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.

What Happens When a Payment Fails

The membership's status changes to Past Due (or Payment Failed for releases that have exhausted retries).
Stripe automatically retries on your configured retry schedule (subscription clubs only; release charges are not auto-retried).
The failure appears on your dashboard's Needs Your Attention bell as an action item.
If the category is Card Declined, the member receives an email with a payment retry link they can use to update their card.
The reservation tied to the failed charge enters Payment Failed status — but inventory remains held until the membership is cancelled, the charge succeeds, or you manually intervene. See Inventory Holds and Blocking Issues for details.

Retrying Failed Payments

You have two options:

Automatic retry — Stripe retries failed subscription payments based on your retry schedule. The member's status moves between Active and Past Due as charges fail and retry.
Manual retry — From the member sidebar → Payments tab, click Retry Payment to immediately attempt the charge again. Useful after the member tells you they've updated their card.

Member Self-Service Retry

Members can also self-serve: the email payment retry link takes them to a dedicated retry page where they can update their card and retry without contacting you. For release charges, this lands on a Release Payment Retry page. For customer-choice subscription cycles, it lands on a Customer Choice Retry page (which also lets them adjust their selections).