Unable to find customers via search

[Alex_Russell]

A new issue started, or noticed, sometime last week that is preventing us from finding our customers via search in Shopify.

We are unable to find accounts of some customers, but we are able to locate previous orders of said customers and see their names listed on the order, yet when we try search for that exact name via the customers page, we get blank.. nothing. This appears to only be with some customers, we are unable to find a pattern here at this point.

Customer accounts made over 5 years ago and ones made within the last 6 months both having this issue, some can be found, some cannot. This is becoming a real issue for us assigning orders to our customers when we cannot find their accounts. In one case, I assumed I had not made an account for a customer as we couldn't find any trace of his name or email address linked to his account, so I tried to make him a new account using the email address that was 'not found', only to be prompted with 'Email address already exists'.

Please just look into fixing this issue Shopify, we're kinda over you breaking your own platform time and time again.

[Reincarnated]

Contact support.  Sometimes the search just looses the link.  It will still be in the customer list and clickable, just not searchable.

Best Regards,

[Alex_Russell]

Already did this, no help was offered and no solution.

Not being able to search for our customers when creating an order create a much larger workload for us later on.

You cannot add a customer to an already processed / fulfilled order and the new "Edit" button on orders is basically useless, you cannot attach a customer to an order using that either.

This was not an issue a week ago.

[mickeyt]

I have been having the same issue this week. It has helped a couple of times to search by their email, but it is obviously not working the way it is supposed to.

[Alex_Russell]

@mickeyt Aye this is the usual method I use to find customers who's names are not showing up

[Helen]

Hey, @mickeyt! 

Helen here from Shopify Support. You are correct; This is not expected behaviour.

Sometimes the search function within your Shopify admin can become out of sync. I’m happy to take a closer look into this for you so that we can get it synced back up on your account. Please check your inbox for an email from me, so that we can proceed with this.

[Helen]

Hi, @Alex_Russell! 

I’m Helen from Shopify Support. I’m sorry to hear that the search function within your Shopify admin has not been behaving properly. I’m here to help! 

In order to diagnose the issue, I need to take a closer look at your account. Therefore, I am sending you an email to gather your store details so that I can proceed with getting this resolved for you. Keep an eye out for that.

[BecPods]

I'm also having the same issue. It's really causing problems when I'm trying to create draft orders and then email an invoice to a customer but I'm unable to find them even though they've ordered before. Can I also have someone look into my store?

[Reincarnated]

Hey Folks.

So there are a few options here.

First, You can chat into Support and see if they can do anything to force an update.

Second, there is one thing you can try on your end that Sometimes works.  You need to be careful though doing it, as a miss-click could delete people.

Go into Customers.  Select all on the page.  Select the "Select all 50+" option to choose everyone.  Click Actions.  Add Tags.  Add some dummy Tag to all of them like "SearchFix".  This will force the Platform to go through Customer by customer and add the tag, which should also trigger it to update the Search options because of the Change to each customer account.  Leave the Tag on there even after its fixed.  If it happens again, you can choose Remove tag instead to force another update.

Depending on how many customers you have, this could take a long while to do, and its not a guaranteed fix.  Its based on the idea of just updating the background info and forcing everything else to follow suit.  

WARNING:

Also if you Click DELETE by mistake, you will end up in trouble with it as there is no way to force
the info back, and all accounts will need to be remade from scratch with new passwords.  They 
can not be restored

Best Regards.

[Conjured_Char]

I'm also having the same issue with the API. When searching for a customer by email, it sometimes doesn't return any results, however when attempting to then create the customer, I get and "Email has already been taken" error. The customer exists, the search is just not returning any results. Is there any fix to this?

[Helen]

Hi, @Conjured_Char! 

Thanks for reaching out. The search function can sometimes require re-indexing, which sounds like what is happening here. I have a more thorough explanation of this in a recent response to a merchant’s post in the Community that you can read here.

Therefore, to proceed with trying this out for your store, I am sending you an email to authenticate your account and work towards resolving it for you. Keep an eye out for it!

[vereinsshop]

Hello Helen,

we are facing this issue in our orders list, and it has caused a significant increase in workload. Some orders are visible in the list but not searchable; regardless of whether we search by name, order ID, or order tag. Please let me know how we can proceed.

[vereinsshop]

Hello Helen,
as mentioned in my previous post we are facing the same issue. Could you help with this?

[yaacovj]

Hv th same issue.  Pls send me email too

Support@diamondveneer.com 

Tks much

Jacob 

[Helen]

Hey, @yaacovj!

I’m happy to re-index your search results as well to see if this helps. Just a heads up, depending on the size of your shop, it can take up to 48 hours for it to process.

Keep an eye out for my email!

[thenuelook]

Also having the same issue. Extremely frustrating and we've only been open for 4 weeks. I had this happen to me 3 times today, no way to look up their email in the system, but i specifically remember entering it and the rest of the data is in their customer profile. When i add the email, it says its taken, but i cant search the email to find where it is "taken" because it isn't actually taken by any other account, its just gone. This is unacceptable for a POS system - its the basics.

[Helen · Accepted solution]

Hey, @thenuelook. Thanks for reaching out about this, although I'm sorry to hear it has been so frustrating for you!

We’re happy to take a look and re-index your search results, which should help with what you're experiencing. We’ll need to access your account in order to do so. While we’re not able to provide account-specific support via the Shopify Community at this time, we’ll continue assisting you through live chat, email, or callback. Please visit the Shopify Help Center and log in to your account to create a support request.

Since this is the next step, I've marked this reply as the solution for the benefit of others who may discover this topic. Thanks!

[MarkN]

My company's store is having the same issue.  API calls to query on the email don't work either. 

The solution I've found for the time being is to use an export of your customers that includes the customer ID for each customer.  I used EZ Exporter to get this export (making sure to include the customer id field/column).

1. Open the export .csv

2.  Search for the email.

3. Copy the customer id

4. Open up https://{company}.myshopify.com/admin/customers/{customerID}