Over 100 cards and paypal declined in December …
I usually average $90 worth of declines but as you can see from the picture in December I had $300 gone.
It isn’t really about the money (not just). I freaking hate that I have to bulk message 110 people and ask them to check their card/paypal.
Frustrating and disappointing. If it get worst we’ll probably have to consider other platforms 
Same here
Ridiculous … I hope they’ll fix this! 
Hi there, thanks for surfacing this. I double checked with our payments team and they confirmed nothing is broken on our end. As it’s still early in the month, these decline rates are average for what we typically see. As the month continues, we keep retrying payments and you should see that number continually improve. As it’s the start of the year, it may be a good time to remind your patrons the importance of keeping their payment info up to date. Let me know if you have any further questions about this and I’ll be happy to help 
Hey @mindy I appreciate your quick respond.
I understand what you say but I still think that the system isn’t working. The pledge processed bar says completed so I transferred the money so the bar is at $0. For what I understand, you are saying that throughout the month I should be able to see money coming in from the pledges that have been declined?
I really think that the numbers I am seeing in my dashboard don’t make sense.
Let me explain:
From the beginning of the month I had 20 new patron, which is great, however, I am -$15 …
I also had 19 people deleting their pledges which is really unusual to be honest and it never happened before.
Even though the declined payments went from 111 to 104 (Patreon did some work) I still feel that the numbers keep dropping too fast and as soon a new patron subscribe there are two of them cancelling (or failing to be processed).
You say it isn’t broken … maybe it isn’t but I just feel the numbers don’t really add up …
Marco.
One of my declined patrons said this:
Thanks! Not sure what happened - there are funds and Paypal has permission, but when I retry it doesn’t work. I’ve emailed support, sorry
From that, it does sound like a Patreon issue.
It isn’t a PayPal issue. I have the same problem with over 50 Patrons using both card and PayPal.
I am also not the only one being affected by this problem. Patreon payment system is randomly declining Patrons payments.
I have people who has money in their bank account reaching out asking why their pledge didn’t go through. They spend way too long trying to change card or add a paypal to their account which is clearly not what they are supposed to do. Out of 50 declines only 6-7 have been fixed.
If Patreon is not able to do the only one thing he’s supposed to do (process payments), then I don’t know where we are going here.
@mindy says these declines rates are average but this is not my average. Last month my decline were $90, in December I had $300 … this isn’t average, this is a faulty system which should be fixed.
Thanks for getting back with more info! From reading the thread, it seems like it could be a confluence of things. For us to investigate further, which we want to, please DM me the patron info (exact username/email address) for those who have reached out to you saying that they’re getting declined when they have good payment methods. Once we have those IDs, the team can start investigating the actual failures for their transaction attempts, and see if they’re getting processor errors or if it’s an internal failure somewhere.
huh, i just checked mine, it says i have just 6 usd declined, from people that already has been doing that, then they paid, and also, some people that has not paid when the month ends.
just recently i have been doing stuff, more than ever actually, so i feel bad that even the content i post there that is just for patron , they are leaving with that.
then again, i dont knew this was an issue, i was just waiting for them to check the payments XD
I heard about a service on another podcast that does all this work for you. Maybe Patreon should hire them. They have huge success rates.
I have alot of declines as well, and honestly I don’t like emailing people asking for money, I mean, they already sign up and the creator and the patron just expect things to work, I mean isn’t that what’s the platform is for??
I don’t know if it’s broken or not but as you can see in my graph it’s normal every month. And it’s a lot of money
Same for me, I lost several patrons this month, and I know -some are friends of mine- they want to pay! It is so hard to get new patrons and so easy to lose them!?
I had the same issue last summer.
Honestly, I don’t like to ask people for money in a million different and imaginative ways, and then make things difficult for them. Please solve this, there IS a problem!
And please, send them an explanation and instructions. YOU Patreon, not me!
Hey Pau, sorry for that. I know that it is pretty difficult to get Patrons, this is why we get so frustrated!
Same here - I’ve had a lot of declines lately, seemingly for no reason. I’ve then tried to reach out to Patreon on behalf of these Patrons to keep them in the system because it is just too much work for these people (most of whom have been declined multiples and would simply rather opt out at this point) only to have support tell me that the supporters need to reach out themselves. It’s frustrating as this should be easy for supporters, if I as a creator take the time to help my supporters reconnect that should be enough, it’s at the point where I’m now harassing my supporters every 3-4 months to check their cards (most of whom already have).
It is a real disaster. @mindy says that it is actually normal to have a lot of declines … I think it’s weird.
Also, Patreon support doesn’t actually “support” at all. Most of the time they come back to you with answers that don’t make sense.
I emailed Patreon support saying that I have over 100 cards declined.
A guys named Ron came back to me saying:
**"Hi Marco, **
My apologies for the trouble here and we do not currently mark declined pledges as deleted"
As you can see from the picture, declined patrons show up as deleted pledge
From the picture you can clearly see that this patron shows up in both declined and deleted. Also notice how at the beginning of the month I have a lot of deleted pledges … some of them are also declined.
I don’t want to hate on Ron but I have the feeling the dude didn’t even investigate after reading my email. Otherwise he wouldn’t have answered in such generic way.
Also, Ron stated:
“That being said, I am seeing that a majority of the declined pledges have since gone through - including the patron you mentioned below” (I mentioned 4 patrons out of 100)
I don’t know how he came up with that because I still have 100 patrons declined, which are the same 100 patrons I mentioned in the first email. For some reason he thought that, yayyyy, the declined pledges have gone through.
But we are not done yet with the email.
He said:
**Declines are something we have little control over but are working to improve upon. ** (Thank you)
I can only recommend that when this happens, you reach out to your patrons and ask them to retry the payment as well as update their payment information.
I bulk message 100 people and only two responded and yet, they had no idea why their pledge was flagged and removed.
They also didn’t know their pledge was actually deleted … one of them had to send an email to Patreon as well as PayPal.
The most frustrating parts of all this are (and this refer to my own personal experience guys):
I don’t hate on Patreon or Ron. I love the platform.
I just get frustrated because I have no idea what’s going on with the pledges and if next month I am going to be hit again.
Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.
I don’t know if this is related to the same problem, but I also have (at least) a patron who pledged last June. His bank payed only that month, and he still has access. I mean, he wants to be a patron, and to pay his pledge, but nobody ask his bank for the money. He wrote to me because he felt guilty for being a patron for free! 
Hi folks, thanks for raising this. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, we just don’t have a great way to investigate what are potentially problematic declines vs. regular declines without specific patron information. To solve this, either the patrons need to write into support or you can DM me the patron info (username and email address) for those who have reached out to you saying that they’re getting declined when they have good payment methods. We simply cannot know what happened without this information as every single patron could be a different use-case, using a different method, in a different country. This article has some information too about the process, if you’ve not had a chance to read that yet.
Thank you, Mindy, I will DM you!
