Same here: $217.00 (18.12%).
Now I may suck, but not this bad…
Hi folks, as you know we’re noticing an unexpectedly high number of payment declines. We’re sorry for the frustration this has caused and we’re doing all we can to help creators get paid by working with our payment partners and continuing to retry payments. Some of these issues were caused by external forces, and others by our efforts to create a stable and global platform as we grow and invest in our capabilities.
To ensure payment goes through this month, you can let your patrons know they can update their payment method to a new card, PayPal, or call their bank to confirm the charge as non-fraud.
Made a post on patreon about this
Minus $98 which is about a forth of the pledged amount, whoopee!
One of my Patrons called his bank and was told the transaction never even reached them, and attempting to retry the charge is doing nothing. He also can’t remove the card and he hasn’t got another card to replace the current one with. So welp… Dunno what to do really. Playing the waiting game now, I suppose.
@SugaryViolet that seems unusual for sure - if you patron is happy to get in touch with us, we can see what happened.
Putting the onus on us and our patrons to sort it out isn’t really the greatest use of our time. Some information on what happened and what Patreon are doing to rectify it (if anything) would be helpful. Is there an official post somewhere?
Completely agree. We just tweeted here, we’re all hands on deck at the moment to reply to everyone we can across social media, and we’re sending an email out to patrons whose payment was declined with specific info about this situation and what they can do to ensure their payment does go through. We’re also talking with the payment providers and retrying payments.
Thank you, that’s good to know.
Thank you Mindy for the information. I know you can only relay the information you are given but it’s good to get updates just to here that the issue is being looked at. Hopefully it gets sorted sooner rather than later.
Thank you! The effort is much appreciated!
Hey there! Experiencing the same issue here; I might be losing over $400 this month, and possibly longer, depending on the specific way this issue is resolved.
I have a good amount of faith in the Patreon team, given how you all have dealt with major issues like this previously, but I’m really hoping this can be resolved in a way that requires little or no action on the pledgers’ part.
When things like this happen, a good amount of the users affected simply never come back, and if someone’s personal payment card is put on hold, that’s enough for a lot of people to think that using Patreon is dangerous enough to justify closing their account and never consider using the service again.
There’s a contingent of hardcore fans of any Patreon creator who will take it in stride and take whatever action needs to be done to get things back in order, but when faced with an issue that’s basically “You didn’t do anything wrong, but something happened on the other end, and it requires you to set up new payment methods in order to keep paying for something,” a very significant amount of people will just walk away, often indefinitely.
So! It’s very obvious that the Patreon team is treating this seriously, and that not all of this issue is in your hands (but rather the banks and/or payment handlers), but I’m just desperately hoping that this can be resolved in a way that requires minimal (or ideally no) effort on the pledgers’ parts, as that’s the only option that won’t result in a significant loss for the creators using the system, and in the willingness of a good amount of pledgers to keep using the system or do so in the future.
And, very hopefully, the declined payments this month can be resolved and go through normally.
In any case, thanks for treating this seriously; best of luck to the team in getting this sorted out!
Dear Patreon:
When you are going to do anything that could cause even a small hiccup in a not-insubstantial portion of our incomes (in this case, to the extent that several patrons’ cards were temporarily suspended by their banks for fraud alerts), PLEASE give us a heads-up before you pull the switch, so that we know to expect said hiccup? Not only because it reduces our stress levels and our need to reduce panic among the patrons; it’s just plain flat out the right thing to do.
Not gonna lie, with the new trend of Crisis of the Month™, it feels like Patreon is becoming the biggest obstacle in the growth of my Patreon.
Don’t be the weakest link in your own chain, guys.
I know pledges as recently as a few days ago were going through the US… Any reason you guys decided to switch to your UK payment method on the day that a massive number of charges would go through instead of the middle of the month when they could trickle in and you could see declines coming in?
I’m sure there are a ton of things I’m not getting here but this seems like a pretty bad way to roll out something this crucial to the functionality of Patreon. It’s causing all sorts of issues/headaches with creators I know now.
“Hey, at least they learned from the last time they made a big payment change without signalling it beforehand and caused everyone to get in an uproar” - a quote from one of them :V
I forwarded this message to him. So far he’s the only one of my Patrons that seem to be unable to fix his pledge, and he’s one of my most longstanding supporters. He tried switching to Paypal too, but it didn’t work.
So yea, hopefully he sends a message and things get fixed.
quick update: we’ve now emailed all patrons who had declined payments with info about the situation, what they can do to make sure their payment is processed, and given our deepest apologies. We’ll continue to work with payment providers to improve payment cycles.
thanks for all the support in here <3 keep updating this thread with your thoughts and I will ensure they are heard by the right people as we review this situation.
I still have the patron I mentioned above stuck in fraud status. He’s paid for months. He said he called his bank and changed his card and still all I see is “fraud”. Anything else I can tell him?
that patron would be best to contact our support team as it may be unrelated to the issue from yesterday. it’s hard to say without looking into their account info I’m afraid.
hi all — a quick update for you on this issue.
I’m happy to confirm that we’re seeing normal successful payment processing rates. we’ll continue retrying any declined payments throughout the month, as we always do, and I wanted to reiterate that Patreon doesn’t collect fees for declined transactions. this article has more info if you want it around that area thank you so much for your patience.
I have a few patrons that the system says is in good standing but it’s only charged 1 month when they’ve been patrons for a few months. It doesn’t say declined for mine but it doesn’t add up the charges. Very concerned.