How I lost a potential customer & managed to win them again 🍻

I faced a payment issue on Famewall last week when a potential new customer tried purchasing the Professional Plan

The customer took my product for a spin & was experimenting on setting up testimonials for their landing page ✨

So I casually went to sleep thinking they were just exploring the product 😴

Upon waking up, I saw a notification which brought instant panic. It seemed that a few payments failed 😥

And the surprise was that all payments were from a single customer. The kind soul tried it for at least 5-6 times after which they got frustrated and just gave up.

Understanding this situation, I contacted Stripe who were super supportive. The problem here was that banks weren't transparent why a payment fails but only provide a generic code

So based on the information they had, they told me that the payment failed due to "card_decline_rate_limit_exceeded" error which seemed to happen due to them trying multiple times

So they advised me to allow them to give a 24 hour window & ask them to pay again. And I did so.

Only after receiving the reply for the email, I realized how frustrated they were with this issue that they were fine to move on

And much to my horror, they tried again & it failed 🥲

I was so anxious after this incident & I knew that at the moment, the customer would have been really angry so I got back to Stripe support again 😥

Seeing the logs they advised me to ask the customer to try a different payment method entirely as the issue could have been probably due to them using their debit card

So I tried sending them an email again after an hour to which they never replied 😅

One thing I could infer from the conversation I had with the customer was that they only preferred to use that specific debit card & hence wouldn't opt for a different payment method.

So thinking about all the constraints in mind & talking to folks on Twitter, I went ahead with an invoicing solution to accept one time yearly payment from the customer.

So it took 2 days for my account to get verified and finally set up a payment invoice with Paypal.

Once it was ready, I sent an email again to them but this time I offered them a discount of 2 months for all the hassle they faced & enabled pre-access to their account even before they paid.

And Voila, they gave a positive response 🍻

I went to check my product analytics if things were working fine. They seemed to use the Video testimonials from the paid plan & things were going smoothly

Then they looped in their assistant to help them speed up the setup. I was happy to oblige and then I thanked them for the cooperation while also reminding about the invoice.

And after a 2 week long struggle, I received the payment notification from Paypal 🥺

The payout I received that day was the most satisfying one ever 🥺

While it could have been easy to dismiss this situation & come to terms with a lost customer as a lot of my friends suggested, as a solo founder, somewhere it didn't sit right with me

I just wanted to ensure that there shouldn't be any stone left unturned before we give up & move on. After all isn't tenacity the reason, why we're all here as indie hackers? :)