Shopify store credit appears at checkout only when both the customer and the order are eligible. A balance on the customer profile does not guarantee that every checkout can use it.
The fastest diagnosis is to verify sign-in, currency, channel, and order type in that order. Shopify excludes legacy accounts, draft and edited orders, unsupported channels, and recurring subscription charges from common store-credit flows.
Why available store credit can stay hidden
Customers must sign in through new customer accounts or Shop Pay. Store credit is not available through legacy customer accounts, and the store-credit toggle must be active under Customer accounts.
Currency and transaction type add another filter. Only the balance matching the checkout currency appears, and Shopify does not accept store credit on draft or edited orders. It can fund an initial subscription purchase but not recurring subscription bills.
- Customer is browsing anonymously
- Store uses legacy customer accounts
- Credit and checkout currencies differ
- Order type or channel does not support store credit
What to test before changing the checkout
Use a customer profile with a known balance, sign in through the live customer-account flow, and create a normal Online Store checkout in the same currency. This removes draft-order and market ambiguity from the test.
For an admin-created order, Shopify's documented path is to send the draft invoice and let the customer open the checkout link, sign in, and apply credit there. Staff cannot directly apply store credit inside the draft-order editor.
- Verify the Store credit toggle
- Confirm the signed-in email matches the credited profile
- Use the same currency as the balance
- Test a standard checkout before testing apps or subscriptions
When returns and loyalty apps complicate the balance
If a returns or loyalty app also issues credit, establish whether it writes to Shopify's native store-credit account or maintains its own balance. Two balances with similar labels can create a support problem that no checkout setting can solve.
That ownership issue connects directly to subscription, returns, and loyalty sync failures. We scope account-extension and integration cleanup through the Shopify fix task library.