How Swanson Vitamins recovered 25% more failed subscription payments with Ordergroove’s Payment Agent

About Swanson Vitamins

Since 1969, Swanson Vitamins has helped customers make wellness part of everyday life. Today, its catalog spans more than 1,200 products, and its subscribers rely on regular deliveries to keep those routines going.

Swanson’s tagline, “Real Wellness,” is about integrity in its products and in how it treats customers. After moving its eCommerce experience to Shopify in February 2026, Swanson was able to give customers more ways to subscribe and more flexibility to manage their subscriptions with Ordergroove. The integration between the two platforms helped Swanson deliver a subscriber experience that reflected the quality, transparency, and care behind its brand.

How Swanson approached the subscriber experience

Ordergroove’s flexible APIs and customizable subscription manager helped Swanson shape the subscriber journey around its customers. For new customers, Swanson positioned subscribing as its most compelling offer, while giving existing subscribers more ways to stay.

• Best Value tags highlighted the offer on product pages.
• Cart opt-in and a checkout upsell gave customers more chances to subscribe.
• For existing subscribers considering cancellation, tailored flows could suggest a product swap or connect them with customer care for education or support.

The challenge: protect the next order

The customer experience was only part of the retention picture. Even subscribers who wanted to stay could lose an order to a failed payment, leading to involuntary churn. Swanson needed to recover more of those orders without turning every retry change into a manual project.

Improving payment recovery took more than retrying a declined card. The team had to interpret payment-provider decline codes, decide when to try again, and find time to assess whether a new approach recovered more orders. That work competed with everything else on the team’s plate.

“Before the Payment Agent, we just had basic retries in place. There wasn’t much hands-on payment recovery happening.”

— Tausha Kubitz, Program Manager, Subscriptions, Swanson Vitamins

A controlled test could show whether a new retry strategy recovered more orders than the one already in place.

The solution: always-on payment recovery with Ordergroove

Swanson used Ordergroove’s Payment Agent to replace guesswork with ongoing payment recovery tests, while keeping manual work for the team to a minimum. Instead of the team designing, launching, and monitoring each test, the Payment Agent handles the whole loop:

1. The Payment Agent analyzes Swanson’s failed-payment patterns.
2. It proposes a new retry strategy.
3. It tests that strategy against the current approach.
4. When there’s a clear winner, that strategy becomes the new baseline, and the Payment Agent looks for the next improvement.

Swanson’s team can follow every experiment in its Ordergroove dashboard, including what’s being tested, how each strategy is performing and how likely the new one is to win. The Payment Agent does the work, but nothing happens out of sight.

“With the Payment Agent, I love that I can log in and see exactly what’s happening with the experiment: what’s winning vs. what’s not. I save hours daily not having to decode payment provider codes or build formulas to understand how something is really performing.”

— Tausha Kubitz, Program Manager, Subscriptions, Swanson Vitamins

The results: Swanson increased payment recovery by 25%

Swanson Vitamins put Ordergroove’s Payment Agent to work testing new retry strategies. In its first experiment, across more than 1,700 eligible failed payments, the new strategy showed a 25% relative lift in recovery rate compared with Swanson’s existing approach.

The Payment Agent then set that winning strategy live for all failed payments as the baseline for future experiments to beat. Based on its annual failed-payment volume, Swanson estimates the 25% lift translates to a six-figure increase in annual revenue.

Across Swanson’s broader subscription business, subscription revenue grew 21% year over year, active subscribers increased 19%, and subscriptions’ share of total business doubled year over year.

The takeaway: Swanson’s retention strategy from customer experience to payment recovery

Swanson’s retention strategy now reaches from the customer experience to payment recovery, helping protect recurring revenue and build customer lifetime value over time. Shopify and Ordergroove give hard-earned subscribers an experience worth staying for. The Payment Agent strengthens that foundation by recovering more of the orders subscribers still want when a payment fails.

Rather than asking Tausha Kubitz’s team to build and monitor each recovery test, the Payment Agent runs the experiments and shows how each strategy performs. Swanson can learn faster from that data and keep improving recovery while Tausha spends more time on the customer care Swanson wants to preserve.

“Our tagline is Real Wellness, and it’s about integrity: in the products we make and in how we treat customers. AI helps us streamline, but the human touch can’t be replaced.”

— Erin Del Ponte, SVP Marketing, Swanson Vitamins

Frequently asked questions

What did Swanson use the Payment Agent for?

Swanson used Ordergroove’s Payment Agent to replace guesswork with ongoing payment recovery tests, while keeping manual work for the team to a minimum.

How does the Payment Agent decide on a retry strategy?

The Payment Agent analyzes Swanson’s failed-payment patterns, proposes a new retry strategy and tests it against the current approach. When there’s a clear winner, that strategy becomes the new baseline, and the Payment Agent looks for the next improvement.

What result did Swanson see?

In its first Payment Agent experiment, Swanson saw a 25% relative lift in payment recovery compared with its existing retry strategy. Across Swanson’s broader subscription business, subscription revenue grew 21% year over year, active subscribers increased 19%, and subscriptions’ share of total business doubled year over year.

Can Swanson’s team see what the Payment Agent is testing?

Swanson’s team can follow every experiment in its Ordergroove dashboard, including what’s being tested, how each strategy is performing and how likely the new one is to win.