Troubleshooting subscriptions that "Need Review"
Some tips for settings to check when subscriptions cannot be billed
Shopify has recently made some changes to their requirements of what is required from a store configuration and subscription in order to be successfully billed. These changes are part of their recent API updates and will apply to all subscription apps as they update.
While previously most failures were credit card related, these are often related to store settings and would not be fixed by a customer updating their payment method. When an order fails for one of these reasons, we now mark them as "Needs Review" and make it easy to filter to this group in your subscription list. In most cases, they can be resolved and billed by updating a store setting.
We've found that Shopify support is generally not equipped to help resolve these issues and the error messages returned are often cryptic, so below we've outlined some of the common reasons we've found for various error codes and how to check and resolve them. Please don't hesitate to reach out to support if you've checked the settings and still not found a solution.
INVENTORY_ALLOCATIONS_NOT_FOUND
This reason is often a tricky one and there are a few different reasons that it can be triggered:
- ) The location that is mapped to the shipping profile has negative inventory. Note that if you have multiple shipping profiles, it needs to be the shipping profile that covers the shipping address of the subscription customer. Also note that even if you have "continue selling when out of stock" checked, the inventory cannot be negative. If you are selling a shuffle or a bundle, both the parent and children products need to have positive inventory.
- ) The shipping address is not included in one of your shipping profile zones. Note that even if you have a subscription shipping profile, the zone needs to be included in one of your NON subscription shipping profiles. Also note that if you have local pickup and delivery, you still need a shipping profile with the zone in it and one attached rate.
INVALID_SHIPPING_ADDRESS
The customer's shipping address is invalid and must be updated. You can do this in Awtomic's admin interface.
PAYMENT_PROVIDER_IS_NOT_ENABLED
We've seen this is often related to Shop Pay.
AMOUNT_TOO_SMALL
The amount that you are attempting to bill is too small
CUSTOMER_NOT_FOUNDor CUSTOMER_INVALID
The customer in Shopify has likely been deleted
FRAUD_SUSPECTED
Shopify has detected that there is likely fraud associated with the customer or subscription. This is something that has to be resolved by Shopify and there is no way to recover with Awtomic or directly in Shopify settings.
Updated about 1 month ago