How many times should a merchant retry declined charges?

Retaining customer confidence while effectively handling declined charges is crucial for merchants. It is generally advisable for merchants to attempt to retry declined charges multiple times. A common practice is to retry the payment up to four times.

This approach balances the opportunity to successfully collect payments while minimizing the risk of alienating customers who might be facing transient issues with their cards, such as insufficient funds or temporary blocks. The rationale behind multiple retries includes giving customers a chance to resolve any issues before permanently losing the sale. Moreover, multiple attempts can account for different scenarios; for example, the customer might have fixed the problem leading to the decline on subsequent attempts.

Retrying charges, particularly four times, aligns with best practices in payment processing strategies found in many industries. Merchants may choose to implement these retries at strategic intervals, such as placing time gaps between attempts to increase the chances of success without overwhelming the customer.

In contrast, fewer retry attempts may reduce the likelihood of recovering the revenue lost from declined charges, while excessive retries could potentially harm customer relationships and experience. This makes four attempts an optimal strategy within payment processing frameworks.