I have been locked out of my store and I hope this will serve as a warning or cautionary tale for others. Unlike some accounts that I have read here where the stores were in a development stage or the bills are unpaid or there are other disputes, this is absolutely not the situation with my store. It is a fully functioning store that has been operational for over six years. Yesterday when logging into the store the message came up that two factor authentication was needed to login. I had not turned that on. Initially, I was not that concerned because I knew I had recovery codes that I download on a regular basis to ensure that I could login if ever I am challenged, by using an unfamiliar device for example. On trying to use the codes I was told that they had either expired or had been used before and that simply is not the case. So then I contacted shopify support via chat,and so I’m told that they are extremely sorry about that and a ticket has been raised with the relevant team so that the two factor authentication may be removed and I could log in again and I would receive an email informing me when I could do so.
8 hours later there was still no email and so I contacted support again (ticket number39081294) and inquired exactly how long was this supposed to take? I was totally shocked to receive the reply that it takes 24 to 72 hours to get this done. I find that appalling, it’s bad enough that this can happen in the first place and then back up security measures like recovery codes can fail, but then to add this time frame to the situation is quite frankly unbelievable. Yes I appreciate you are looking after my store and you have to be correct that you are dealing with the right person, but there is an immense amount of information I can provide to you to prove who I am, in fact you have already accepted I am who I say I am, but you are still going to take up to 72 hours work through this and as I write, we passed the 24 hours. Not good enough Shopify, not good enough by a long way, I will have so many problems and order queries to deal with when I eventually do get back in and I have lost confidence in you going forward. Many of us here will have had situations where we are locked out of things like online banking accounts and yet we are able to get back in within minutes if not hours so I’m really having problems how you can possibly justify such a time scale.
I feel you. I am currently sitting on day 6 of waiting for the magic email from the accounts department to unlock my account, the 2 factor authentication is off…but it’s asking me for an old number that I no longer have in service. I have hadmy account for 6+ years, and am in the process of building the 3rd. The responses so far have been the same…wait for the email. It’s ABSURD that an account owner can be locked out of their own account for a week. I can’t see orders, customer messages, nothing. Of course there is no longer an option to call there either.. I am looking for other website providers, as this customer service as actually been a nightmare. Hopefully you were able to get in.
It took one week to receive the email, then I uploaded the requested documents ID bank statement etc and then it took another day or two before I was allowed to reset. I agree it’s totally absurd that you can be locked out of an account for so long. I also had recovery codes that were less than a month old but they didn’t work either. This has been a major rethink for me. I have a WordPress store with Woo commerce on a managed hosting and good technical support is there within seconds. Customer service support on shopify actually seems faster than it did years ago but it’s misleading. That supports seems to be outsourced to the Philippines and doesn’t deal with anything complex at all. Anything that involves decent technical support seems to take days now, I think it’s pretty obvious where the axe landed when Shopify laid off so many people over the last year or two. You mention moving providers but platforms like Wix or Square space don’t seem to do any better. I think that’s the problem with platforms like those, you’re stuck within their ecosystem and you can’t move. If you have a WordPress site and you’re not happy with the support or some other aspect you can switch your hosting provider within minutes. To each their own I guess. Hope you get your site back soon.
It took over a week for me to get in. It was miserable. No one would help me and just kept telling me to wait till someone would email me. They no longer allow phone calls, only chats online. No matter how many times I messaged, there was zero rush on it. The customer service used to be so good. I hope you get in quickly!
Yes! But seriously it felt like I was holding a support agent hostage. I had them wait while they escalated the issue to the security team. From there an “analyst” was assigned. The analyst then sent me an email walking me through resetting my password and I was in… Needless to say, I didn’t turn on 2FA this time around. I lost a lot of money and customers during this period and I can’t go through that again. Just put pressure on them to escalate the issue to the security team in order to get an analyst assigned to your case. They won’t talk to you over the phone and they don’t have a “supervisor”. But they do talk to the security team internally. Good luck!
ok thank you for replying. i was able to talk to someone & they said they had to send the request to remove the 2sa to the security team, but i don’t know how long that will take.
That takes forever! They had initially said the same thing to me… but I waited and waited and they finally said that they are busy. That’s when I said “No, I will have you wait with me while you escalate the case”. That’s when they confirmed that someone was actually working on it and within 24hours I was in. But I waited 20 days to hear back from the security team… I would’ve waited longer had I not put pressure on them to resolve it immediately.
