Prior to this project, Acorn Biolabs’ team was manually monitoring Stripe for failed payments and following up with customers on an ad-hoc basis. With no consistent process in place, failed charges were inconsistently tracked, follow-up was delayed, and recoverable revenue was being lost.

To solve this, an automated recovery workflow was built using n8n as the orchestration layer connected directly to Stripe. When a payment fails, the workflow triggers automatically:

• Detects the failed charge event from Stripe in real time
• Initiates automatic retry attempts on the card
• Sends a dunning email to the customer prompting them to update their payment method
• Alerts the internal team so they have visibility into every failure
• Logs each failed payment and its outcome for ongoing tracking and reporting

The result is a fully automated, end-to-end failed payment recovery pipeline that runs without manual oversight.