It is one of the questions that causes the most anxiety, and rightly so. If Shopify goes down in the middle of a campaign, you stop selling, you burn the traffic you paid for and your customers go to the competition. So the doubt makes complete sense. If the store goes down through a fault of theirs, do they refund you that money?
The short answer
If you are on a standard Shopify plan (Basic, Grow or Advanced), you have no SLA (Service Level Agreement) or uptime guarantee, and its terms limit Shopify's liability when there is an outage. In other words, there is no way for them to refund you the sales you did not make.
If you are on Shopify Plus, you do have a contractual availability guarantee. But that is not the same as being paid for what you failed to sell. Being guaranteed that the store is available almost all the time does not mean they pay you the lost sales for when it was not.
What Shopify actually says
It all depends on whether your plan includes an SLA with contractual value.
On the standard plans there is none. There is no uptime guarantee or credits for outages, and the terms of service limit Shopify's liability. You have 24/7 support by chat and email, but nothing that turns an outage into a refund.
Shopify Plus is the only plan with a contractual uptime guarantee. The figure usually cited is 99.99% (with parts such as the checkout and the Storefront API around 99.9%), and you can also negotiate custom SLAs. But watch two things. First, that 99.99% already allows for around 52 minutes of downtime a year, so if it does not exceed that time, nothing is breached. Second, even where there is an SLA, the norm in this kind of service is that what you recover is credits against your fee, not compensation for the sales you lost. And that, in the best case, has to be requested, it does not arrive on its own.
There is another detail worth knowing. Shopify does not count as an outage everything you perceive as one. Left out, for example, are scheduled maintenance or failures that come from third parties or from your own configuration. So not every "outage" counts towards the SLA.
The real case: the Cyber Monday 2025 outage
On 1 December 2025, in the middle of Cyber Monday, Shopify suffered an outage lasting several hours that affected stores around the world at one of the worst possible moments of the year. Its backend went down: merchants could not log in to their admin, see or manage orders, update inventory or use their point-of-sale systems. Storefronts and checkout largely stayed online, so many orders were still technically coming in, but a lot of merchants could not process, ship or respond to them during peak hours. The impact on sales for many brands was huge.
What did Shopify do? It announced no compensation plan for the affected stores. Its terms of service limit liability for interruptions, and only enterprise customers with a specific SLA would have, at most, some contractual recourse to claim. For the vast majority of stores, those hours of lost or unmanageable sales were absorbed by each brand. It is the clearest example that guaranteeing availability is one thing, and compensation for your business is quite another.
Why Shopify almost never pays for outages
It is not bad faith, it is how their model works. When you build your ecommerce on a platform like Shopify, you gain a great deal (infrastructure, security, scalability) in exchange for giving up control of availability. You depend on a provider that, like any SaaS, shields itself in its terms from liability for interruptions. The same happens with the big infrastructure providers, where the remedy for an outage is a credit against the bill, never the money your business failed to take in.
An uptime guarantee is not a revenue guarantee. That is why expecting Shopify to refund the sales from an outage starts from the wrong expectation. The useful question is not how to get Shopify to pay, it is how to reduce your exposure to it affecting you.
How you can cover yourself
Here is what you can do. You do not control Shopify's uptime, but you do control your level of dependency and your capacity to react. This is what is in your hands.
- Business interruption insurance. Talk to your insurer about cover for loss of income from third-party technology failures. It is the real route to compensation when the platform does not respond.
- Independent monitoring. Do not rely on Shopify's dashboard alone. Tools like shopifystatus.com, Downdetector, Uptime Robot or Pingdom alert you to an outage even before the official status page reflects it, and give you minutes of margin to react.
- Communication channels that do not depend on Shopify. If the store goes down, you need to be able to reach your customers by email, SMS or social media. Having those channels ready turns an outage into a managed notice instead of a silence that erodes trust.
- Export your critical data regularly. Catalogue, customers, order history. So an incident never leaves you without access to the essentials.
- Do not depend on a single sales channel. The more spread out your business is, the less a one-off outage of one channel hurts.
- Shopify Plus, if your volume justifies it. It is the only plan with a contractual uptime guarantee and negotiable SLAs. It will not refund your sales, but it does give you a contractual framework and a level of support the standard plans do not have.
What really matters: reducing the impact
A few minutes of downtime a year is part of the game with any platform, and it is not what should keep you awake. What makes the difference between a brand that comes through an outage unscathed and one that loses a whole campaign is not whether Shopify compensates you, it is how prepared each one was.
As a Shopify Partner, we build stores with their resilience in mind too, with monitoring, contingency plans and an architecture that reduces single points of failure. An ecommerce's profitability is not only built by selling more, it is also protected by stopping a bad day from wiping out a quarter's work.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shopify refund the money for sales lost in an outage? In practice, no. The standard plans have no SLA or credits for outages, and the terms of service limit Shopify's liability. Shopify Plus's uptime guarantee is not equivalent to compensation for your lost profit either.
Do I have an SLA if I am on a standard Shopify plan? No. Basic, Grow and Advanced do not include a contractual uptime guarantee or a compensation system for outages. You have 24/7 support, but not an SLA with financial remedies.
Does Shopify Plus guarantee compensation for outages? It guarantees availability, not compensation for lost sales. Plus is the only plan with a contractual uptime SLA and lets you negotiate custom SLAs, but the usual remedy is credits against the fee, not the money you failed to take in, and it usually has to be claimed.
What do I do if my Shopify store goes down? Confirm it is a Shopify outage (check shopifystatus.com and Downdetector), notify your customers through a channel that does not depend on the store, pause or adjust your paid media spend so you do not burn budget while people cannot buy, and document the incident and its impact in case you need to claim on insurance.
Can I claim against Shopify for an outage? If you are on a standard plan, the options are very limited by the terms of service. If you are an enterprise customer with a specific SLA, there may be a contractual recourse, but you have to check the contract and claim it actively.
How do I reduce the risk from Shopify outages? With independent monitoring, business interruption insurance, alternative communication channels, backups of your critical data and a strategy that does not depend on a single channel. You will not prevent the outage, but you will prevent its real cost.
If you want your store ready for a bad day and not just a good one, we will review it with you. At STRAT we audit your setup, your level of app dependency and your contingency plans, and through our Shopify store development and optimisation we reduce the impact any outage can have on your revenue.
