We Need Transparency: Why Won't Shopify Show Status History of Their Platform?

[wiselywoven]

We have been experiencing intermittent performance / technical issues with our Shopify store for some time now. Is seriously impacting our sales. Some days are great and everything appears to be rolling along normal - and then other days it's like something broke and conversions dramatically tank. It seems to be related to javascript or some kind of script errors that we are starting to verify through various tools, but have not nailed down the cause(s). It could be stemming from an app, the theme, or the platform itself (with all it's many moving parts and pieces). It is clear though that when we have the support team refresh our Shopify store's cache it seems to resolve this mysterious issue most of the time.

The Shopify Plus support team won't look into issues most of the time unless they can replicate the problem or you can show them some tangible error. I understand that it is a necessary protocol but it blinds them to alot that could be going wrong with a store. As we have been trying to troubleshoot our store I have had to rely on StatusGator and DownDetector to find out if their is a platform wide problem with Shopify. I have to do this because the Shopify Status Page (https://www.shopifystatus.com) does not reflect well what is happening or was happening with Shopify. There is no available public log of previous outages and errors - like other ecommerce companies provide. Shopify use to offer a more robust monitoring system of their platform but now you can't even see a resolved issue once it's past.

I say all this to point out: how can I troubleshoot my store properly when Shopify is not allowing us to see when the issue is a platform wide error/outage? I'm left wringing my hands trying to figure out if there is a glitch in the system or if the problem is localized to just our store. We need more platform wide transparency!

[IKRDE]

I have the same problem, i was actually thinking thats my connection.

But the JS has nothing to do with it, since they use CDN.

For me its only sometimes so far. Can not say more i just switched back to shopify from prestashop.

I will follow up.

[JEJURI1]

I am completely agree with you and i am a busy store owner with same issues hapening since last 3 months . And i get constantly advised by the bunch of adviors that clear your cache, use another device or place a test order and i know deeply the issue is within them in their knowledge, not being transperant with us about the errors . Some days are great and some days are worst and then they start blaming your advertising campaigns if you highlight their technical errors because shopify adviors cant do anything about tech errors just keep suggesting to clear cache. I though i am alone struggling with tech error unresolved since many months now .

[wiselywoven]

Sorry for the very delayed reply. Please check out DownDetector.com and look up the Shopify thread. There are many Shopify store owners who are banging their heads against the wall over these unresolved performance problems.

[JEJURI1]

Very well said its true banging heads against wall and no help provided , neither their is any regulation on them in UK to monitor that how they are mis treating our complaints 

[Colter]

I get outages consistently, sometimes daily/weekly. All large companies provide status updates, especially core service updates via RSS or webhook. The fact that they removed RSS feed tracking in 2020 is absurd. We need to be proactive when their services degrade, not reactive to customer complaints. 

Look at the response time chart, starting at the end of August, response time has been climbing consistently. 

I am using MonSpark which does a great job tracking each outage. I have had 50 outages since November 22nd and look at the ping response. 

TOTAL DOWN TIME: 14 hours, 11 minutes in 15 months.

Changelog from 2020

https://shopify.dev/changelog/store-specific-status-now-available-on-shopify-s-updated-status-page
As part of this move to store-specific status updates, subscriptions to updates (SMS alerts and RSS feed) have been deprecated. Overall status and major outages will continue to be posted to the public shopifystatus.com page.
....
Our team is currently working on ways to enable Partners to see status information for stores where they have collaboration login access from the merchant.

[wiselywoven]

Thanks for sharing this Colter. I can only conclude that Shopify is trying to appear like a platform with little to no outages. It's whitewashing. Meanwhile their platform stability and customer service continues to decline. They need to realize their real shareholders are their customers.