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Cristina · by **Cristina** » Sun May 26, 2019 12:46 pm

Failed credit card payments are a nightmare!

They can make it so you don’t actually raise as much as you thought you would on Kickstarter.

Today, I share a few ways that creators go about collecting these payments along with an effective tool to make the process easier.

You can learn more down below!

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Let’s talk a bit about failed credit cards…

Read the article here: https://www.crowdcrux.com/easy-tool-to- ... dit-cards/

: failed-credit-338x185.jpg (16.23 KiB) Viewed 1757 times

nomlinz · by **nomlinz** » Fri Aug 02, 2019 4:16 pm

Great tips, Sal!

Some additional info for any readers out there too:

When your campaign ends (and if you have successfully met your goal) then the backers’ credit cards get charged. Here’s a full breakdown of the timeline of what happens after the campaign ends.

Campaign Ends — credit cards are charged. A percentage of backers become errored backers and have 1 week to fix their credit card.
7 days after end — all errored backers become dropped backers and can no longer fix their credit card issues.
14 days after end — money is transferred from Kickstarter to your bank account.
Soon after you receive your funds from Kickstarter — you’ll send a survey to your backers to gather important information about their order like their shipping address.

Here are two strategies to decrease the number of failed credit card charges.

1. Send personal messages to Errored Backers
When a backer’s credit card fails, Kickstarter immediately sends them a notification asking them to fix the issue within 7 days. This is useful, but you can also take matters into your own hands and communicate with your backers directly. It’s always better to hear directly from the campaigner (imagine hearing from the CEO fo your favorite brand!) so be sure to include this in your post-launch strategy.

Here’s how to do this after your campaign ends:

Go to Backer Report.

Click the “All backers” dropdown then choose “Errored backers”.

After you’ve selected your Errored Backers, you have the option to message just those backers and can message them directly all at once.

Here’s the first message, sent right after the campaign ends:

Hey there!

I noticed that your credit card failed to charge for your [product] pre-order! I wanted to personally reach out to let you know that you only have 1 week to fix it in Kickstarter. If you don’t, then our team can’t guarantee that you’ll get your [product] at your Kickstarter discount.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

-[your name]

Here’s the second message that should be sent 6 days after the campaign ends, one day before Errored Backers become dropped pledges.

Hey there,

I just want to remind you that this is your last chance to update your credit card information on Kickstarter. If you don’t, then our team can’t guarantee that you’ll get your [product] at the discounted price.

Please login to Kickstarter and correct your credit card information as soon as you can. You can save a new credit card to your account by heading to the Payment Methods tab of your Account Settings and clicking the green ‘Add a new card’ button.

If you don’t by tomorrow, you will be dropped as a Kickstarter backer!

Please let me know if you have any questions!

-[your name]

As you can see, this is a very generic blast to all Errored Backers. To get an even higher response rate, be sure to go through your Errored Backers one-by-one to personalize your message to them.

2. Get all missing information with BackerKit

BackerKit is a tool that makes pledge management a breeze for your crowdfunding campaign. One of their best features (along with product upsells and address confirmation) is their ability to recover failed payments.

With BackerKit, you import all of your backers into their system once the campaign is over. Thankfully, Kickstarter provides information of dropped pledges and backers with failed credit cards so their information will also be included. These dropped backers are entered into the system with a pledge of $0, but BackerKit knows which reward they tried to pledge for.

When you send out surveys to your backers, BackerKit also sends surveys to the dropped backers and gives them another chance to enter in their credit card information and pay for the reward they tried to buy on Kickstarter. Voila! Even more dropped pledges get recovered in this way.

Be sure to use this information to properly budget for how many payments will likely fail at the end of your campaign. More importantly, go into your campaign armed with the knowledge that you can do something about the (inevitable) failed credit card payments at the end of your campaign.

At the end of the day, recovering your Errored Backers and dropped pledges is one of many things you should do immediately after your campaign ends. If you're interested in the other 3 things you must do immediately after your campaign ends, check out the article here: https://crushcrowdfunding.com/what-to-do-immediately-after-your-campaign-is-successfully-funded/

Rougdab · by **Rougdab** » Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:19 am

I never had a problem with failed payments. Maybe you are using a credit card from low rating banks, or maybe you are making purchases from a non-safe website, because I never had this kind of problems. I have a personalized credit card number, that I am using for a while, and trust me, I made a lot of card payments, and never had a difficulty with them. In my opinion the best option here is to discuss with the bank that gave you the credit card, they are responsible for the services that they offer, so they have to solve this problem.

NinaGood · by **NinaGood** » Sat May 28, 2022 8:46 am

Great thanks

NinaGood · by **NinaGood** » Tue May 31, 2022 6:22 am

Thanks for the info, I bookmarked your post. Could you recommend a good bank to get a credit card at? Direct Express and its customer support service https://direct-express.pissedconsumer.c ... rvice.html look rather good as for me, but I am very hesitating and afraid of making a wrong choice.

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