> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Success Rate, Recharge > Success Rate for Recharge stores. Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Supporting Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Payment Gateway](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) ## 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`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/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 | ```text theme={null} Success rate (this card): Numerator (successful first attempt) = 4,810 Denominator (success + error) = 4,810 + 285 + 42 = 5,137 First-attempt success rate = 4,810 ÷ 5,137 × 100 = 93.6% Failure-with-recovery (after dunning) ≈ 60% of 285 recovered = ~ 170 All-in eventual success rate ≈ (4,810 + 170) ÷ 5,137 × 100 = 97.0% Involuntary churn rate = (285 - 170 + 42) ÷ 5,137 × 100 = 3.0% ``` What the merchant should notice: 1. **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. 2. **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. 3. **The 285 retry-queue charges** will resolve in 3, 7 days. Those that fail permanently feed [`rec_decline_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/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. 4. **The 78 refunds and 4 chargebacks are NOT failures.** They originally succeeded; the customer subsequently got their money back. They sit in [`rec_refund_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/refund-rate) and [`rec_chargeback_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/chargeback-rate). Conflating them with first-attempt failures distorts the diagnosis. 5. **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`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/decline-rate) | The complement: failure rate. 1 - success\_rate ≈ decline\_rate (excluding cancellations). | | [`rec_top_decline_reasons`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/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`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/top-payment-methods) | Method mix often explains rate movement (Amex declines more than debit). | | [`rec_volume_trend`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/volume-trend) | Success rate dips coincide with volume troughs. | | [`rec_chargeback_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/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`](/nerve-centre/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](https://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. | **Cross-connector reconciliation:** | 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`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recurly/success-rate) | Similar shape | Both are subscription-billing layers. Recurly's multi-processor failover can lift its rate above Recharge's single-processor pattern. | ***
Documentation cross-reference * [`recurly.rec_success_rate`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recurly/success-rate) * [`stripe.stripe_success_rate`](/nerve-centre/stripe/stripe_success_rate)
## Known limitations / merchant FAQs **"Success rate dropped below 90% overnight, what should I check first?"** Open [`rec_top_decline_reasons`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/recharge/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. *** ### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre *Success Rate* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Recharge and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. [Start for free](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.