Grace period — a period between the first failed recurring payment and subscription cancellation. This is the time interval that you give your customers to update their billing information before removing them from your members-only area.
If the customer will fix their billing information during the grace period, their subscription will continue normally. Otherwise, it will be canceled automatically.
With InviteMember and PayPal, the grace period is optional (enabled by default).
How To Disable Grace Period
In @InviteMemberBot, open Payment options > PayPal and click Disable grace period.
Unpaid subscriptions will now be canceled immediately after the first failed recurring charge.
How To Enable Grace Period
In @InviteMemberBot, open Payment options > PayPal and click Enable grace period.
Now your customers will have at least 10 days to update their billing info and your bot will make at least 2 retries to recover the failed payment.
You can change the grace period length & the number of retries (see below).
How Does Grace Period Work
There're two important concepts to understand: missed billing cycles and payment failure threshold (see PayPal docs).
How PayPal recovers failed recurring payments
For each failed recurring payment, PayPal makes max. 2 recovery attempts (every 5 days, on the 5th and 10th day).
If the main payment attempt and two retries will fail, PayPal will consider the billing cycle "missed" and increase the counter of missed billing cycles. The outstanding balance will accumulate, so PayPal will attempt to charge more next time (when the next billing cycle comes).
When the number of missed billing cycles will reach your payment failure threshold, the subscription will be canceled.
How to change the payment failure threshold
In @InviteMemberBot, open Payment options > PayPal and click Set payment failure threshold.
You can enter any number, from 0 to 999. InviteMember can also bulk update all your existing subscriptions with the new payment failure threshold.
How does it work with a 0 (zero) payment failure threshold
If the payment failure threshold is set to 0, PayPal will try to recover the payment forever. An outstanding balance will accumulate each missed billing cycle.
How does it work with 1-999 (non-zero) payment failure threshold
PayPal will cancel the subscription when the number of missed billing cycles reaches your payment failure threshold.
A billing cycle is considered missing when the main payment attempt and 2 retries fail.
For example, if your subscription period is 1 month:
payment_failure_threshold = 1 means 10 days grace period
payment_failure_threshold = 2 means 1 month + 10 days grace period
payment_failure_threshold = 3 means 2 months + 10 days grace period
payment_failure_threshold = 4 means 3 months + 10 days grace period
etc.
How to cancel unpaid subscriptions manually
You can cancel them in your PayPal Dashboard:
How to change the payment failure threshold for old subscriptions
InviteMember can bulk update the payment failure threshold for all existing subscriptions. In @InviteMemberBot, open Payment options > PayPal and click Set payment failure threshold.
Then, select Yes, update all existing subscriptions.
You can review changes in your PayPal Dashboard: