Subscribers do not cancel — failed rebills chase them away.
Subscription businesses need a payment layer far beyond one-time transactions: saved payment methods, retry logic, proration, and pause/cancel handling. WooCommerce Subscriptions is the mainstream WordPress answer, but its payment architecture deserves a close look.
Setup Intents vs Payment Intents
Stripe separates the two on purpose. A Setup Intent saves a payment method without charging — used for a free trial. When the trial ends, a Payment Intent charges automatically. Understanding this split is the foundation of a clean subscription flow.
Retry logic that recovers revenue
Multi-card is the churn killer
The single biggest cause of involuntary churn is a card that fails and a customer who never updates it. Letting subscribers keep a backup card, with automatic fallback, quietly recovers revenue that would otherwise vanish.
The subscription payment checklist
- Tokenization — how is the payment method stored?
- Rebill trigger — when does the charge fire?
- Retry strategy — how many attempts, at what interval?
- Customer notification — when does the failure email go out?
- Cancel / pause — how is payment handled on each?
Design the rebill path carefully and churn stops being the silent killer. For the rest of the subscription stack, see our WordPress plugin tutorials.
