Payments

MIT (merchant-initiated transaction)

A merchant-initiated transaction is a charge submitted against a stored credential without the cardholder present, such as a subscription renewal or a retry after failure.

MITs rely on an earlier customer-initiated transaction that established consent, and card network rules bound how long that consent supports subsequent charges. Past that window an attempt is no longer a valid MIT regardless of what a retry scheduler believes.

This is a hard ceiling on dunning that many retry schedules quietly exceed. A sequence still attempting charges beyond the validity window is generating guaranteed failures and paying the decline-rate cost for them.

Related terms