My ticket number is 20004683. I have been in contact with support via chat to resolve this issue for a few days now. My store became unavailable immediately after I posted my credit card information to buy a monthly plan. I have been told that it has been escalated to a review team and to wait to hear from them? Today is the 5th day. My entire business has stalled because of this. Not to sound impatient, I understand and respect the timeline that Shopify needs to get to all the cases. However, I really feel that there is a big lack in communication here. I do not know why my store is unavailable? No one I have contacted has the answer! I do not know what I need to change, if any to get my store back up? I will happily follow all policies and protocols if only I knew what is required of me. I have been asked to simply wait indefinitely for an email that has not arrived past your own average response time. I do not have access to my site that I spent many days creating. This seems to be a pattern with many threads here. Lack of communication/information. Please give me a course of action besides telling me to just wait. I really hope somebody can help me here. Thanks.
Thank you for the additional context, and for sharing your ticket ID, this allowed me to bring up your case to see if I could look for an update for you.
I spoke with the team and they advised that they have had a high influx of cases as of late, which has led to the delay, so we appreciate your patience with this.
They advised that a member of the team will reach out to you shortly via that ticket ID, and any further questions you have, can be replied to there also.
The support agents here, on social media, or on our live chat/phone service would not have the same level of access to your account as the Risk team would, so they are the best people to chat with regarding your account.
Thank you again for reaching out about this, and for your patience.
Unfortunately I can promise you, you are pretty much screwed. I have three stores this has happened with over the last 10 days. I’ve spent 2 full days on the phone/chat/email. ZERO Results. All that will happen is 1) store will be unlocked by the “Risk Team” 2) You will attempt to use Credit card which it will not accept 3) You will attempt to use a different card and the store will lock you out. 4) you will contact support (which is now no longer over the phone) and they will tell you have to start the process all over. RINSE AND REPEAT. I’m on cycle #4 this time. It’s borderline insanity and I can’t even begin to quantify how many thousands of dollars in revenue this has cost.
I will lose my clients if I don’t resolve this today. I will be making sure that all 30+ of my stores move to another platform if that happens.
Thank you for responding to me. My store has been made available as of right now. I understand that each store issue is unique and that the Chat Support agents cannot accurately answer Risk team related questions.
However, after reading @APOD reply here, I have become increasingly nervous to proceed with my store. So far things have happened exactly the way described - Account is back up. My credit card was rejected - the same one I tried to use during initial plan purchase. (I was told via Chat Support that the risk review was triggered because my name on the account was not the same as the one on the credit card. This is understandable as the name on my credit card has by given/legal name and the Shopify account has my nickname. I changed the Shopify account name to match the name on the credit card.) I tried a second credit card with my name on it and this time it was accepted. However, since I am still under the trial period, nothing has been charged. I am scared that on the 14th day when the trial ends, this will happen again like @APOD describes.
I am willing to provide any paperwork/information to avoid having to go through this again. You must understand that a majority of people here are well meaning day to day people trying to get a business started. We will gladly follow all policies and procedures - If we only knew what they were?
This is obviously not an isolated event. If you do a search in the Discussion for the word “unavailable” you will see several dozens similar cases - website unavailable out of nowhere with no explanation? Can someone from Shopify please explain why this is happening to so many of us. We want to avoid this. Please guide us.
I do not want to go through the process of building my store, purchasing apps and spending weeks fine tuning it to suddenly find I cannot access it. Please help us out.
Hey @APOD Thank you for your candid and informative reply. I really hope they can guide us as to how to proceed. I feel sorry for you for having gone through it 4 times! I really do not want to be in your shoes. Fingers crossed.
That is great to hear that your store was reopened following the review by the accounts team.
While I cannot speak on @APOD ’ experience, all I can say is that each merchant has the same reviews conducted by both the Risk account team, and the subsequent banking partners if it is related to the Financial aspect, as Shopify is not a bank. So they would have their own internal review program.
I will share a few policies with you which will help with your query of “We will gladly follow all policies and procedures - If we only knew what they were?”, and you can always reach out to support if you are unsure of anything. I would always recommend if you are unsure, to speak with a member of the Shopify team.
Luckily, all of our legal policies are available online for all to see and are laid out to help clearly define the best practices. I will share our Terms of Service, our Acceptable Use Policy, as well as more information from our legal team.
As you already have an escalated ticket with the accounts team, you can reply to this email and ask them further questions relating to this.
I had a very similar issue last year. No matter what their card processor would not accept any payment. I had been using the same card for 3 yrs and then all of a sudden nope! After 3 attempts my site was froze, it would take them weeks to get back to me and unfreeze it only to try another credit card and/or bank card only for it to do the same thing. My store brought in $25,000 in sales a month. I was paying shopify over $400 a month in fees. After months of no resolution I had to start over with a new domain. I had spent 3yrs building my site and customers and all of a sudden its gone, all 10,000 customers gone!! You could imagine the heartbreak of having to wrap my head around starting over but I did. My store is still nowhere near where it was. I did finally after about 6 months all a sudden they processed my payment and yay got to my customers but guess what my domain was sold through godaddy…like what in the hell!! I chalked it up and go my customers and imported them to my new domain on a new host. My sales are at about $5,000 a month, again nowhere near where it was. I have lost my car, my home and just about everything I own because that was my only source of income. There has got to be something I can do and will be looking further into what can be done.
Shopify dont bother trying to fix anything people just need to hear my story. A better response time to a down site would work wonders. I am a computer engineer so I know the whole company could have done better and cared more to fix a minor issue that greatly affected my life due to poor response.
Thank you for taking the time to detail your experience here, @krisendaallen . The issue with the payment method being rejected (particularly the period of time it took to resolve) sounds rare. I understand that it must have been frustrating to wait for a response during this time, and I have shared your feedback with the team.