Welcome to another Commerce Module Tuesday! Today we are looking at Commerce Dunning, something we at Commerce Guys have been working on for awhile. This is part one (on what a Dunning process looks like) in a two part series that we will finish next week with how to test the functionality that we discuss today.

What is "Dunning" you ask? Sounds like a "dunce cap" that you might have heard of as a child? You're close! Dunning management (Delinquent User Notification) is the automated process that's kicked off when a charge attempt of a recurring order fails. This process involves periodic customer communication and payment retries.

In today’s video, we are simply going over the Dunning Process using Prezi. This is an important step towards making Drupal Commerce handle recurring payments, and we’ve tried to make it as straightforward as possible.

Terminology

A customer's payment can fail for various reasons. When the daily limit of the card has been exceeded, or the card has insufficient funds etc., the payment gateway will indicate a so called soft decline. This means charging the card can be successful in the foreseeable future.

A hard decline will be indicated by the payment gateway if the credit card is expired or not valid. In this case, that card can't be charged anymore.

(There is more information on the module page in drupal.org)

Next week we will use the Commerce Dunning testing suite to discuss how the actions get scheduled based on failures. I look forward to your comments and will be monitoring closely!