Most Shopify store owners know that Shopify Payments is powered by Stripe under the hood. What fewer know is that an outage affecting one doesn't automatically mean the other is affected, and the way each goes down, and what you can do about it, is different.
The infrastructure relationship
Shopify Payments is a white-label product built on Stripe's payment infrastructure. When Stripe has a major infrastructure event, Shopify Payments is typically affected too, because it relies on the same underlying card processing network.
However, Shopify Payments also has its own layer of infrastructure for settlement, payouts, and Shopify admin integration. This means Shopify Payments can have incidents that don't appear on Stripe's status page, and vice versa.
When Stripe goes down
If your store uses Stripe directly as a payment gateway (not Shopify Payments), a Stripe outage means customers cannot complete checkout at all. The failure is immediate and visible, card charges fail and customers see an error.
What to check: status.stripe.com: specifically the "API" and "Charges" components.
What to do immediately:
- Pause your paid ads
- Enable an alternative payment method if you have one set up (PayPal, Shop Pay)
- Add a banner to your store explaining the issue
When Shopify Payments goes down
Shopify Payments incidents can be more nuanced. The card processing itself might work while the payout or settlement layer is affected, meaning orders succeed but funds don't reach your bank account on schedule. Or the admin integration might fail while processing continues normally.
What to check: Shopify's status page at www.shopifystatus.com, under the "Shopify Payments" component.
Shopify Payments-specific failures you should watch for:
- Payout delays (your money isn't arriving on schedule)
- Disputes dashboard not loading in admin
- Checkout completing but orders not appearing in admin
- 3DS authentication failures (cards that should pass are declining)
The worst case: both are down simultaneously
Because they share infrastructure, simultaneous Stripe and Shopify Payments incidents do happen, usually during major AWS or Cloudflare events that affect large portions of the internet. When this happens, no Shopify store using either processor can accept payments.
Your only option in this scenario is to have an alternative processor, PayPal or a direct credit card processor not reliant on the same infrastructure, already set up in your Shopify payment settings before the outage happens. This is not something you can configure in 5 minutes during a live incident.
How to know which is down before your customers do
StatusBird monitors both Stripe and Shopify Payments independently, every 2 minutes. If either one degrades, you get an SMS alert with context, including whether the correlated failure suggests a shared infrastructure issue. Start monitoring free.
The stakes at checkout are well documented: the Baymard Institute's cart abandonment research puts average online cart abandonment near 70% even when everything works. A payment outage hits shoppers at the exact moment they were ready to buy.