March 2026 Incident: Shopify Terminating Rate Request Early, Triggering Backup Rates
Understand why Shopify backup rates are appearing at checkout instead of your ShipperHQ-calculated rates, and what to do about it
Status: Under investigation by Shopify | Started: February 24,2026
Impact: Slower carriers may result in Shopify timing out requests to ShipperHQ prior to ShipperHQ responding. Most impacted carriers include FedEx small package with delivery dates or calendar enabled as well as certain LTL Freight carriers
What's Happening
ShipperHQ is aware of an intermittent issue impacting merchants on Shopify where Shopify is terminating the connection to ShipperHQ before Shopify's published and expected timeout threshold. This results in either no shipping options at checkout or Shopify backup rates displaying at checkout, if configured, instead of your ShipperHQ-provided shipping options and rates. This is most frequently seen when using live rate carriers with slower response times.
This behavior is broadly impacting all providers using Shopify's Carrier Service API, not just ShipperHQ as seen in the ongoing Shopify Developer Community discussion.
What We're Doing
We're working directly with Shopify's technical teams as they work to understand the root cause of this behavior and press for a resolution. Shopify's engineering team is actively investigating and we are providing whatever information is required to help them resolve this issue as quickly as possible.
Determining If You're Impacted
You can review your store's 30-day backup rate history in Shopify under Settings › Shipping and delivery to see how often backup shipping rates have been triggered. If you see frequent backup rates triggered from February 24th and later, you are impacted by this issue.
What Can You Do
If you are seeing backup rates used you can:
- Review the live rate carriers you have configured in ShipperHQ and reconfigure, disable, or replace slower carriers. Slower carriers to look for include:
- FedEx small package services (Ground and Express) with delivery date or calendar enabled
- Certain LTL Freight carriers and 3PLs
- After making a change to your ShipperHQ configuration monitor usage of backup shipping rates in Shopify to determine the impact of your change
- Contact ShipperHQ Support so we can track impact and follow up with you when Shopify provides a resolution. Also let us know if you have questions or need assistance when updating your ShipperHQ configuration to adjust for this issue
- Contact Shopify Support directly from within Shopify to report the impact on your store. Merchant-reported cases help prioritize the investigation on the Shopify side. When you reach out to Shopify, let them know this relates to ticket #64437075 which is our central ticket for this issue
- Make sure your backup rates are configured in Shopify. If you haven't customized your Shopify backup rates, shoppers may see rates that don't reflect your actual shipping costs. See Shopify's backup shipping rates documentation to review and update your settings