The customer tried to place an order. Shopify had the customer profile information including the shipping address with the phone number. Shop asked the customer for his phone number without any indication of why it was asking when clearly the phone number was already entered. This customer had already successfully placed an order with our store previously. The customer tried a number of different formats including with no spaces or parenthesis and it continued to tell him the number was invalid.
This is terrible programming. If there is a valid reason to ask for a phone number when you obviously already have the phone number you need to tell the customer why you are asking. Asking a customer to enter a phone number you are showing them is also really stupid. If you are trying to verify a phone number then you need to NOT SHOW the phone number you are trying to verify. Otherwise verify the number you have instead by using the number you have. If there is no good reason to ask the customer for the phone number then DON’T DO IT. If the system is having an issue because you expect the phone number to be formatted in a certain way TELL THE USER what format you need. Don’t leave them guessing what you mean. They can’t read your mind. I was able to save this sale because the customer called me and I took the information on the phone. If this is happening regularly without my knowing it you are definitely losing me sales. Can you please tell me what happened and WHY THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN?
Then it’s not a programming problem it sounds like a glitch. If the customer’s Shop Pay number is correct, and you have that set to not include, that phone form shouldn’t be there at all.
If you had every customer saying this I’d be a little more concerned. But as you have other customers checking out fine, including this one, it sounds like just some weird glitch or maybe a caching issue on their end.
Maximus3 I don’t understand how you can say that. I told the customer to try to take the number out while I was on the phone and we got the messages that the phone number was required. What distinction are you making between a glitch and a bug? Are you saying that a bug is bad but a glitch is something programmers can ignore. That is distinction with no meaning. This could have cost me an order and if this GLITCH is happening frequently it is losing me sales, I can guarantee it. I don’t care if this is a GLITCH or a BUG or what you think this might be, SOMEONE needs to look into it and make sure this GLITCH doesn’t happen. So answer these questions.
why did shop ask for the phone number when it had one already and it wasn’t required.
why did it say that a good phone number was invalid?
2a. If this is a formatting issue, why doesn’t the error say so, or why doesn’t the input field say what formatting is needed?
Why did it prevent the user from placing the order?
Imagine being this user. You find items you want to purchase you go to your cart and hit buy and it says you need to enter a phone number. It doesn’t say why and It shows you the number is already entered. You put in the same phone number (because it is your phone number) in again anyway but the system says that it’s invalid. You try different formats trying to figure out what the system wants but nothing you do works. That’s your glitch. That is not a glitch that is a disaster! It needs to be fixed! Or at least the developers need to look into it! Dismissing this as a one off glitch is insane. How many orders does this have to happen on before you think it matters? Let’s say that it only happens 1 out 100 orders. For shop that is 66,000 orders a day! Still think it doesn’t matter?
Easy. A bug is repeatable and permanent until fixed. A glitch is not. You obviously don’t think this affects everyone, maybe not even some. This wasn’t something where you said hey lot’s of customers are experiencing a checkout problem. You pointed to one individual. The issue isn’t repeatable as far as I can tell. And no one has reported such a problem (in this tiny forum). I took the liberty of trying it myself
No. No I never said that at all. But how is someone supposed to fix it if it can’t be diagnosed? If there is no verified issue?
For your questions, I think those should go to Shopify directly. We’re only merchants and developers here. Why does anything malfunction? I’m not teing you to accept it. I’m telling you a possible cause.
I buy online on a daily basis, on my shop account on a weekly. I’ve had my share of bs. What I can tell you is that is not normal, that is not the checkout functions normally. So no i don’t think it’s a bug that need immediate attention. Sorry but I think you’re turning a pebble into a mountain. I don’t think this is some widespread issue. If more people report it I’ll definitely look at it differently. But as it looks right now, I’m leaning more towards glitch and/or cache.
You’re right to push back here. A customer unable to complete checkout is a real problem regardless of how often it occurs, and the experience you described (asking for data it already has, rejecting valid input, offering no guidance) is genuinely frustrating. Maximus3 is correct that one-off issues without clear reproduction are hard to diagnose in a forum, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve investigation.
The most actionable step is to open a support ticket directly with Shopify and include as much detail as possible about that specific customer’s attempt: the exact phone number format they tried, the browser and device they used, and ideally a screenshot of the error message itself. If you can, ask the customer to try the order again from the same device and browser while you watch their network activity (browser DevTools > Network tab will show the checkout API calls and any validation errors from the server). That traffic often reveals exactly why a phone number failed validation when it shouldn’t have.
If this does happen again with other customers, the same details will matter for Shopify to track it down. But even one incident that blocks a sale is worth their time to rule out as a legitimate bug.
Thank you JohnQQ. I contacted support. Turns out this is a pretty major bug. All extra SMS verifications for all stores go through this process. Any customer could have had issues with the strict formatting required to enter in a phone number that the system already had. It was also only asking the user to enter in a phone number and validate they had access to that phone number, something anyone could easily do, instead of using the customers phone number to validate the customer. I’m sure this has caused a great deal of customer sales friction that the support team took it very seriously and are working to fix now.
I had an issue in the past that I came here to report. I recalled that someone from shopify support picked it up but I could be remembering that incorrectly. I thought that this was the place for shopify support to vet issues. I see now that this is not such a place. This is a place for community member to help each other. Thank you for pointing that out to me. That was very helpful. I’m sure this is a very useful forum. I’d tried going through the help system and the AI told me what support told me but AI had no idea how serious the problem was. Support understood immediately. I’ll go the support route next time there is an issue.
I’m sorry if I came off as a bit harsh on Maximus3. I’m a developer and the distinction that this was a glitch was utter nonsense, but I didn’t know Maximus3 was only trying to help as a customer. I apologize. I’m not sure how many customers that this bug has kept from completing an order but I imagine it is a huge number of the 6 million orders a day. Any user that required an extra SMS verification could have stepped in it.
The exact same thing happened to a customer who has ordered very regularly. Was on the phone with her for 30 min and finally had to google the issue. Ended up calling her back and having her checkout as a guest. Wondering how many customers would have just given up?!
I’m sure there are thousands of orders. I ended up taking the order on the phone. I had no idea why it didn’t work and it’s impossible to troubleshoot on the phone! Hopefully they will fix this soon! Anyone that required a extra SMS check could hit this error.
Oof — that’s exactly the kind of checkout bug that quietly loses orders because most shoppers won’t call. Glad support took it seriously. I’d still watch abandoned checkouts for the next few days in case the fix rolls out gradually.
