Is Shopify now inaccessible in China?

[nmittels]

Hello,

Have received reports from our CN employees that they are unable to access our shopify store, or even shopify.com without using a VPN. Seems as though this is a recent development, as just a couple of weeks ago they were able to access without issue. Has been tested and multiple cities/users now unable to reach any shopify.com or myshopify.com domains. Just a few weeks ago everything was accessible, so not sure at exactly what point this happened. Anyone else experiencing the same?

[Cahyl]

Yes, I can confirm. It's not accessible from China anymore.

[mmartin98]

Does this affect e-commerce sites that are run through Shopify as well? We've noticed that customers in China cannot access our store any more or are having issues with access?

[Cahyl]

Yes absolutely!

[Jeck_1302]

I have the same issue with our site needing to be available in most of China.  Is there a resolution for this?  Is it Shopify's Cloudflare?  

[takwa1]

hi cahyl, do you what is the equivilent of shopify in china, is there any sites that you can make a website accesible in china, example for teaching language.

[uksll]

can you guys log into the shopify app? 你们能登陆shopify app吗？我几周前就被强行登出然后再也登陆不进去了

[plentypractical]

Did you get this solved?  My customers can't access myshopify. 

[Jeck_1302]

Absolutely not!  We felt it was Shopify's CloudFlare.  I have had several responses back from Shopify... their last response, yesterday, was this:  I am unable to confirm if it has to do with Shopify's cloudflare, however using compliant connectivity methods have proven to work for other merchants with the same issue. These may include getting a license from an authorized service provider, which must be an operator qualified for international communication business, or using an authorized basic telecommunications business operator equipped with international communication gateway exchanges.  That said, I have also passed on all the information that you shared with our developers, however I cannot say that this will be an instant resolve on our end as we are currently still tracking these incidents.   

Then I received another response after complaining that our past website had access to China:  We don't have a specific timeframe for a resolution here as those intermittent issues that could be experience loading shopify URLs in China are happening because of third parties that may be preventing connectivity to our services. At this point, our teams are trying to gather context and data to try to narrow the possible causes and track the issues. 
 

[Sam-Yang]

Jeck_1302 & Plentypractical- check out our experience 👇,  maybe it'll help your situation as well. 

[Sam-Yang]

Hi Nmitels,

This sounds familiar, several of our clients encountered nearly the same problems starting back in late December. We discovered it was due to China's internet regulations and Shopify's reliance on certain cloud services at both the hosting and resource-levels.

To fix the Shopfy issue in China, we found this service provided by 21YunBox, which acts as a bridge, optimizing Shopify sites for China's internet. They analyzed the sites to pinpoint slow-loading or blocked resources in China, (images, CSS, JavaScripts, PDFs, video files, ect, ect). Then they're solution optimized those resources to ensure they load quickly and are accessible in China, without affecting the performance of our client's regular site. They provided us the optimized site at <SITE-ID-Example>.21cloudbox.com to test its performance from China.  We confirmed it worked in mainland China without a VPN, with an average reach time of ~ 100-150 ms compared to before it was blocked, we were seeing 3000-5000 ms.  Then we set up geo-IP routing, which automatically directs Chinese visitors to the China optimized version and global visitors to an international version, all while using the client's normal .COM domain.

Now when our client's make any changes to their original Shopify site, it'll immediately reflect on the optimized China site, including inventory updates.  The solution has been in place since mid-January. There were a couple hicups at first, but were quickly address by 21YunBox's support team. Now our clients are back to business as normal.

Hope this helps!  Good luck 👍