Wild Earth unifies tech stack, recovers 83% of failed transactions with Failed Payment Recovery
About
Wild Earth is a brand on a mission. Alarmed by irresponsible practices widespread in the dog food industry, their founders set out to do right by the animals we love and the planet we share with them.
Their dog food (which you might recognize from Shark Tank) is made from high-quality, cruelty-free, sustainable ingredients, and their vet-developed recipe is healthier for pets. The result is a more joyful and tail-wagging path forward—one led by science, guided by experts, and driven by heart.
Bag of Wild Earth surrounded by bananas and sticks of cinnamon
The revenue we’ve realized through Failed Payment Recovery has far surpassed our expectations, and the tool has worked in concert with all products in the Recharge platform to give us a more complete picture of retention than we’ve ever had. Plus, Failed Payment Recovery is easy to implement and use, which makes our team confident that failed payments are covered and frees us up to focus on other priorities.
Nikita Michelsen
Chief of Staff, Wild Earth
Challenge
Wild Earth has big goals, but a compact team. They need tools that are a breeze to implement and operate. One task they needed to streamline: resolving failed payments.
They were using an off-the-shelf service to track and reattempt stalled transactions, but it was a standalone product that didn’t integrate with any of their other tools. And as their tech stack grew increasingly full of similar single-purpose tools, it was becoming unwieldy.
They needed something that just worked—without compromising on revenue recovered from failed payments.
Dog eating Wild Earth from a bowl next to a bag of Wild Earth
Solution
To tackle both problems, Wild Earth turned to a platform that already housed some of their most-used features: Recharge.
Recharge’s product lineup includes Failed Payment Recovery, a passive churn prevention tool that reattempts failed payments when its custom machine learning model determines they’re most likely to succeed. It also provides strategic notifications and advanced analytics, and comes with a team of experts dedicated to helping you maximize recovery results.
But unlike other passive churn solutions, Failed Payment Recovery isn’t a single tool—it’s part of Recharge’s Retain suite, a comprehensive customer retention package that includes tools for rewards strategies, cancellation reduction, and win backs.
Not only could Wild Earth find their passive churn solution bundled with the other retention tools they needed, but it all came from the same place that already powered their subscriptions.
That solved their tech stack fragmentation—now they needed to see results.
Results
Failed Payment Recovery went to work immediately. It didn’t just match the results of Wild Earth’s previous churn reduction tool, it beat them by more than 10%. Out of over 2000 failed transactions, Failed Payment Recovery recovered 83%, bringing back $150,000 in revenue.
And it did all that as just one component of Wild Earth’s newly unified retention and churn reduction strategy.
What's next
At the core of Failed Payment Recovery is a custom machine learning model that analyzes store, customer and order properties from Recharge’s 20,000 brands and 1.3 million daily transactions to find the best time to retry payments and send notifications.
But the model isn’t one-size-fits-all. It personalizes its approach to each brand as it gets to know their customers and the factors behind their payment errors, meaning it delivers better results over time—and Wild Earth’s 83% recovery rate may just be the beginning.
