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We are a small start-up business that started about two months ago. We use Stripe as the primary payment processor along with PayPal as the secondary option.

Our plans are monthly subscriptions ranging from $5 to $25 per month. Our payment form currently collects the user's Name, CC, Expiration Date and the CVC security code.

After the first month, we started noticing that the recurring payments of users started failing on Stripe. We have no idea why this would be happening. If the first payment went through, why would future subscription payments fail? So far, every third recurring payment is failing for us on Stripe.

We contacted Stripe regarding this issue a few times but keep receiving responses that are straight off of their documentation and help guides. We need professional and experienced advice on this matter.

One thing we keep asking ourselves is whether we should additionally also collect the full billing address data.

Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.

Armin
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If the first payment went through, why would future subscription payments fail?

For the same reason that charges ever fail: The card expired, the card was reported stolen, the account is closed, the customer's overdrafted their account, the customer's exceeded their credit line, the issuing bank had an extended outage...

Depending on what you're offering, you could be getting a substantial amount of fraudulent users that are getting caught a couple billing cycles down the line.

Any available information about the decline is returned via webhooks. That would be the first place to look for any further details. (Banks are not necessarily forthcoming, so "declined" may be the extent of the information available.)

Given how widespread this seems to be for you, yes, I might recommend collecting full address information and refusing any transaction that fails AVS.

At a minimum, you might want to request the customer's ZIP code and perform AVS checks against that.

colinm
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  • Our business is an online tool for watermarking photos, so it is unlikely something that would lure fraud, but you never know. One thing that happens on the second charge is that, unlike the first transaction, the CVV code is not provided when charging the credit card on transactions after the first one. The reason is that merchants are not allowed to store the CVV anywhere, so future charges are done without CVV. I figured that could be the root cause, but then why would subscription billing even exist? I will request user's address information and see how that goes. Thank you! – Armin May 11 '14 at 02:44
  • Armin, did adding the address help with these cases? – Henley Nov 01 '14 at 04:22
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    We've having a similar issue with a site (recurring payments very, very frequently failing, even with address info). Did you get any resolution? – Nick Benson Feb 07 '15 at 16:01
  • Keep in mind that most recurring billing providers will send a payment type of "recurring" to flag to the bank that CVV is not to be expected. Are you able to access the decline reasons anywhere in Stripe? – Rachel Quick Jan 14 '16 at 16:29