I was alerted earlier today by a client that Shopify was experiencing checkout issues starting around noon. As of 1:30 am, they’re still listing the issue as unresolved. I’m not sure what the larger fallout or resolution will be here. If you manage a Shopify store shipping physical products, read on for more info and how to ensure you’re prepared for the weekend.
The issue manifests as the checkout error stating:
The root cause appears to be some structural data change made by Shopify that deselected the subregions of some countries from fulfillment options. Depending on your configuration this may or may not have affected your store. If you’ve not received any orders in the last 12 hours or so, there’s a good chance the issue is present. The way to check is to navigate to:
- Settings > Shipping and delivery
- Under Shipping, select your shipping profile
- Under Shipping zones for each location (US, Canada, etc) click the ellipsis menu and select Edit zone
- Now verify that all appropriate checkboxes are checked.
- Then save the zone and test checkout.
For example for a United States zone I observed the following where no states were selected:
The current recommended workaround is to reselect any missing destinations in each of your shipping zones. This is a bit of an egg hunt though as each store is different and I’m not always certain I know what exclusions you might have had in place.
For all our Shopify Managed Support Clients, I’ve went in and added all US states to any store that was showing the above (for US zones of course). However:
you should review those yourself in the morning to ensure any exclusions or international zones are still missing.
Once you’ve restored the missing fulfillment destinations and tested that checking is working for those locations, I recommend reviewing your Abandoned Checkouts list for any that occurred on Friday. From there, depending on the nature and the volume, you can reach out to those affected and explain why they may have encountered issues checkout out. Offer them a cup of tea or maybe a discount to restore faith and renew their relationship with your store.
I’ve written a short form letter that you can modify when sending something to your customers:
Hi friend,
I’m so sorry for the frustration you may have experienced trying to check out today. Earlier this afternoon, Shopify began experiencing a platform-wide issue that caused some stores, including ours, to display the following error at checkout:
“Your order cannot be shipped to the selected address. Review your address to ensure it’s correct and try again, or select a different address.”
This wasn’t related to your address or anything you entered. The issue appears to have stemmed from a behind-the-scenes system change that temporarily removed certain state or regional shipping settings across affected stores. Shopify is still working to fully resolve the related incident.
As soon as we became aware of it, we went in and restored the missing shipping destinations and tested checkout to make sure everything is working properly again. If you’d still like to place your order, you should now be able to complete checkout without any issues.
If you ran into this error earlier and gave up in frustration, I completely understand. Thank you for your patience. If you’d like to try again and have any trouble at all, just reply to this message and I’ll personally help make it right.
And as a small thank-you for your patience, here’s a code you can use on your order:
[INSERT CODE]We truly appreciate you supporting our small business.
—
[Your Name]
A 14+ hour checkout-breaking bug is very uncharacteristic for the Vancouver-based ecommerce platform many of us rely on. They’ve historically maintained strong uptime, which makes this one stand out.
When the incident is fully resolved and a formal post-mortem is published, I’ll review it and pass along any relevant details so we can understand what happened and whether any preventive steps make sense on our end.
At this point, I don’t have any indication that payments, customer data, or other store systems were impacted. Everything points to a shipping configuration issue introduced at the platform level. Still, if you notice anything unusual, lower-than-expected sales volume, or customer complaints that don’t line up with what we’ve discussed here, let me know. The earlier we spot anomalies, the better.
I’ll continue monitoring status updates and will follow up if anything changes.
