Subscriptions = recur declines

I am working with a community website, which offers additional benefits for a monthly subscription. People can sign up with no problem, but 10-15% of our members are being declined on the recurring payments. These seem totally random; a member will be fine for a few months, then it will decline payment. We have ruled out expiration dates and stuff like that, and the gateway processor claims that it's not on their end. They claim that each member's individual bank is declining the payments.

Is this that comes up regularly? Are there solutions? Should I just recommend to the site owner that we **** it up and switch everything to PayPal?

I'm completely at a loss as to where to look for the problem. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Likely the customers have exceeded their credit card limits at the time the recurring payment is initiated and are therefore declined.

This is something that cannot be influenced from your site or your payment processor's one (that's within the responsibility of the card issuer).

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switch everything to PayPal?

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That will likely not improve the situation (by the way, any other payment processor is better than PayPal, but this may reflect my subjective opinion only).

Depending upon in which business you are, a 10 % fraud rate seems to be very acceptable.

Also consider that a credit card's limit is deducted at the time of authorization. So even if a merchant just gets an authorization code, the amount is taken - regardless a purchase is finally done or not. I mention this because some card owners may state that they have not reached their limit.

Thanks for the advice. I'm just really frustrated with all this.

Just today, over 30 members' recur payments were declined. And what's worse is that many of them were declined, which cancels the additional site benefits for which they pay, but then their cards were charged anyway.

Is baldness inevitable when attempting to accept online payments

Probably the biggest billing complaint we have. We spend more time following up on this than anything.