Billing Attempt Failure - UNEXPECTED_ERROR: Failed to created Order

Retired Boards Appdev Subscriptions
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Topic summary

Main issue: Subscription billing attempts are failing with errorCode UNEXPECTED_ERROR and errorMessage “Failed to create order.” Failures recur on the same subscriptions and across multiple merchants.

Context and patterns: Some affected subscriptions share the same discount code, but this pattern is not consistent. Multiple attempts return ready=true, completedAt timestamps, order=null, and no nextActionUrl.

Evidence: Two example attempts (Dec 10 and Dec 14, 2023) show identical failures with no additional diagnostic details.

Troubleshooting info: No other error codes or response IDs are available from the merchant side.

Latest update from platform team: The error appears to be a catch‑all when no more specific error is available. Recommended path is to contact Support so they can review customer/order context and backend logs for the specific requests.

Actions and status: Provide Support with affected customer/order identifiers and billing attempt IDs to enable log review. Root cause remains undetermined; resolution pending case-by-case investigation via Support.

Summarized with AI on January 10. AI used: gpt-5.
1

We’ve recently seen an increase in this error code for some of our merchants and since there’s no description or indication of what was wrong I’m not sure how we’re supposed to inform the merchant or customer how to correct the problem. We’ve seen it occur multiple times in a row on multiple subscriptions. We’ve noticed sometimes that there are patterns like the subscriptions might have the same discount code but nothing seems to be 100% consistent.

What’s the recommendation when a subscription’s billing attempts fail repeatedly with this error?

Here’s a couple example billing attempts from the same subscription:

[
	{
		"node": {
			"createdAt": "2023-12-14T15:00:20Z",
			"id": "gid://shopify/SubscriptionBillingAttempt/44676153523",
			"completedAt": "2023-12-14T15:00:27Z",
			"errorMessage": "Failed to create order.",
			"errorCode": "UNEXPECTED_ERROR",
			"ready": true,
			"nextActionUrl": null,
			"order": null
		}
	},
	{
		"node": {
			"createdAt": "2023-12-10T15:00:25Z",
			"id": "gid://shopify/SubscriptionBillingAttempt/44277366963",
			"completedAt": "2023-12-10T15:00:31Z",
			"errorMessage": "Failed to create order.",
			"errorCode": "UNEXPECTED_ERROR",
			"ready": true,
			"nextActionUrl": null,
			"order": null
		}
	}
]

Any guidance on this would be appreciated : )

2

Hi Brian - I’ve reached out to our API team on this, are there any other error codes or response IDs that are being returned that would help with troubleshooting this?

3

Hi @Liam - unfortunately there’s nothing else. Thanks for the quick help here!

4

From taking to our internal dev team, they’ve recommended to reach out to support to be able to look in to the customer, order and any logs specific to the request. That error kind of seems like it may be a catch-all for anything not available in the other responses.

Hope this helps,