Re:HTTP 402: Payment Required
by jto1218 on Saturday February 01, 2020 @08:49PM
(#22214608)
Shopify’s REST API returns 402s when the shop whose data you’re interacting with hasn’t paid its Shopify bill. Always thought it was an interesting usage cause the payment-required relationship is between the shop and Shopify, as opposed to the shop and the application hitting the API.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Actually I'm not sure that is interesting - from Shopify's perspective it is payment-required. If the shop's dodgy JS sent a malformed request body, you'd get a 400 - even though the bad-request relationship is between the shop and Shopify.
It does violate the contract of 4xx errors though, that a 4xx indicates a client error. If the store hasn't paid up, that's not the clients fault nor can they fix it. It should be some kind of 5xx for customers.
Re:HTTP 402: Payment Required
by krainboltgreene on Sunday February 02, 2020 @06:13AM
(#22216416)
If an admin disables your account by accident, that's still a 401. Just because the client can't change something, doesn't mean it doesn't fit along with the 4XX brand.
401 means authentication is required. If Shopify is sending that to clients, because admin disabled access, that's just another example of abusing the error codes
Yeah ... current practice treats the need for payment as a permissions issue and thus 403.
But in Shopify’s case, the client has no permissions problem.
What you’re describing really is a 500-range issue ... or even an old fashioned 404.
Like I said on another comment, this really is a header or body issue.