What happens if a payment fails?

What happens if a payment fails?

Subscriber Out of Funds

Payfast will try a number of times to reprocess a payment where the buyer does not have funds on their credit card.

On failure, the buyer will be notified, allowing some time for the problem to be resolved.

On a complete failure (after X amount of times), the subscription will be ‘locked’ and will need some action from the merchant to reactivate on the Payfast backend or via the API pause endpoint.

System Issues

Payfast will resolve any system issue that may cause payment failure.

Subscription payments will resume once all systems have been restored.


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