Avoid Credit Card Cancellations with the WishList Member – Stripe Integration

The WishList Member – Stripe integration is an excellent way to accept credit cards without the expense of a full-blown shopping cart and merchant account expenses. However like everything else it does have it’s limitations.

One of the biggest tradeoffs for using this simple solution is that neither Stripe nor WishList Member is setup to send notices to your subscribers when their credit card is declined. When this happens nobody is aware of it until the member’s subscription is ultimately cancelled and they land on a “Membership Cancelled” page.

 

This usually results in unnecessary support requests and not a little aggravation on the part of the membership site owner.

Sound familiar?

After dealing with this one too many times I spent last weekend digging into some potential solutions and will share them here with you in this series. I’m convinced that when we communicate advise members immediately of a declined credit card that 80% of the confusion will go away. For this reason I spent most of the weekend researching and testing various automation options to send declined card notices to members. I’m pretty happy with the solution and I’ll share it with in the next post on this topic.

This week I will be sharing the solutions with you in three different posts. They are:

• Quick and Dirty Manual Solution (in this post)
• Free (and Relatively Ungeeky) Automated System
• How to change your Membership Cancelled and Subscription Management (for Stripe users) Pages to keep more members.

To this end I created a short video that shows you how to use the Stripe Dashboard to find declined card transactions. It’s not an elegant solution, but it’s something you can do right now to get ahead of the situation and, based on your volume, it may be all you need.