If you've chosen Shopify as your preferred payment method, there are some specific procedures that differ from those using credit card billing. Here are a few examples:
Shopify Billing Cap:
Shopify has established a billing cap of $5,000. This cap means that if your subscription plan's cost suddenly increases to $5,000, you will need to manually approve the new price to prevent your account from being restricted.
This measure is in place to prevent account restrictions when transitioning between different pricing tiers. For instance, if you were on a $45 plan and it's about to shift to the next pricing tier at $50, you'd be required to manually accept this new price through your dashboard, or your account could be temporarily restricted.
The $5,000 billing cap helps safeguard accounts from sudden and substantial price increases that might not occur organically, such as going from a $45 plan to a $5,000 plan.
It's important to note that Privy cannot reduce this spending limit because our pricing structure is designed to scale as your account collects more contacts. As the contact count increases, the price will naturally adjust.
Account Restriction Notification:
If your billing cap isn't set at $5,000, your account may still face the risk of being restricted. In such a scenario, a pop-up message will appear on your dashboard when you attempt to edit or create any display or campaign.
In order to stop this message from showing up, please click on the ‘Take me to Shopify’ button and this should complete the update.
Note: Please make sure that the price and contacts match in both the restriction message and our pricing page. If you see any discrepancies, please contact the support team for further assistance.
Shopify has two charges.
You might see that your Shopify bill that Privy is split into two charges, a base charge, and a usage charge.
This may cause some confusion as you might think you are being charged twice. Don’t worry, that’s not the case! Shopify separates the base charge of a plan from the additional pricing associated with the particular usage tier. Our base charge will be $15 for Starter (as that was the lowest tier of this plan) $45 for Growth, and the usage charge will be the remaining cost.
For example, a Shopify billed merchant under the $90 Starter plan will see a base charge of $15 and a usage fee of $75.
What is a ‘Usage fee’?
Usage in Privy is not related to the features used or the use of the account, usage in Privy is related to the number of mailable contacts on the account and how they scale.
In other words, a usage fee is determined by the tier of contacts you’re currently at. The base charge is the minimum price and the usage fee adjusts for your account size.
This means, that even if the service is not used, or if no emails/texts are sent, or no displays are created the price will remain the same and it will be split into two charges (Base and Usage) if you are Shopify billed.
If you’re planning to not use the account for a period of time, we recommend that you cancel the account for the time being to avoid additional charges. Check this article for more information (Insert Account management article).
Frozen accounts
When an account is Frozen, on Privy's end, we cannot determine the specific reason why an account gets frozen, since this status is related to the Shopify side of your store.
However, this article from Shopify support Frozen Shopify stores states that if you missed paying your Shopify subscription bill or if a payment fails three times, then your store is frozen until you settle your bill with Shopify. Your store does not freeze until your bill's due date. If your store is frozen, you can't access your Shopify admin and customers can't view your store.
When a Shopify account is frozen, apps (such as Privy) do not have the option to cancel or reinstate a paid plan. Since Shopify is showing us that your store is unfortunately frozen. We highly recommend chatting with their billing support team on how to resolve this.