How Apple Pay Express Checkout Emptied a Bakery's Storefront

Nadia runs a small bakery in Alfama, the tangled hillside quarter of Lisbon where the streets get too narrow for delivery vans. Sourdough on weekdays, focaccia and cardamom buns on weekends, plus a small line of jarred preserves. She takes orders through a Shopify store on the Sense theme and delivers herself on an e-bike inside a five-kilometre radius. Walk-in traffic is steady. Her Instagram engagement is fine. Her online orders had been holding around forty a week for a year. In late April they fell off a cliff. By the end of May she was doing four orders a week and could not find a reason.

What Nadia had already tried

By the time she wrote to us, Nadia had spent a month tugging on the wrong threads. She rewrote the header of her homepage twice. She swapped the featured product from the sourdough loaf to a rotating "baker's pick" widget she built with a metafield and a small snippet. She turned off her Google Ads, then turned them back on. She emailed Shopify Support twice and got back a general suggestion to check her theme customisations. She ran the store speed test in Shopify admin and got a score she was reasonably happy with, which she took to mean the site was not the problem.

She also tested the store from her own phone. From her own iPhone, in her own kitchen, on her own Wi-Fi, everything looked correct. The sourdough was in stock. The cardamom buns were in stock. Her delivery zone matched her actual delivery zone. The checkout accepted her card. She could not reproduce anything wrong. That is what made it so easy to keep working around it.

Why nothing surfaced in the admin

Here is what she did not know. When a customer opens Nadia's store on their phone and taps the Apple Pay express checkout button on the product page, Apple Pay pulls their saved wallet address and hands it to Shopify as the shipping destination before the customer sees a checkout screen at all. Shopify then checks that address against Nadia's five-kilometre delivery zone. If the address is a house in Cascais, an apartment in Porto, or a flat in Berlin, Shopify returns "we do not ship to this address" and the storefront renders every product as sold out.

Nadia's admin dashboard shows nothing. No failed payment. No abandoned checkout with a useful error. No alert in Analytics. From the merchant side, the customer simply saw the store, did not buy, and left. The event that killed the order does not exist as a row in any Shopify report she has access to.

The awkward part is that half her customer base is exactly the wrong shape for this. Tourists staying in an Airbnb in central Lisbon still have their home Apple Wallet address set to somewhere in London or Sao Paulo. Diaspora Portuguese who moved to another city and kept ordering from home for their parents got their own home address auto-filled instead of the parents' address. In both cases, Shopify silently marked the store empty and the buyer moved on.

This behaviour has been public for six years. The oldest Shopify Community thread about "why does Apple Pay remove the store pickup option" was opened in November 2020. Merchants have been posting on it every year since. In March 2024 a Shopify Staff member confirmed that Apple Pay and Google Pay "do not work with Local Pickup Orders" and that this was expected behaviour, filed as feedback with no committed fix. Earlier this year a merchant on the same thread wrote "2026 and it's still doing this. Any fix for this six year old issue?" No fix.

The thing that surprised us

We had two working theories when Nadia first sent us her store URL. The first was that a recent theme update had broken a delivery-zone check. The second was that a shipping app she had installed and forgotten about was quietly hiding the free-delivery option. We were wrong about both. It took twenty minutes of testing from a phone signed into an Apple ID with a non-Portuguese home address to see the failure, and once we saw it, everything else made sense.

What surprised us was not the mechanism. The mechanism has been documented for years by community members, and a Shopify Partner posted a technically precise explanation in May: Apple Pay's payment sheet requires a valid shipping address to authorise the wallet, and it fetches that address from the buyer's device before Shopify's checkout ever gets a chance to ask the buyer where they want their sourdough delivered. What surprised us was that Google Pay does not do this the same way. On a device signed into a Google Pay wallet with a non-Portuguese home address, Google Pay still let us select a delivery method. Apple Pay did not. Same wallet concept, different behaviour, same store.

That divergence changes the shape of the recommended fix. The older advice that circulates in community threads is "hide every express button," and that advice also throws out Shop Pay, which is actually the one accelerated method that plays cleanly with local pickup. If you sell to a mix of local and non-local addresses and Shop Pay is doing real work for you, that matters.

The fix Nadia actually shipped

We spent an hour with Nadia on chat working through the two paths she could take. If you want a wider walkthrough of the options for a shop like hers, we already wrote a comparison of the four common fixes: Four Fixes for Shopify Shipping Setup When Apple Pay Breaks Pickup. Here is what she picked and why.

She opened her Sense theme customiser, went into the default product template, opened the Buy buttons block, and unticked "Show dynamic checkout buttons." That single toggle removes the entire Apple Pay express checkout section from the product page: Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Shop Pay all disappear as express buttons on the product surface. They remain available at the standard checkout step, so a customer using Apple Pay can still pay with Apple Pay at the actual payment page, after Shopify has collected a real delivery address from them.

She repeated the same toggle on her cart template. She then opened a private window on her phone, added a sourdough to the cart, and completed a test order using Apple Pay from the standard checkout. The delivery-zone check ran against the address she typed, not the address Apple had cached. The order came through with the correct address. She refunded herself.

There was one thing we did not know for certain until we tested it: whether Sense's toggle removes the Shop Pay button as well. It does. There is no documented Shopify-native way to selectively keep Shop Pay's express button while removing only Apple Pay and Google Pay. If Shop Pay's express flow matters to your revenue, a hide-payment-method app like HidePay or a broader install of Zapiet's Pickup + Delivery is the workaround the community lands on, and both come with their own caveats and a monthly bill. For Nadia, the walk-in-plus-e-bike shape of her business meant losing Shop Pay's express button did not cost her much, and the Apple Pay express checkout problem was already costing her thirty orders a week.

Within four days her order rate came back to the low forties. She sent us a photo of a printed order queue with three of the top five orders addressed to Airbnbs inside her delivery zone. If she had kept the express button, none of those three would have converted.

What this means for your store

If you sell online to a specific geographic zone (a city, a postcode, a country), and you have the Apple Pay express checkout button live on your product page, your store is silently rejecting some fraction of your customers before they see a checkout screen. You will not see a failed payment. You will not see an abandoned cart with a useful reason. You will just watch conversion trend down and start rewriting your hero copy, the way Nadia did.

You can test it yourself in ten minutes. Open your store on a phone signed into an Apple Wallet with a home address that falls outside your delivery zone. Tap Apple Pay on any product. If your store now shows the item as unavailable, you have the same problem. If you cannot swap addresses on your own Apple Wallet, ask a friend in a different city to do it for you. This is the fastest self-diagnosis I know for a category of Shopify failure that will otherwise cost you months.

If you get stuck on the toggle or the test, the first fifteen minutes with a help1 expert is free, and this specific fix is usually shorter than that. Bring a link to your store, tell us the delivery zone, and we will run the check with you.

Nadia is now sending most of her online orders out on the e-bike within two hours. She has not turned Apple Pay off entirely, because it works fine at the standard checkout for anyone with an in-zone address, and she wants it there for the walk-past tourist who tapped a QR code on the shop window. What she turned off was the Apple Pay express checkout button on the product page: the one place Apple Pay was allowed to decide, on behalf of every customer, where the sourdough was supposed to go.