Verification issue Shopify billing - frozen store - Shopify support refuse to unfreeze store

Topic summary

A merchant’s Shopify store has been frozen for 4 days due to a billing verification issue that prevents payment of an overdue bill. Multiple payment attempts using Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal have failed—not due to insufficient funds or bank declines, but because verification requests never reach the banks (confirmed by both financial institutions).

The Core Problem:

  • The merchant references an existing community thread identifying this as a known Shopify issue
  • That thread’s official solution states Shopify support staff have authorization to manually unfreeze affected stores while billing issues are resolved
  • However, when the merchant contacts support with this information and thread link, representatives refuse to unfreeze the store
  • One support agent even claimed they cannot confirm whether the community post marked as “solution” was written by an actual Shopify employee

Current Status:
The merchant seeks clarification on whether support staff are being deliberately unhelpful or if the community thread solution is incorrect and should be removed, as the conflicting information is causing additional problems while their store remains down.

Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

This know Shopify issue has been persistent and my store has been down for 4 days as a result after attempting to pay the overdue bill.

The link to the thread already discussing this exact issue is:

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/verification-issue-shopify-billing-store-frozen-cannot-make/m-p/2931054

I have attempted to pay my bill using visa, Mastercard and PayPal all with no success. The verification doesn’t reach either bank and I have called both and confirmed this. No payment attempts are visible and the transactions are not being declined (ie insufficient balance ect)

what’s worse is that the community post regarding this issue confirms that it’s a known issue and that Shopify staff have authorisation to unfreeze merchant stores affected by this know issue, and instructs us to contact support and link the thread in the chat and request the store be unfrozen whilst they work to rectify the billing issues:

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/verification-issue-shopify-billing-store-frozen-cannot-make/m-p/2931054

However, I have been back and forth with the Shopify support staff who routinely outright refuse or claim they can’t unfreeze the store due to the outstanding bill. I explain I can’t pay the bill as Shopify is not working and that this a known issue and send the link to the thread and screenshots of it. I also explained that Shopify staff answer on the community thread says to contact them to get the store unfrozen and that I wouldn’t need to ask support to unfreeze the store if there were no internal Shopify issues with taking my repeated attempts of payment of the bill. They ignore it and one even stated the can’t confirm the staff answer on the thread marked as ‘solution’ is written by an actually Shopify employee!!! (insane right).

Can someone from Shopify clarify if the support staff on the chat system are being honest or deliberately unhelpful because they are saying something completely different to what the solution to this thread is saying :

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/verification-issue-shopify-billing-store-frozen-cannot-make/m-p/2931054

If this thread is wrong then it needs to be deleted and removed because its misleading and causing problems