Failed and Completed Transactions

About Transaction Failures in ONTRAPORT

Applies to: ONTRAPORT Plus and above.

ONTRAPORT provides four different types of sales transactions you can leverage:

1. One time sales
2. Payment plans
3. Subscriptions
4. Free trial periods (for payment plans or subscriptions)

Payment plans are periodic payments that end when the balance of the sale is collected, while subscription plans are evergreen payments that continue until cancelled. A payment plan may be "$200 a month for three months" as an option on an order form for a $600 product. Subscriptions are often used for membership websites, fitness centers, or service contracts. In ONTRAPORT, the future pending payments for either payment plans or subscriptions are called "open orders".

Collection and Recharge Settings

When a payment plan or subscription transaction fails the contact is automatically added to the Collection and Recharge Settings for automated collection efforts. You can automate the messages sent to the contact about the transaction failure, the days between retry attempts, and how long before the open orders are set to "write off" status.

Configure the settings to reflect your company's approach (by default, the failed transaction is re-tried every 3 days for 90 days, then the order is written off). Check with your accountant to see if the open orders that are written off are tax deductible.

Engaging via Campaigns or legacy Rules

In addition to the built in and automatic Collection and Recharge Settings, you can engage the customer using Campaigns or legacy Rules.

In Campaigns, use a Trigger or Goal for "Open order is charged or updated" and select "Charged but declined":

Note the four parameters you can use:

1. Charged and successful (this will happen with each successful transaction)
2. Charged but declined (an attempt was made to charge the open order, but the transaction did not go through)
3. Cancelled (the open order was cancelled through manual action in the Contact Record, or in a Campaign or legacy Rule)
4. Completed (the last payment of a payment plan was successfully charged)

Triggers, Goals and legacy Rules allow you to go beyond the standard options in the Collection and Recharge Settings to customize your automated interaction with the client. You can create a Campaign to nurture a customer who has cancelled a membership plan, or encourage a payment plan customer to purchase again after they complete the payments.

Failed One Time Sales

When a potential customer is unable to complete a transaction because the payment gateway refuses their credit card ONTRAPORT still captures the contact information. Because the failed transaction does not have a valid credit card attached, these transactions are not sent to the Collection and Recharge Settings.

Re-engage these potential customers by using the Simple Abandoned Cart Follow Up Campaign available in Campaigns. Click on Campaigns and New Campaign to search for this free Campaign. The template provides the framework to follow up on failed transactions for single purchase products.

Articles in this section

• Sales Overview
• Coupon Codes
• Create a Custom Invoice Template
• Creating an Upsell Form
• Manual Transactions
• Failed and Completed Transactions
• Collections / Recharge Settings
• Suspend Membership When Payment Fails
• Adding Tax Types to ONTRAPORT
• Creating Products