[BUG] Subscription billing attempts failing with PAYMENT_PROVIDER_IS_NOT_ENABLED on shops with Shopify Payments active

Products and Orders APIs
1

Hi —

We’re seeing intermittent billing attempt failures with the PAYMENT_PROVIDER_IS_NOT_ENABLED error code on subscriptions whose payment methods were just created in Shopify Payments on shops where Shopify
Payments is clearly activated. In some cases the error persists across retries; in others, the very next billing attempt on the same subscription succeeds without anything changing on our end or (as far as we
can tell) on the shop’s end.

We started seeing this in early April 2026.

Some facts:

  • The affected subscriptions were created with payment methods on Shopify Payments, not a legacy gateway
  • Shopify Payments is activated on the shops where this is happening
  • Nothing about the subscription, payment method, or shop gateway config changes between a failing billing attempt and a subsequent succeeding one
  • The behavior is inconsistent — same shop, same subscription shape, sometimes fails and sometimes doesn’t
  • In some cases the PAYMENT_PROVIDER_IS_NOT_ENABLED error persists across multiple retries; in others it clears on its own

Sample billing attempt

  • (failed) gid://shopify/SubscriptionBillingAttempt/224420790517
  • (succeeded same sub - no changes) gid://shopify/SubscriptionBillingAttempt/224421282037

Because the error clears on its own in some cases and the shops’ Shopify Payments configuration is unchanged throughout, this looks to us like something on the platform side rather than a merchant configuration
issue — but we’d love a second set of eyes on that billing attempt to confirm.

Any guidance would be appreciated — this is causing billing failures for subscription merchants and seems to be escalating.

Thanks in advance!

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Hey @Brian_Singer :waving_hand: We identified an issue in early April that caused intermittent PAYMENT_PROVIDER_IS_NOT_ENABLED failures on subscription billing attempts for shops with Shopify Payments active. It affected multiple subscription apps and we identified and mitigated the underlying cause.

Billing attempts that failed during this window should succeed on retry, since no data was corrupted and the payment method/gateway configuration was never actually invalid. If your app has retry logic, those should clear on the next pass. For any billing attempts that exhausted their retry limit during the incident window, a new billing attempt on the same contract should go through.

If you’re still seeing new failures after roughly April 8, that would point to something else and I’d want to dig in further. In that case, can you share the affected x-request-id headers and a few of the more recent failing billing attempt GIDs so I can investigate on our end?

1 Like
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Thanks for the quick response @Donal-Shopify - April 10th is the last one that I have an example of at the moment (its the one referenced in the post) bit I’m fairly confident that we’ve seen it in the last few days as well

Unfortunately I don’t have the x-request-ids (we aren’t storing those so can only grab them when we try running BAs manually)

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April 10 is definitely past the window I was tracking, so going to take a closer look. If you can share any of the most recent failing billing attempt GIDs, I should be able to track down what’s happening on our side. Thanks Brian!

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for now - just this one gid://shopify/SubscriptionBillingAttempt/224420790517

but I’ll see if I can get you more