At a glance
The percentage of attempted Recharge subscription rebills that succeeded on first attempt: COUNT(SUCCESS) ÷ COUNT(SUCCESS + ERROR + dunning-in-progress) × 100. This is the single most important Recharge health metric, it’s the inverse of involuntary churn risk. Healthy DTC subscription brands run 92, 97% first-attempt success; below 90% means your card-on-file refresh, retry strategy, or dunning copy needs work. Recharge’s automated retry and Smart Dunning logic will recover a portion of failures over 3, 7 days; this card measures the first attempt only.
| What it counts | COUNT(charges WHERE status = SUCCESS) ÷ COUNT(all attempted charges in window) × 100. Both numerator and denominator filter to charges first attempted in the window (NOT charges retried from prior periods, those have their own success/failure profile). |
| What goes in denominator | SUCCESS + ERROR + (in-progress retry queue at snapshot time). Excluded: REFUNDED and CHARGEBACK (those are post-success outcomes); SKIPPED (subscriber paused). |
| Currency | Currency-neutral (it’s a rate). |
| Recharge dunning | Recharge automatically retries failed charges for 3, 7 days using configurable retry intervals. This card measures first-attempt success; the recovered portion is in rec_decline_rate and the involuntary churn metric (the ones that retry-out, no recovery). |
| Underlying processor matters | Success rate is dominated by the underlying processor: Shopify Payments tends to run 1, 2 percentage points higher success on Shopify Plus than Stripe stand-alone, all else equal, because Shopify Payments has tighter coupling with Shop Pay tokens and network tokens. |
| Card-on-file age | Older saved cards have higher decline rates (expired, replaced after a fraud event, closed account). Recharge’s Account Updater integration (where enabled) auto-refreshes card-on-file in the background and lifts success rate by 2, 5 points. |
| Time window | 7D vsP rolling default. |
| Alert trigger | <90% absolute, OR -3pp decline vsP. sentiment_key: success_rate, gauge thresholds good ≥95, warn ≥90. |
| Reading hints | Sub-90: investigate. Most spikes are Q1 expired-card waves, a payment-method launch with a buggy token, or an issuer-side fraud wave on a specific BIN range. |
| Roles | owner, finance, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Recharge data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
“Daily Greens Co”. 7-day window 26 Apr 26 to 02 May 26, the days surrounding the 30 Apr month-end and the 02 May Friday refresh wave.| Outcome | Charges | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Successful first attempt | 4,810 | The bulk |
| Failed first attempt → retry queue | 285 | Currently in 3-7 day retry window |
| Failed permanently (retried out) | 42 | Cards expired, no update from customer |
| Refunded (originally succeeded) | 78 | Excluded from this card |
| Chargebacks (originally succeeded) | 4 | Excluded from this card |
| Subscribers SKIPPED (paused) | 120 | Excluded |
- 93.6% first-attempt success is below the 95% “healthy” threshold. Recharge dunning will recover ~170 of the 285 failures over the next 3, 7 days, lifting eventual success to ~97%. But the 3% involuntary churn (157 customers lost over 7 days) is the structural concern.
- Q1, especially February, is when this card historically dips. January and February card-on-file expiries from issuers reissuing batches at year-end push failure rates up 1, 2 pp compared to mid-year. April should normally read 95+%; 93.6% suggests an unusual pattern this period.
- The 285 retry-queue charges will resolve in 3, 7 days. Those that fail permanently feed
rec_decline_rate. Recovery requires either (a) the issuer auto-updating the card-on-file (Account Updater), or (b) the customer manually updating their card via the customer portal. Recharge sends dunning emails; quality of dunning copy materially affects recovery. - The 78 refunds and 4 chargebacks are NOT failures. They originally succeeded; the customer subsequently got their money back. They sit in
rec_refund_rateandrec_chargeback_rate. Conflating them with first-attempt failures distorts the diagnosis. - 120 SKIPPED subscribers are paused, not failed. The subscriber proactively skipped a delivery (going on vacation, has product still on hand). They’re not a churn risk; they’ll auto-resume next cycle. Excluded from this card entirely.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Success Rate |
|---|---|
rec_decline_rate | The complement: failure rate. 1 - success_rate ≈ decline_rate (excluding cancellations). |
rec_top_decline_reasons | The first card to open when this dips. INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS, EXPIRED_CARD, DO_NOT_HONOR cluster reveal cause. |
rec_top_payment_methods | Method mix often explains rate movement (Amex declines more than debit). |
rec_volume_trend | Success rate dips coincide with volume troughs. |
rec_chargeback_rate | Different metric (post-success); but high chargeback often correlates with poor first-attempt success. |
| Stripe / Shopify Payments authorisation rate | Underlying processor’s view, the upstream input to this. |
Shopify checkout_completion_rate | Storefront analogue, but for first-purchase success not rebill success. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in the Recharge merchant portal: admin.rechargepayments.com. The closest comparable view is Recharge Admin → Analytics → Charges → Success rate for the same window. Recharge admin shows two flavours: “First-attempt success” (matches this card) and “All-in success” (after dunning recovery, higher number). The Retention → Involuntary churn dashboard is the second-order view: subscribers Recharge couldn’t recover and lost. Why our number may legitimately differ from the Recharge merchant portal:| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| First-attempt vs all-in | Theirs higher if showing all-in | Recharge admin sometimes defaults to “post-dunning” which is 2, 4 pp higher than this card. |
| Time zone bucketing | Boundary days off | Recharge admin: store TZ. Vortex IQ: UTC. |
| Snapshot timing on retry queue | Brief discrepancy | A failed charge in the active retry window may show as ERROR here briefly; if it succeeds later it flips. Catches up automatically. |
| Comparison | Expected relationship | When divergence is legitimate |
|---|---|---|
rec_success_rate ↔ Stripe / Shopify Payments authorisation rate | Recharge slightly lower | Recharge rebills fail more often than first-purchase auth (the card-on-file is older, the customer hasn’t actively engaged in months). 1, 3 pp gap is normal. |
rec_success_rate + rec_decline_rate ≈ 100% | Yes, in window | The two are complementary. |
rec_success_rate ↔ recurly.rec_success_rate | Similar shape | Both are subscription-billing layers. Recurly’s multi-processor failover can lift its rate above Recharge’s single-processor pattern. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
“Success rate dropped below 90% overnight, what should I check first?” Openrec_top_decline_reasons. Most spikes are one of three patterns: (1) expired-card cluster (most common; happens at year-end, also at month-end when calendar months tick over), (2) issuer-side fraud filter triggered by an unusual transaction signature (e.g. a sudden uptick in subscriber count from a new geo, the issuer flags the rebill batch as suspicious), (3) payment-method outage (Klarna or Affirm subscription paymemts going through a non-card token rail had an outage; if your store offers these methods this can show up as a regional/segment dip).
“What’s a ‘good’ success rate for a Recharge subscription business?”
95+% on first attempt is excellent. 92, 95% is normal for healthy DTC subscription brands. Below 90% there’s a fixable upstream issue. Above 97% is suspicious, you may have aggressive Account Updater integration but underlying card-on-file is still aging; the eventual involuntary churn will catch up.
“Account Updater, is it worth enabling?”
Almost always yes. Account Updater is a card-network service (Visa Account Updater, Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater, Amex CARD Refresher) that pushes new card details to merchants when an issuer reissues a card, your saved token gets refreshed automatically, the customer never sees a failure. Recharge integrates with Account Updater via the underlying processor (Stripe + Shopify Payments both expose this). Enabling it lifts success rate by 2, 5 percentage points and is roughly cost-neutral.
“My underlying processor changed (Stripe → Shopify Payments). Will success rate change?”
Likely yes, marginally. Shopify Payments tends to run 1, 2 pp higher first-attempt success on Shopify Plus stores than Stripe stand-alone, due to tighter Shop Pay token coupling and direct network token issuance. Plan for a brief dip during the migration as cards re-vault, then a small lift.
“Why does Recharge’s success rate differ from Recurly’s for similar businesses?”
Recurly has a “multi-processor failover” feature (route to a backup processor when the primary declines, see if the backup approves). Recharge does NOT have this, it’s tied to a single processor per Shopify store. For high-volume merchants where a 1, 2 pp lift on involuntary churn is meaningful, this is one of Recurly’s pitches against Recharge. The trade-off: Recharge’s Shopify-native UX and feature depth.
“Is the 7-day window the right read?”
For most brands yes. 7-day catches anchor-day fluctuations. Daily can be noisy on small brands (one terrible BIN cluster on one day swings the rate). 30-day smooths but obscures recent issues. Use 7-day for ops, 30-day for trend.
“What’s the difference between this and ‘all-in’ success rate?”
First-attempt success: did the rebill succeed on the first try in this window. All-in success: did the customer eventually pay (after Recharge dunning retries). All-in is always higher (typically 2, 5 pp) and is the better churn metric. This card is the better operations / processor health metric, because it isolates the upstream signal from the dunning intervention.
“Q1 dip is structural, can we do anything?”
Three levers. (1) Account Updater (covered above). (2) Pre-emptive customer-portal email “your card expires in 30 days, update now” before Q1, the highest ROI proactive intervention. (3) Recharge Smart Dunning copy refresh, A/B test dunning email subject lines and update-card CTA placement; can lift recovery rate 5, 15%.
“Cancellations dragging this number down, do they count?”
No. A subscriber who cancels their subscription via the customer portal doesn’t generate a failed charge, the next rebill simply doesn’t fire (SKIPPED or removed from the schedule). Cancellations are tracked in voluntary churn separately. This card is involuntary signal: rebills attempted but failed.