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Last updated on Aug 28, 2026
Understand why credit card charges fail, what to do when a customer's card is declined, and how Advanced Billing retries failed payments.
There are a number of reasons credit card charges are not successful. Here is a summary of areas where the most common failures occur:
Credit card charges can fail for several reasons which are specific to the customer. These include:
Your Payment Gateway has many settings that allow or block transactions in different circumstances. For instance, your gateway account has settings which dictate how to react if there is a billing address mismatch with your customer's credit card, if the customer's card-issuing bank does not support address verification, if their card bank is outside the USA, or if the card bank is simply in a different country than your business, etc.
These settings inside your gateway account are meant to protect you from fraudulent charges. You need to log into your Payment Gateway website and adjust these settings as you learn your customer profile and behavior. You may need to "loosen" the settings to let more customers in, but keep in mind that the more you loosen these settings, the easier it is for someone to do a fraudulent transaction. It's a balance between making it easy for your customers, yet stopping fraudulent transactions.
This is less common, but your merchant account may be denying the transaction or may not be set up to accept the transaction. For example, your merchant account may impose a total monthly charge limit if you are a new business or your merchant account is new. Or if you did not specifically request it, most merchant accounts are not set up to process American Express charges, even if your Payment Gateway is okay with AmEx.
Your Payment Gateway may be working fine itself, but the username and password that you configured in Advanced Billing may be incorrect. See Troubleshoot Payment Gateway Configuration Issues for ideas you can test.
When a customer's card is declined the best course of action to take is to have the customer call the card issuing bank (their number should be on the back of the credit card) and inform them that their card is being declined for a transaction they would like to approve.
The card representative should have a list of declined transactions listed by charge amount and merchant name. This is your company name (not "Advanced Billing"), and is the identifying name you provided to your merchant processor. This is the name that shows up on the customer's credit card statement after a charge from your organization.
The representative should then be able to allow charges from your organization for that customer, at which point the customer can attempt to purchase again.
Advanced Billing attempts to retry your customer's credit card based on your dunning settings if we receive a response from your Payment Gateway indicating that the transaction has failed. If the card cannot be successfully charged, the subscription status changes to Canceled or Unpaid, depending on the subscription's settings. At this point, Advanced Billing stops attempting to collect payment on your behalf.
Visa states that a Preauthorization Transaction that receives one of the following Decline Responses may be resubmitted for Authorization, in an attempt to receive approval, up to 4 times within 16 calendar days from the date of the original Decline Response:
Advanced Billing uses Preauthorization Transactions in limited cases, such as verifying a card at signup when no amount is due. Advanced Billing adheres to the rules governing "Resubmitting Transactions": a transaction must not be resubmitted for Authorization if it receives a Pickup Response or one of the following Decline Responses, according to Visa:
If your merchant bank contacts you regarding these rules, you can be confident Advanced Billing adheres to the Visa rules.
If you have any questions or concerns, contact support@maxio.com.
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