Payments can fail when a customer's recurring payment (subscription or payment plan) is not processed successfully. Kajabi Payments provides tools to handle failed payments, view and export them, and manage automatic retries.
Note: Kajabi Payments is currently available to Heroes whose businesses are registered in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and select European countries.
Understand failed payments
Payments can fail when a customer's recurring payment (subscription or payment plan) is not processed successfully. These failures can stem from a variety of reasons, including:
Lack of a payment method tied to the customer record
An expired payment method
The payment is declined, which can happen for a variety of reasons
Handle failed payments with Kajabi Payments
Kajabi Payments uses Stripe's Smart Retries feature to automatically attempt to recover failed payments. When a payment fails, Smart Retries will attempt to collect the payment up to 4 times over the course of several weeks. The timing of retries is optimized for success—for example, the attempt could be sooner if it predicts there is a higher chance of success due to new information. For additional insights, refer to Stripe's documentation on Smart Retries.
What happens when a payment fails?
If a payment fails, the status of the purchase record becomes Past Due wherever it is displayed in Kajabi
On the Transactions Details page, the failed charge shows a Retrying status
If a retry succeeds, the status is set back to Active
If all 4 retries fail, the subscription or payment plan will be Canceled, which revokes product access for the customer
Automatic emails
When a payment fails, Kajabi will automatically send emails to:
Your customer, prompting them to update their payment information when a payment fails. Learn how to customize the failed payment email notification.
Your email on file, alerting you why the payment didn't go through, how many times we've retried, and the approximate date for the next attempt.
View failed payments
To access information regarding failed payments, follow these steps:
Navigate to the Payments page
Click the Transactions tab
Click Filter
In the Filter Menu, select Failed and Kajabi Payments
Apply the filter to view failed payments
Use ... to view more details about the failed payment
Export failed payments
To export your failed payment data:
Go to Sales > Transactions
Filter for Failed payments
Click Export
Auto revoke and auto grant after failed payment
If you want to revoke product access after the first failed payment for a subscription or payment plan, and then have access auto-granted back to your customer once the payment has succeeded, this setting can be turned on from your Customer Payments setting page. This feature is exclusively available to Kajabi Payments and Stripe.
To turn on Auto Revoke/Auto Grant:
From your Kajabi Dashboard, navigate to Settings
In Settings, select Customer Payments
Toggle the box under the revoke and grant access section
Click Save to apply the changes
Note: The auto revoke/grant feature does not trigger grant automations.
Manually retry failed payments
With Kajabi Payments, you can manually retry a failed payment. This process can be attempted twice every 24 hours, per transaction.
To manually retry a failed payment:
From the Kajabi Dashboard select the Sales tab
Click Payments
Select the Transactions tab
Locate the transaction you wish to retry, then click on the payment
Select Retry Payment
Click Retry Payment in the pop-up window to confirm
Turn off automatic retries
If you'd prefer to stop retries after a failed payment—without canceling the subscription—you can do so directly in Kajabi.
Disable automatic retries on a failed payment
Go to Sales > Payments > Transactions
Locate the failed transaction. You can do this by filtering by status: Failed
Once you have selected the failed transaction click the ... menu and select Turn Off Automatic Retries
Once turned off:
Retry attempts will stop immediately
The transaction will update from Retrying to Failed
The subscription remains active unless manually canceled
Disable automatic retries when canceling a subscription or payment plan
Go to Sales > Payments > Transactions
Locate the subscription or payment plan
Click the ... menu and select Cancel Subscription
Select your cancellation option and check the box Turn off automatic retries on all failed payments
This action will disable automatic retries on all current retrying transactions when the subscription or payment plan is cancelled.
Disable automatic retries when pausing a subscription or payment plan
Go to Sales > Payments > Transactions
Locate the subscription or payment plan
Click the ... menu and select Pause Subscription
Check the box Turn off automatic retries on all failed payments
Click the Pause subscription button
This action will disable automatic retries on all current retrying transactions when the subscription or payment plan is paused. Unpausing the subscription or payment plan does not re-enable auto-collection for the affected transactions.
Note: This is only available for Kajabi Payments and only applies to subscription or payment plan types.
Failed payment decline reasons
To access reasons for payment declines and recommended next steps, see failed payment reasons.
If you have questions or run into issues, reach out to [email protected].