Cannot process payment if signed into website account

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Customers signed into their store accounts cannot complete checkout; PayPal briefly opens then closes, credit card stalls on “Pay now,” and Apple Pay returns “payment failed.” Checking out as a guest works, causing ~50 abandoned carts for one merchant.

Support advised contacting Shopify Live Support; cases appear escalated. A second merchant reported similar PayPal card issues and was told to contact PayPal, expressing frustration and asking Shopify to investigate first.

Staff clarified that if the issue is within PayPal’s gateway (a third party), PayPal must investigate, but did not confirm a platform-wide cause.

Latest update: Disabling Shopify’s new one-page checkout immediately resolved all payment failures for signed-in customers across all payment methods. This points to a potential bug in the new checkout flow rather than PayPal specifically.

Outcome/status:

  • Immediate workaround: revert to the previous (non–one-page) checkout.
  • No official fix or root-cause resolution announced yet; technical investigation status unclear.
  • Thread ends with another user questioning whether reverting is the only solution, indicating the issue remains open.
Summarized with AI on December 14. AI used: gpt-5.
7

I have been in touch with Shopify live support, they advised me to contact PayPal, I was somewhat disappointed with this response from Shopify live support, lets remember the interaction on the checkout is between both PayPal and Shopify so the issue could be on either platform, I think to just simply say contact PayPal does not really serve Shopify customers very well.

In my opinion this should be firstly escalated to Shopify development team for deeper investigation, then and only then passed to PayPal if the development team have 100% ruled out Shopify as the potential cause.

I would be interested in your feedback

Best Regards
Steve