I’m currently using Appstle Memberships for a monthly membership service I offer. I also offer a free trial for onboarding purposes for the first week. It seems about 95% of payments get declined when the first payment is due. I’ve had multiple members reach out on this issue, asking why payments aren’t being processed properly.
The error message I receive on the Appstle side is “Your card was declined”, this is coming from the payment gateway. I understand that some users use prepaid cards or gift cards for payment, those usually have the error “Your card has insufficient funds.” This is understandable, since we offer a free trial. However, it appears the “Your card was declined” error is coming from members who want to stay on with the service and have a legit card on file. I’ve also tested this with personal cards and had some of my friends try as well, receiving the same error and nothing from our banks.
Does anyone offer a similar membership/subscription service and has ran into a similar issue such as this? Wondering if this is a Shopify payment gateway issue or an issue with the Appstle app possibly? I’ve heard authorize.net might be a viable option.
This is putting a major damper on business 
Let me know if any additional info is needed! Thank you!
I am so disappointed in how bad Shopify payments are. I’ve had three clients. My only three clients that I’ve used on here that I am super embarrassed to even talk to at this point because it’s so embarrassing that the payment is just decline. Declined to decline decline decline I don’t know what’s going on in this stupid site but I’ll tell you right now. I’m getting off of Shopify and I’m never using it ever again. It has done nothing but make me lose money in time. I’m going straight back to Square because Shopify sits there and talks about how they think they’re better than square and they’re this in that honestly, Shopify is the worst system I’ve ever used in my life and the funny thing is they have so many different ways to do payments. It’s ridiculous and for some reason, they’re so concerned about fraud that they don’t even accept anybody’s payments ever so it doesn’t matter who it is you can’t even run a subscription for 999 without getting decline for some stupid reason. I’m done with this site. I’m never coming back here ever again and I suggest that anybody else that’s having these issues don’t waste your time trying to fix it. Just go somewhere that you don’t have to worry about fixing stupid stuff like this. This is something that they should have fixed already because your money and your business the whole point of running a businesses to make money, not decline peoples payments is ridiculous anyway anyways good luck with everybody out there and I wish everybody the best on running their business my opinion this is probably the worst place to run a business. Honestly, good luck though thank you. Have a good night.
Free trials check out for $0.00. Because no funds are captured, banks and Shopify Payments often fail to fully authenticate the vaulted card for future, off-session charges. When the trial ends and a sudden charge attempts to process without the customer present, it gets hard-declined. Instead of a strictly $0.00 trial, implement a nominal upfront fee (e.g., $1.00) or a temporary authorisation hold. This forces the gateway to establish a strong, authenticated token while the customer is actively checking out, which drastically reduces failures on the first recurring charge. Ask them to verify that their API calls to Shopify’s Billing API are correctly passing the required flags for off-session recurring billing. Do not accept generic Tier-1 responses. Present your evidence effectively like “I have reproduced this with personal cards. The banks confirm no charge was ever attempted. This means Shopify Payments is internally blocking the transaction before routing it”. Request that their Risk Department review your account’s threshold for automated subscription blocks.