When an AI effect does not work, your shopper sees the same sentence every time: “Failed to process image. Please try again.” A budget cap, a provider outage, a rejected photo and a timeout all produce it. This guide is how you tell them apart, and what a failure has already cost you before you get involved.
It was not the first attempt
That matters for your advice. “Try again” is worth one go, because a genuinely momentary problem was probably already retried away. If it fails twice, something is actually wrong and the shopper retrying will not fix it.
Work out which cause it was
The shopper’s message is generic. Yours are not, so look at your own side in this order.
- Is the provider on and healthy? Open Integrations and read the card’s status. A Warning or Error pill points straight at the connection or the key.
- Is a cap in the way? Check the month’s spend against your Monthly hard cap on that provider, and the product’s own Generations per product. A hit cap refuses the call before it reaches the provider, which looks identical to a failure from the shopper’s seat.
- Is it the session limit? If one shopper has been trying repeatedly, they may have run out of tries rather than hit a fault. See below: this is the one a failure spends.
- Is it the photo? A provider can refuse an image on its own safety rules. That is not something you can configure away; a different photo works.
What a failure costs you
Three of the four release the reservation when a call fails, so a bad afternoon at your provider does not quietly eat your budget or lock a product for the month.
The per-session limit is the exception, and it is deliberate: it exists to stop abuse, so it counts attempts rather than results. The consequence to know about is that a shopper with a flaky connection can use up their tries and never see a picture.
What the shopper can do
They can try again straight away; the effect is re-runnable and nothing is stuck. What they lose is one of their per-session tries each time.
If the failure happened after a preview had appeared, the result is deliberately not accepted onto the design, so they cannot check out with a half-finished item. That is the right outcome and it can read as the button being broken, so it is worth a line on your product page for a product where AI is the point.
Common questions
Why does the shopper not see which limit they hit?
The customizer collapses every cause into one message on purpose, so a shopper is never shown your budget or your caps. Diagnose it from your own side.
Was I charged for a failed generation?
No. The spend reservation is released, so a failed call does not reach your monthly total.
The effect failed and the photo is still there unchanged.
On some storefront layouts a failed effect falls back to the original image. The upload is fine; the effect did not run.
It works for me and fails for shoppers.
Check the per-session and per-product limits rather than the provider. Your own testing runs against the same caps as everyone else.
Can I see a log of failures?
The provider's card in Integrations shows the month's generations and spend. A single shopper's failure is not surfaced separately, so contact support with a time and a product if you need one traced.
Next
Read what AI generation costs for the limits themselves, or the AI styles you can offer for what to publish.