Shopify's cha-ching sound stopped working: every fix, and why it keeps breaking

Your phone used to make a noise when a stranger bought something. Now it makes a generic ding, or it makes nothing at all, and the forum threads you found end without an answer.

This page is the whole answer. It is organised by device, because the fix is completely different on Android and on an iPhone — and that single fact is the one nobody writing about this seems to mention. At the end are the two questions the Shopify forum has been asked for years and never answered: the voice that says "You've got sales!", and how to hear a sale on a computer.

Everything here was checked on 7 September 2026, and revised on 8 September 2026, against Shopify's, Apple's or Google's own documentation, or against a forum thread that is linked so you can read it yourself. Where we could not verify something, it says so instead of guessing.

First: which of the two problems do you have?

Put a test order through your own store, with the phone in your hand and unlocked. What happens next splits this page in two. That single test order is the only instrument this page needs — where a section further down has to check something, it sends you back to this one rather than asking you to place another.

• A notification appears, but the sound is a generic ding — or there is no sound while other apps still make noise. The sound is broken. Go to your platform below — and if you are on a Galaxy, that is the Android section, because Samsung is Android.
• No notification appears at all — nothing on the lock screen, nothing in the notification shade. Delivery is broken, not the sound. Fixing the sound file will do nothing at all. Skip to Nothing arrives at all.

One caveat on that second outcome, which we could not verify: nobody documents whether an order placed in test mode fires the same push notification as a real one. So if the test brings you nothing at all, do not settle on "delivery is broken" on the strength of the test alone — the quiet may be the test mode, not your phone. A real order, from a friend, settles it.

These are different failures with different causes. Most of the advice you will find online fixes the first one and is being read by people who have the second.

The thing nobody tells you: the sound does not live in the same place on both phones

Two sentences follow from that table, and they are the two most useful sentences on this page:

• On Android, a cha-ching that turned into a ding is a file problem, and it is in your hands. You can fix it today.
• On iPhone, if you hear a sound but it is the wrong one, you cannot fix it. If you hear nothing, Shopify did not fail — iOS silenced it, and there are five places where that happens.

Android: the sound is a file, and the file goes missing

Since Android 8.0, an app creates a notification channel once and then cannot change that channel's sound, vibration or importance again. Only you can, from the phone's Settings.

That one rule explains most of what goes wrong here. Shopify can ship you the cha-ching, but once the channel exists on your phone, Shopify has no way to put the sound back if it disappears. You have to.

1. Reinstall the sounds from inside the app

This is Shopify's own route and the first thing to try.

This prompt is documented on Shopify's troubleshooting page, and it only exists on Android. There is no equivalent on iPhone.

2. If the sound still is not in the list, put the file where Android looks for it

The system sound picker only offers files it has indexed as notification tones. A file sitting in Downloads will never appear in that list, no matter how well it plays in your file manager. That is why "I downloaded the sound and it isn't there" is such a common dead end.

Before you go looking for the file: there is no file to download. Shopify does not publish the cha-ching as a download. If the prompt in step 1 did not install it, any notification tone already on the phone will do — the phone does not care whether it is a cash register. The box below is for putting your own audio file where the picker can see it, whatever you decide that file is.

This is the workaround that circulates on the Shopify forum: a merchant on a Galaxy S23 Ultra described it in October 2023 in a thread opened in November 2021 and still being replied to in May 2024. It works. It is also worth being honest about what it is: you are hand-installing an audio file so that a paid platform can make a noise.

And here is the step that thread is missing, which is why the workaround stalls where it does: the next person to post asked where the sound file came from, and got no reply. There is no reply to give, for the reason above: Shopify publishes no download. On Android the app installs its own sounds through the Install Shopify Sounds prompt in step 1, and one merchant with a Samsung, in a December 2025 thread, says the file ends up in the phone's Notifications folder afterwards. We could not confirm that on other Android phones. If the prompt never appears for you, use a tone the phone already has rather than downloading executables from a soundboard site to fix a notification.

3. Reinstalling the app is the official fix — and on modern Android it can make things worse

Do step 5 before you do this one. Checking for a pending app update takes thirty seconds and cannot leave you worse off. This step can, for the reason in the box below.

Shopify's troubleshooting page tells you to log out, clear cache and data, uninstall, reinstall, log back in and send a test notification. That does reset a stale channel, which is why it sometimes works.

Where that leaves us: the two facts above are Google's, and documented. The conclusion that this is what happened to a particular merchant who reinstalled and ended up worse off is our inference, not something anyone has tested under controlled conditions. We think it is the likeliest explanation for "I reinstalled and it got worse". We are not going to pretend it is proven.

4. If you set a custom sound and notifications stopped entirely, put the default back

There is a July 2023 thread from a Pixel 5a on Android 13 describing exactly this: with a custom sound selected, the notification appears for a split second or not at all; with the default sound, it behaves. The thread has a single reply and no explanation, and we have not found one anywhere else either.

So the practical advice is a diagnostic rather than a fix: set the sound back to the default and repeat the test from the top of this page. If the notification comes back, you have found your cause, and you can try a different, shorter audio file rather than assuming push is broken.

5. On a Pixel, check for a pending app update

Shopify's troubleshooting page singles this out: Play Store → Manage apps and device → install any pending Shopify update.

Samsung: the phone is putting the app to sleep

Samsung is Android. If your notification arrives and the sound is wrong, your fix is in the Android section above and every step of it applies to a Galaxy. This section is for the other failure — the notification not arriving at all — plus two Samsung-only quirks about Do Not Disturb and per-category sounds at the end of it.

Samsung's One UI is more aggressive than stock Android about stopping apps running in the background, and Shopify's documentation is blunt that push notifications must be running in the background on your device to arrive.

An app Samsung has put into deep sleep does not run in the background and does not deliver notifications. Apps end up there on their own after a stretch of not being opened. Shopify's troubleshooting page does not mention Samsung's battery controls at all. That is the gap this section fills.

One quirk that makes people think they did it wrong: once you set an app to Unrestricted in App info, it stops appearing in the Never sleeping apps list. That is expected, not a failure.

Samsung keeps moving these menus, so if the path above does not match your phone, look for the words sleeping and background rather than for an exact sequence. From Android 14 onwards Samsung began shifting some of these controls out of Settings and into separate Good Lock modules. The reference the rest of the internet uses for this, across manufacturers, is dontkillmyapp.com, and it is worth a look if your phone is not a Samsung either.

Two honest limits on this section. The menu paths are documented; that a sleeping app is the reason your Shopify sound stopped is a strong inference from Shopify's own "must be running in the background", not a controlled test — nobody has published one. And we could not verify whether the Android app registers a separate notification channel per category (New orders, Fulfillments, and so on) or a single one for everything. If it is a single channel, the per-category sound picker simply will not be there and you set one sound for all of them.

The notification arrives and still does not ring: Do Not Disturb

One thing Samsung took away: on One UI 4.1 you could tell a single notification category to ignore Do Not Disturb, from Settings → Apps → Shopify → Notifications. Merchants report that this per-category option disappeared in One UI 5, and we found nothing from Samsung confirming or denying it. If you remember doing this once and cannot find it now, you are not imagining it.

There is still a way through. It is one level coarser, and it is worth taking. Samsung documents an exception list for Do Not Disturb that works per app: you name the apps allowed to make a noise while the mode is on.

Say plainly what the trade is, because it is exactly what One UI 5 took: the old control let one category of Shopify's notifications ignore Do Not Disturb. This one lets the app through, all of it. That is why the second step is not optional — whatever you leave switched on inside Shopify is what will ring at three in the morning. It is the best answer available today, not the one you used to have.

iPhone: you cannot change the sound, so stop trying

Shopify's help centre says it in one line: "iOS devices don't support individual app sound settings." There is no sound picker for the Shopify app on iOS, and there is not going to be one. The cha-ching is a file inside the app, named by the push notification itself. If the wrong sound plays, that is on Shopify's side and nothing in your Settings will change it.

That is the answer to the question asked on the forum in November 2024 — an ex-Android merchant asking how to get the cha-ching back on an iPhone — which never got a usable one. The answer is no. Knowing it is no saves you an evening.

So on iPhone there is exactly one useful question: is the sound wrong, or is it absent? If it is absent, iOS silenced it. Here is everything that silences it, in the order that costs you least to check.

1. The ring/silent switch, and the ringer volume

Obvious, and still the first thing to check — but the advice everyone gives for it does not work on a default iPhone. The volume buttons change media volume, not ringer volume, unless Settings → Sounds & Haptics → Change with Buttons is on, and it is off out of the box. Press volume up while nothing is playing and, on most iPhones, you have just moved the wrong slider.

2. Focus, including Do Not Disturb

If you want order alerts to cut through a Focus, that mode's Time Sensitive option is the mechanism. It only helps if the app marks its notifications as time sensitive in the first place, which is the app's decision and not yours.

We could not verify whether the Shopify app marks order notifications as time sensitive. It matters, because if it does, they break out of a Focus and out of the summary below. You can find out in about a minute: turn on a Focus and repeat the test from the top of this page.

3. Scheduled Summary — the one that looks exactly like a broken sound and isn't

Apps in the summary are held and delivered together at the times you choose (Apple's documentation). Nothing rings when the order lands. If Shopify ended up in your summary — and iOS suggests apps for it — your orders are arriving perfectly on time and being deposited, quietly, into a digest you read twice a day. It is indistinguishable from a broken sound, and it is not one.

4. You may have muted the app by accident

Swiping left on a notification, tapping Options and choosing to mute for an hour or a day sends that app straight to Notification Centre: no sound, no banner, no lock screen. It is one swipe away from the gesture you use to dismiss a notification, and it expires on its own, which is why it feels random.

5. The app's own notification settings

6. If a voice is reading your orders out loud through headphones, that is Apple, not Shopify

iOS can have Siri announce notifications through AirPods or Beats when you are wearing them and the phone is locked. If that is what you are hearing, it is Announce Notifications: Settings → Siri (or Apple Intelligence & Siri) → Announce Notifications → off.

7. Shopify's official iOS reset, if none of the above did it

Nothing arrives at all

If there is no notification — not a silent one, none — then only three things matter, and the sound is not one of them.

1. The switch inside the app. Shopify app → Menu → Settings → Store notifications → under Push notifications, turn on what you want. The categories are Critical alerts, Fulfillments, New orders, Setup tips and Timeline mentions.
2. The switch in the phone. Shopify says it explicitly: when you activate notifications in the app, you must also activate them in your device's main settings. Two switches, both have to be on. On Android 13 and later this is a permission the app has to ask for and you have to grant.
3. The phone has to let the app run in the background. See the Samsung section — the principle applies to any phone with an aggressive battery manager, which by now is most of them.

If all three are right and orders still do not arrive, it is worth knowing this is not always local to you. A thread from February 2024 collects iPhone merchants losing new-order alerts, and it runs long without one fix that worked for everyone.

So put a floor under yourself while you chase it. The push to the app is only one of the two channels Shopify sends a new order down; the other one never touches your phone's notification system at all. Make sure your address is on the staff list for new-order email (Shopify's own page) and give that sender an alert in your mail app. It is not a cha-ching, and it is not instant, but it does not go through the ringer switch, the Focus, the battery manager or the sound file, so none of them can swallow it.

One more thing to try, and this one is our judgement rather than Shopify documentation. If the push is still missing after all three checks, open a ticket with Shopify support quoting the date, the time and the number of an order you never got a notification for. A missing push with an order behind it is something they can go and look up; "my notifications do not work" is not.

The voice that says "You've got sales!"

In October 2022, Shopify started playing a voice saying "You've got sales!" over the cha-ching, and the thread it produced is still the first thing merchants find. Here is what it actually says, with dates, because every other page that mentions this is vague:

• 12 October 2022 — the thread is opened, asking how to keep the cha-ching and lose the voice.
• 14 October 2022 — a Shopify staff member answers that the voice will only play twice a lifetime before reverting to the classic cha-ching.
• 21 October 2022 — the same staff member says the request for a switch has been submitted to their developers.
• 22 November 2022 — an iPhone 14 upgrade loses the sound.
• 16 December 2022 — the last reply, still asking for the switch. Nothing since.

No switch was ever shipped. That is the whole answer, almost four years on, and it is worth saying plainly because everything else written about this implies otherwise.

There is a second thing in that thread worth knowing, because it sent people looking for a menu that was never there. Staff pointed merchants at a path through the app to their phone's settings to pick a different sound, and merchants replied that the menu did not exist on their device. That is because the path only exists on Android, and the people asking were on iPhones, where by Shopify's own documentation there is no per-app sound setting to reach.

So, in 2026:

• On Android you can replace it. The sound is a file you choose. Put whatever you like in the Notifications folder and select it — a till, a doorbell, or silence.
• On iPhone you cannot. There is no setting, there never was a switch, and the only thing you control is whether the app makes a sound at all.

Hearing it on a computer

This question is older than the sound problem itself. It was asked in December 2021 — no cha-ching on the computer and none on the phone — and every reply in that thread is about Android. It was asked again in June 2022, explicitly "on my Android phone or computer", and only the phone half was ever answered.

Here is the answer nobody gave them, and it is short:

The confusion is understandable, because Shopify does ship a desktop browser notification with a sound — it belongs to Shopify Inbox, and it fires when a customer sends you a message, not when someone buys something. Chrome and Firefox will show it with the tab closed; on Safari or Edge you have to keep the tab open. It is a good feature, and it is not the one you were looking for.

Which leaves three honest options if you want a sale to be audible at your desk. Keep the phone next to you with the sound working. Or pay for one of the third-party order-notification apps in the Shopify App Store that play a sound in a browser tab or through a speaker — the two we know of are Cha-Ching: Order Notifications from Keel Labs and PingBell, both monthly subscriptions, and rather than tell you to work out what that adds up to, we have put their prices and their three-year totals next to ours. Or put something on the desk that is not a phone.

What still has no fix

Four things this page cannot solve, said out loud so you do not spend an evening looking for a setting that is not there:

• There is no official way to turn the voice off. Four years after it was asked for, and answered.
• Shopify's troubleshooting page never mentions battery savers, Do Not Disturb or Focus. If one of those is your cause — and three of the sections above exist because it can be — the official page will not lead you to it.
• On Android the sound can revert to the system default after an app or system update — reported by merchants in the threads above, not documented by Shopify — and the remedy is to install the sound file by hand again.
• On iPhone, a separate problem was reported in January 2025: order notifications arrive and then vanish from the notification centre within seconds. The merchant who opened the thread relayed that Shopify support said they were aware of it, with no timeframe. The last reply is from April 2025 and we have found no confirmation that it was ever fixed.

Why it keeps breaking

None of this is a scandal, and it is not incompetence either. It is what happens when the thing that tells you about a sale is a notification on a general-purpose phone.

To hear one order, six independent things have to go right: the ringer switch, whatever Focus mode you are in, the scheduled summary, the battery manager that decides which apps get to run, the notification permission, and a sound file that may or may not still be on disk. Five of those six belong to Apple or Google or Samsung, and every one of them exists to make your phone quieter and last longer. That is their job. Your sale is just another notification competing with the group chat.

Exactly one of the six — the sound file — is something Shopify can help you with. That is why this breaks again after an update, and why it will break again after the next one.

But start with the free fix. If your cha-ching is ringing again by the time you get to the bottom of this page, then this page did its job and you do not need us.