member's saved card without opening Stripe or another tool.
Release Charge Progress modal — the Retry Failed Charges button kicks off a single retry run targeting all members with failed charges on the release.
Payments dashboard — review failures and jump to the affected release or membership to take broader action (cancel reservation, change tier, etc.).