Every card network and issuer keeps a quiet opinion of how a merchant's charges behave. Retry a dead card nine times in a day and that opinion darkens — not just for that charge, but for the merchant's whole stream, and for any tool whose fingerprints are on the attempts. Recovery systems therefore spend two currencies at once: attempts against the payment, and reputation against the future. The second one is not refillable on any schedule the merchant controls.
That is why attempt ceilings exist even where one more try costs nothing computationally. Our ceiling is eight attempts per failed payment, shaped by decline family, with hard declines stopping at zero. The discipline reads as restraint; it is actually portfolio management. A retry plan that maximizes this payment's recovery odds while torching issuer trust is borrowing from every future payment to pay this one.
Swipe Again treats the reputation budget as shared property between merchant and tool — spend it like it belongs to both, because it does. The recovery flow would rather leave a marginal retry unfired than teach an issuer that this merchant's charges are noise. In billing, being ignored is the only unrecoverable state.
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