Customer should select to overwrite default address

[JohnC]

I am increasingly hitting a problem whereby customers order gift products so they naturally choose a different name and shipping address leaving their billing address as is. However, shopify then updates the customers default address to the shipping address so the account still has their name but the recipients address - this is clearly stupid, and it is causing me big problems and lost money as many of my customers also have subscriptions and their address has been changed unbeknownst to me. I am now wasting time and money getting a private app developed to check all orders and warn me if the address has changed in this manner.

It also looks pretty dumb to my customers when they next log in to their account and see they have moved house to their friend/relation/colleague etc. address. When this address is in a different country it affects the pricing I offer for my subscription products which are post inclusive. I then have to explain to such customers I have over or undercharged them - all because they kindly sent a gift to their mum, dad, son etc.

I read elsewhere that this behaviour is deliberate in case the customer moves address. However, when they specify a different name they are clearly sending this to someone else so the default address should remain untouched. 

There are no warnings or prompts to the customer or settings available to the merchant to control this.

I would like to suggest two improvements to the checkout to help resolve this:

1 - never update the default address if the customer has specified a different name for shipping - this would hopefully be a simple fix that would solve most of these problems

2 - when shipping and billing address are different, both to each other and the default address, give the customer an option to update the default address from one of them. By default it should leave the default address alone.

I hope shopify take this suggestion seriously as I'm sure it is a common problem for other merchants and customers

John

[Stefanvr]

This is one of those things that amaze me.

How can such an overall good product have a list of the most banaal and downright mind-bogglingly stupid shortcomings?

I have a little grab bag of items to list whenever anyone asks me about issues they should be aware of when going over to Shopify.

As to Shopify taking this seriously, this issue has been knocking around for years along with many others, 0 movement.

[tsornin]

I'm running into this too, and in fact it's a huge security hole IMHO. This means if someone (NOT the customer) checks out and gives the e-mail address of an existing customer, but changes the name and shipping address to (anything else), that now becomes the default address for the account. What??? How is this even possible? Shopify needs to fix this!

[CharlesMJr]

I discovered the same issue when I was testing a new store.  I sent an email to Shopify Help last week and was advised over the weekend by a Shopify Support Advisor that the technical group had confirmed that this is the standard functionality.  I fully agree that this does not make sense and I feel the Shopify Support Advisor who was helping me believed this also.  I have asked the Shopify Support Advisor to submit a request for Shopify Development to consider changing the updating of a customer default address based upon changes in billing address vs ship to address as that is more likely to represent a change in the customer address than changes in the ship to address if they want to update the default address automatically (as I assume they will not want to add functionality for the customer to easily update their default address - the customer can change their default address but only if they know how to do it by viewing their stored addresses when they log onto their store account and then updating it as necessary - just not intuitive from a customer standpoint).  

[JenniferP]

This just happened to me with an Xmas gift I purchased.  It changed the default address for my subscription pet food -- on an entirely different vendor site -- and mailed a huge bag of chicken feed across the country to the person I sent the Xmas gift to!  Still trying to figure out how I can be made whole by Shopify -- this was not the pet food vendor's fault.

[Shawn17]

I know this is an old post but have you found a solution? It is a major headache for us. We sell a gift item as well and are constantly sending to the wrong address as a result of this. The worst is when it is from a draft order so we are the ones to put in the address and then still it gets overwritten when the customer goes to pay.

[JohnC]

@Shawn17  No still no solution. I feel shopify just ignore simple and obvious things like this - probably most of their product managers/business analysts/developers have never experienced running a business. Perhaps it will be like merging customer accounts and they will wake up after 9 years (yes NINE) and finally do something about it.

I now have automated scripts (rather crude and implemented outside of shopify) that check the address for all my subscription customers against the last subscription renewal order they placed and produce a list for me to manually check.