Cannot place test orders in test store

[juan_ris]

Hello,

I have multiple test stores that I am using to test a new Shopify APP integration. Everything seemed to be working well until yesterday when I started receiving the message below every time I try to create a new order. 

The bogus (test) payment gateway is enabled and I was able to create orders no problem up until yesterday. This is happening on multiple stores, but not all yet. I looked in the checkouts section of the settings for the store, but everything seemed fine to me. Can anyone shed some light on this issue? Am I hitting some type of limit? Am I missing a new setting?

Thank you in advance.

[LionetChen]

I have exactly the same problem Contacted Shopify Support but they cannot help. They response only confirmed that 'development stores do not have any checkout features at all'. However, according to https://help.shopify.com/en/partners/dashboard/managing-stores/test-orders-in-dev-stores Bogus Gateway is still supposed to work.

I'm very confused.

[LionetChen]

tl;dr Contact shopify support and ask them to enable checkout for your dev store and DO NOT EVER use the admin page to create order and try to pay it.

@Ju After a few days of communication with shopify support I think I have a conclusion on this. So around 24th Jun 2021 the Shopify team disabled the payment from back-end for development stores, meaning you cannot create a draft order and then pay it in the admin page. You have to go to your front-end store and place an order like a normal customer would do.

What makes it worse is that once you tried to pay the draft order from admin page and received that 'checkouts are not available' message, your store is locked out and you cannot even use the front end to create order. You'll be met with 'Checkout unavailable due to techinical problems. Please try again in a few minutes'. In this state, the only way to unlock your store is to contact shopify support.

Write to support@shopify.com and ask them to enable the check out function for your store and don't ever use the admin page to create and pay orders again.

To quote the response of a shopify staff:

**If you want to test the DRAFT order process, you will need to go to a PAID PLAN to test this.**

If you continue to use the draft order process to test orders on your ***Development plan***, the online checkout will become disabled again.