Due to the large number of people involved with crowdfunding, and because of the delay that occurs between when a pledge is first placed and when it's charged, it is normal for most campaigns to experience some amount of declined charges.
It can happen for a number of reasons, such as a card's recent expiration date, insufficient funds in the account, or if their card issuer erroneously views a charge as suspicious.
Thankfully we do automatically notify supporters whose cards have been declined and we give them the opportunity to update their pledge with new credit card information.
Declined pledges can be fixed by the pledger re-entering their payment info after they make sure all is right with their card issuer. They already should have received an automatic email from us to advise them of this decline, along with the steps they can take to take to fix it:
They can log in to their Seed&Spark account (or if they pledged as a "guest" they'll first need to create an account with the email address they used to pledge), then they'll just have to click the yellow banner at the top of their homepage that will take them where they can re-enter their card info to run it again.
When people check with their bank or card issuer about a decline, that typically wouldn't cause their original declined charge go through our system, that would just (hopefully) allow a new charge to go through when they reenter their credit card information. We have to say "hopefully" because it's impossible for us to predict a card issuers response to any charge attempt. Declines are almost always the decision of the card issuer, and not us here at Seed&Spark.
Declined pledges won't delay you from receiving any successfully charged pledges. As folks begin to fix their declined charges they'll arrive to your bank account as separate payouts, usually 2-3 business days after they fix their pledge. We don't place any sort of time limit on how long folks have to fix their declined pledges.
You can view the current remaining declined charges by going to your Supporter's dashboard and then filtering by Declined:
You can also send folks unique "fix payment" links. If you click someone's name with a declined charge, a popup will appear that looks like this:
If you click that "copy fix payment" link you'll copy a link to your clipboard that will take an individual directly to a page where they can fix their pledge. They don't have to be logged into a Seed&Spark account at all to fix their pledge if they use this link.
Please note: If you try to visit one of these links while you're logged into your own Seed&Spark account you'll receive a 404 error, as each fix payment link is uniquely tied to each pledger's pledge, but if you are completely logged out of Seed&Spark the link should work for you (and them).
It's also important to note that every pledger has a unique fix payment link, so you'll want to be sure to click their name and copy the fix payment link from their popup every time. You don't want to send the same fix payment link out to multiple folks.
If folks are still appearing underneath the "Declined charge" filtered view in your Supporter dashboard, that would indicate that they haven't yet successfully fixed their declined pledge in our system. They may have reattempted to fix their pledge, but it's possible it was declined again when we reattempted the charge.