When orders stop appearing in ShipStation, fulfillment stalls quietly: nothing errors on your storefront, the orders keep coming in, and you find out when the pick queue looks suspiciously short. Check these in order.
Is ShipStation itself having an incident?
Start at ShipStation's live status. ShipStation posted a solid 99.9% (A grade) over the 180 days ending July 2026 with one 166-minute incident, but its April 2026 outage is the cautionary tale: order imports stalled for most of a business day, and when service recovered, the backlog flooded in at once, with some stores creating duplicate orders by re-importing during the instability (full postmortem). If there is an active incident: stop, do not re-import, and work the playbook in what to do when ShipStation goes down.
Did a store connection lose authorization?
The most common non-outage cause: an expired or revoked store connection. A password change, an uninstalled app, or an expired API token silently breaks the sync. Check the store connection's status and refresh its authorization, then trigger a manual update.
Are your import settings filtering the orders out?
Orders in statuses your import rules skip (payment pending, on hold, digital-only, a location your ShipStation store is not mapped to) never appear. If specific orders are missing rather than all of them, compare their status and line items against your import criteria.
Is the marketplace's API delayed?
Sometimes ShipStation is fine and the source platform's order API is the bottleneck. Marketplace APIs (Amazon, eBay, Walmart) throttle and lag under load, especially during sales events. Check the source platform's status too; StatusBird tracks the Amazon Seller Central, eBay, and Walmart Marketplace systems separately for exactly this reason.
How do I catch sync failures before the ship deadline?
The expensive part of a sync failure is the discovery delay: a 2-hour import stall found at 4pm costs the day's shipping SLA. Monitoring ShipStation and your order sources means the stall pages you at minute 2, while there is still a full ship day to work with.
Start monitoring your stack free with StatusBird: 1 service, no credit card required. Pro is $29/month for all 84 services with SMS, email, Slack, Teams, and Discord alerts within 2 minutes of a status change.