Subscription Status

Subscription payments occur when customers authorise a merchant to charge them for goods or services on a scheduled basis. As opposed to one-time purchases, recurring payments require merchants to securely store additional customer information for future charges. Automated payments simplify the billing process, maximising revenue, securing cash flow, and fostering long-term customer relationships.

Subscriptions statuses help diagnose any issues and act on amendments:

subscription status description
active a subscription was created successfully and is active on the customer's account. The status is set automatically. However, you can manually update the status from Failed, Completed, Canceled, or Held to Active and reactivate the Subscription.
failed a subscription has been cancelled manually. The reason could be a customer's request to cancel an active subscription, despite not all payments being processed. Or an initial failure of the automated payments due to incorrect customer payment details. 
cancelled a subscription has been cancelled manually. The reason could be a customer's request to cancel an active subscription, despite not all payments being processed. Or an initial failure of the automated payments due to incorrect customer payment details.
complete a subscription has automatically ended. The reason is the completion of the subscription's pre-set conditions. For example, the recurring billings have collected the specified amount or number of transactions or have reached the end date.
held a Subscription is paused and will only resume upon a manual reactivation. The records on charges are still created but not processed. Once you set the subscription back to active status, these charges will not be reattempted.

Note: Automated update of subscription status to failed only applied to the following gateways:


- Authorize.Net;

- Assembly Payments;

- Afterpay;

- Bambora;

- Braitree;

- eWAY;

- Ezidebit;

- Fat Zebra;

- Flo2Cash;

- Forte;

- Merchant Warrior;

- NAB;

- Paperless;

- Windcave;

- PayPal;

- Pin Payments;

- SQID;

- Stripe;

- Westpac Payway;

- Worldpay;

- Zip;


We are currently working on a future enhancement that will extend this across all available gateways.

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