Payment Reminder Emails That Get Stores to Pay: What the Research Says

The short answer: a payment reminder works when it reads like it came from a person, asks for something specific, and deals with the actual reason the store hasn't paid. Saying "past due" again, in a sterner voice, isn't one of the things the research supports.

That matters if you sell cannabis wholesale. Your money sits in dispensaries' payables queues, and the reminder email is the tool you use most often to get it out. So when we rebuilt the reminder emails ShelfSpace sends for brands, we started from published studies on what gets people to pay, not from what collections emails usually sound like. Here's what those studies found and how each finding shows up in the emails your stores receive.

Why most reminder emails don't work

Most reminder sequences repeat one message with rising pressure: "Reminder," then "Second reminder," then "Urgent," then "Final." Each one tells the store something it already knows, that the invoice is late, and none of them helps the store fix whatever is keeping it from paying. A store that never got the invoice into its payment run needs a copy, and a store with a short shipment needs someone to sort it out. Neither one is moved by a louder subject line.

Research on reminder messages points the same way. Small changes in how a reminder is written can change who pays, and the change that keeps showing up isn't pressure.

Address them by name

A reminder with the recipient's name in it gets paid more often than a generic one. In a field experiment with 9,196 people who owed unpaid hospital bills, run with a debt collector in Latvia, messages that used the person's name significantly raised payment compared with generic reminders. Messages appealing to social norms or the public good did no better.

The UK's Behavioural Insights Team found something similar when it tested text messages to people who owed court fines: the text that included the recipient's name performed best of every version it tried.

So our reminder emails never open with "Dear customer." Each one greets the store by its own name ("Hi Green Leaf Market team,") and comes from your brand by name, so it reads like a note between two businesses that know each other. It's a small change, and it's the one the research supports best.

Ask for a reply, not only a payment

A reply is often what gets an invoice paid. A store that writes back, even just to say "next Friday," is now in a conversation, and a conversation gets resolved. A store that reads the email and closes it isn't.

The research backs this up. In a study of 3,330 people who owed money, a standard repayment letter was rewritten to nudge people to contact the business they owed. More people replied, and more agreed to a repayment plan. A separate working paper found that people who state an intention to pay are more likely to follow through.

That's why every reminder we send makes replying easy, and why replies get read. When a store answers with a date, that date gets written down as a promise to pay, and the reminders adjust around it. You can see how that works on the promise to pay page.

Give two clear next steps

A reminder should tell the reader exactly what to do next, and two clear options can work better than one. A US Department of Education experiment with 13 million student-loan borrowers tested how its emails were written. Emails redesigned with behavioral research cut 60-day delinquencies by 0.42 percentage points, and emails that recommended two actions did slightly better than emails recommending one at a time.

Our version is simple. Every email ends with the same two options:

Stores pay late for three different reasons

A late store is usually dealing with one of three problems: not enough cash, a payment process that's slow or stuck, or a question about the invoice. In a 2025 survey of US businesses, the most-cited reasons customers paid late were cash shortfalls (45%), delays in their payment process (33%) and invoice disputes (23%). Respondents could pick more than one.

Those reasons tend to show up at different points. Early on, a late invoice is usually a process problem: it never got into the payment run, or the store needs a W-9 or a PO number. If it's still open a month later, there's often a question behind it, like a short shipment or a price that doesn't match. When an invoice gets old, it's usually about cash. So each stage of our reminders asks about the problem that's most likely at that point.

What each stage asks for

Our default reminders run in nine stages, from just before the due date to well past it. Each one has its own subject line and its own question. Here's the whole sequence:

(The invoice number and store name above are made-up examples. In a real email, they're the store's own invoice and name.)

Notice what the sequence doesn't do. It never jumps to threats, and it never repeats the same request twice. Every stage asks a question the store can actually answer. For sample wording you can use in your own emails, see our past-due invoice email templates.

What we tested and left out

One popular tactic didn't make it in: the "9 out of 10 people pay on time" line. Telling people that most others have already paid raised tax payments in UK tax letters, and it shows up in a lot of collections advice. But in the hospital-bill experiment above, run by a private debt collector, social-norm messages had no significant effect on payment.

Your stores are businesses getting an email from a supplier, not citizens getting a letter from the tax office. The evidence from the private-collection setting is closer to yours, and it says the line doesn't help. So we left it out. Our rule is to follow the evidence for the setting we're actually in, even when a tactic is popular somewhere else.

Edit every word yourself

Everything in this post is a default you can change. In ShelfSpace, open Collections, then the Settings tab. Each stage is listed with its subject line and message. Rewrite either one, add your own sign-off, or switch a stage off if you don't want it sent. Your edits apply to every reminder sent from then on.

You know your stores better than any study does. If a buyer responds better to a shorter note, or you want a stage to mention a delivery schedule, write it that way. Our defaults never threaten. If you want firmer language at a later stage, that's your call, and you make it on purpose.

Your name and your mailbox

The reminders go out under your brand's name, not ours, and from your own mailbox if you connect it. Stores see an email from the supplier they buy from, which keeps the relationship where it belongs. When a store replies, the reply gets read, and a promised date gets tracked so nobody has to remember to check back.

Should a brand threaten to stop deliveries

Usually not in an email, and never as the opening move. A threat answers none of the three reasons stores pay late. It doesn't fix a stuck payment run, settle a short shipment, or create cash. It mostly tells the store that the relationship is in trouble.

Holding further orders until a balance is paid can be a sensible business decision. Make it as a decision, say it to the store directly, and stick to it. Some states have formal rules for this. New York requires retail dispensaries to pay for cannabis product within 30 days of delivery. A supplier who isn't paid sends a written notice of default and then reports the store, and a reported store goes on a cash-on-delivery list until it pays. Our guide to New York delinquent payment reporting walks through that process. Not legal advice. Check your state's current rules or ask your counsel.

What we're measuring

We don't have before-and-after numbers yet, and we won't make some up. The studies above weren't run on cannabis brands and dispensaries, and their effects were often modest. What they give us is a better starting point than "past due, but louder." We're measuring how stores respond to each stage now, and the sequence will change as we learn.

If you want the bigger picture on getting paid by dispensaries, start with how to get paid by dispensaries. To see the reminders running on your own invoices, look at ShelfSpace accounts receivable. You can start on your own or schedule a demo, whichever you prefer.

A store that's late is usually stuck on something. A good reminder finds out what, and makes the next step easy.

Sources

• Personalized messaging enhances hospital debt collection while prosocial appeals fail: Evidence from a field experiment (PubMed Central)
• How personalized text messages increased fine repayments (The Decision Lab, on the Behavioural Insights Team study)
• Call first, pay later: stimulating debtors to contact their creditors improves debt collection in the context of financial scarcity (Behavioural Public Policy)
• Working paper on stated intent to pay and repayment (SSRN)
• Behavioral nudges prevent loan delinquencies at scale: A 13-million-person field experiment (PubMed Central)
• Summary of the Atradius Payment Practices Barometer, US 2025 (Lonely Entrepreneur)
• Social norms in UK tax letters (UCD Behavioural Science and Policy)
• Delinquent payment FAQs (New York Office of Cannabis Management)