We have been selling on Shopify for over a month now. In the last 20 plus days they have put our payouts on hold, but not stopped us from selling additional products. At this time, they owe us over $20,000 in payouts. When we try and communicate with the payout team we can only speak with Shopify Support Advisors that are very friendly, but can not seem to move our payout hold along. This is now effecting our payroll and our payments to suppliers. Interest in now being charged on our credit cards due to our inability to pay them off in total. In other words, this situation is getting serious for us. We have now stopped using Shopify Payments and are using only PayPal and Google Pay. This, of course, is costing us an additional 1% for any money we take in and probably turning off a lot of potential customers. Does anyone have a way that we can communicate with someone at Shopify that can actually provide us with some customer support and get this fixed for us? We have been doing ecommerce since 1995 and have never seen this type of issue, where we can’t get paid money owed to us. Help, please.
Topic summary
A merchant experienced a 20+ day hold on over $20,000 in Shopify Payments payouts, despite continuing to process sales. The hold created serious cash flow problems, affecting payroll, supplier payments, and forcing credit card interest charges.
Initial Problem:
- Payouts showed conflicting reasons: first indicating chargebacks/disputes (which were never confirmed), then claiming the bank rejected ACH deposits
- The merchant’s bank confirmed no issues on their end that would block deposits
- Support advisors were friendly but unable to resolve the issue or provide substantive updates
Workaround Attempted:
- Switched to PayPal and Google Pay, incurring additional 1% fees and potentially losing customers
Resolution:
- The merchant eventually contacted “the right person outside of chat” who escalated to a Shopify lead
- Issue was resolved: Shopify’s banking partner had placed the hold but failed to flag it properly in their system
- Funds were successfully deposited
Ongoing Interest:
- Other merchants experiencing similar multi-month payout holds are asking how to reach the same contact, suggesting this may be a recurring issue
Why can’t you get paid? What’s the reason given by Shopify?
Initially they had the payout that was put on hold as showing chargebacks or disputes. But, this is highly unlikely and Shopify has never told us there were either of these items.
Then when you click on the link for the payout it shows this:
Saying that our bank was unable to process the deposit. However, they had no problem depositing six payouts before this one. I did receive an email that said I needed to speak with our bank, which I did, and they said there is no reason our account would reject an ACH deposit going into it. Since that time I have heard nothing from the team that does payouts. I have only been told numerus times by the Shopify Support Advisors to be patient as they work my case. But I have not seen or heard anything that tells me they are doing that. I believe my escalated ticket had gone unnoticed or is lost.
I finally got hold of the right person outside of chat. They sent my issue to a lead at Shopify that resolved the issue. They said it was the banking partner that had put our account on hold. They said the banking partners did not flag this payout hold in the usual manner. Anyway, this issue is considered close by us since the deposit is now in our account.
Do you mind sharing who you got a hold of? I’m having this exact same issue dealing with it for over 5 months now.
How did you get ahold of the right person?