Can we merge duplicate customer accounts on our sales platform?

[makers18]

Has there been any updates or progress on the ability to MERGE CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS that are duplicates?  We have a ton and we basically began online sales in early March.  This is really needed to keep up with past orders and preferences.  We also offer rewards for our repeat customers and this system has really made tracking sales difficult.  

[Biordi]

AMAZING! 2 years later and Shopify has done nothing about this??? I know I am writing to a retired person. I just need to vent.

Ori

[PaulNewton]

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@Biordi wrote:

AMAZING! 2 years later and Shopify has done nothing about this??? I know I am writing to a retired person. I just need to vent.

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The issue is much older than that this is just a main thread.

And other shopify staff are either in the thread, or read it occasionally for use cases and merchant insight.

[impactcloset]

I am a brand new boutique and I have multiple customers that have different accounts.  Some of them because they have a different spelling of their name or used a different email address.  We sell online and in person in our mobile boutique using the POS.  I would like my orders from my customers to be clean and smooth and be able to pull up and see at a glance what a customer has purchased from us and how much they have spent with us.  Instead there are to many customers with orders under different names/email addresses.  What can I do - I would like to be able to merge these customers with their orders but I do not see that option . . . Why?  HELP!

[makers18]

We have had the same issues constantly, and it is only getting worse. It seems like a basic function of a system of that size with so many customers. Shopify continues to say they are not capable of doing this.

[SpencerCran]

It is kind of ridiculous that this has gone on for 5 years and is still not resolved. What is up, Shopify?

[James-21]

We only just started with Shopify but the Store Importer has created lots of duplicates even with customers who have the same name and address but the title is different. 

i can’t see why this wouldn’t be an easy feature to add

[Parmengo]

I agree with you this is a basic functionality and it is RIDICULOUS that it's taken more than 5 years to get it fixed.  We've had Shopify for the past 7 years and all they have done is increase their price and drastically reduce functionality. Time to go somewhere else.

[skoutshonor]

I am in need of this as well. I have many customers that order without creating an account and use their phone number then make another purchase with their email and create an account. This is frustrating for our efforts as well as the customer. Adding points manually to their account for our rewards program is frustrating as well.

[forbiddenfiber]

I would also like to be able to merge customers.  An example of how duplicate customers are create is one of my customers paid with apple pay, which defaults to a different email address than the one her customer account is set up under.  So her newest order is now located under a different customer, and she can't look up her order history all in one place anymore.  How can I fix this for her?

[makers18]

We continue to run into the same issue and our products are all custom, so it makes it a nightmare for us to be consistent with our customers.  Shopify claims it is too complex for them to develop, but it is done by others like Square and so helpful.  

[Tough_Traveler]

On the downside, this is an ongoing annoyance that Shopify seems to have no interest in fixing.  On the upside, I saw your company name and, being really into fiber, went to your website and bookmarked it, so you got a new customer!

[AdenaB]

A more helpful workaround would be if you could edit the customer on a sale.  So if someone goes in and adds a new account to buy something and you realize it's the same person, to be able to go and amend the customer who actually bought it, then delete the duplicate (which then doesn't have a sale).  It's so annoying trying to clean it up and realizing that I can't even delete the misspelled one because it "has a sale attached to it".  Is this an option?

[juliehtjb]

I've tried editing the email address associated with four duplicate customer records and get an error "that email address has already been taken." So the work around to edit the email address doesn't work. How can I at least get the same address associated with all of the duplicate customer records?

[begreen]

Yeah, we have the same problem with duplicate customer accounts. Usually they simply use a different email address!

Shopify please provide this functionality! It should be possible to assign these duplicate customer profiles to another. This is really, really an important functionality for us merchants!

[makers18]

We run into the same issue, so it keeps the accounts separated. Sometimes they just make an error like putting “.con” instead of “.com” and then there is nothing you can do. 
Definitely a basic function that Shopify needs to address and create.

[Luxion_Inc_]

Chiming in to vote for this too. A MUCH needed feature.

[dragonsgarden]

I sell digital products and my customers love keeping everything in one place. Some customers have duplicate accounts and there is no way for me to let them have all in one place without merging. It is a crucial feature to have!

[James_Wiltshire]

Hi Rae - I'd like to chime in here ( f9-audio.com)  .. I have several customers with multiple accounts and what appears to be the common cause is the difference between ordering on desktop / mobile as the different platforms can have different email addresses in auto-fill .. This is a particular issue with iOS as many people use Chrome / Firefox on desktops but these cannot be set as default browsers on iphone /ipad so Apple's own Safari is used ( or even facebook/ instagram's built in browser )  ... Often the auto-fill information is different and this will cause duplicate accounts 

I understand data protection causes a real issue with merging accounts but this is a feature that would benefit customers greatly so i feel should be dealt with 

Hope this helps 

[daniquixote]

Can't Shopify dedicate some development resources on this? Jeezuz you guys got rake in the profits from the pandemic but refuse to allocate time for features that customers are clearly asking for. Make sure the big wigs hear this.

[harrisonw16]

What happens is people simply mistype a letter in their email.

Example: Teera rather than Terra

Then they call in and say "Why haven't I gotten an email? I buy from you every month" and we cannot link the accounts. Most times it's customers who have bought 20+ times

[makers18]

We have faced the same issue, and it has negatively effected our communication with our customers and ability to see who our top customers are. 

[george_d]

+1

How is it possible that such a basic feature is not available? Especially since users have been begging for it? This is just another basic feature that Shopify has been promising for years, and that the competition has. How long do you think we will all ways before we jump ship?? I am dangerously close. I have a laundry list of thing I had to create workarounds for, or just give up on all together. This just may be the straw that broke that camel's back. I am sick of the empty promises.

Shopify admins, we all here need some ACTUAL ANSWERS OR ACTION ON THIS. Not empty promises. Give us a reason not to recreate our stores on Square. At this point I am willing to put in the work.

[dragonsgarden]

This is one of the top posts on the board, and no staff member took the time to give any updates or replies since last year. Sad really.

[Jye]

Hi Rae, 

I was wanting to find out how I merged customers in my Shopify store and came upon this thread.

It appears that the issue has not been resolved for a number of years now and a number of people are still requesting it.

Being able to merge customers to keep all of their orders and history under the one profile seems to be a vitally important feature in order to understand what your customers have purchased from you when they purchased it how frequently they have purchased and therefore what to offer them next to meet their needs.

What are the next steps from here to have this feature added?

For example are there a certain number of complaints or requests that you need to see for this feature to be taken seriously or added or is it something that individual users can pay for perhaps if Shopify are not willing to make the update themselves?

Thanks very much in advance. 

Jye

[Rich_Hamilton]

In an exchange with Shopify support a couple of years ago I was told that the only "effective" way to allow your voice to be heard on items such as this was to open up an official support ticket to report the problem or request the feature.  I.E. the development team, or even a manager, can't be bothered to check the community forums for issues like this. So, if you are a customer the best course of action is to open a support ticket on the issue.

[Rich_Hamilton]

Here's the page with contact information:

https://help.shopify.com/en/questions?utm_campaign=Guru+Ask&utm_medium=forum&utm_source=social#/cont...

[ScoutsOut]

Tried the chat thing. The representative just tried to delete one of the accounts!

[mikeyonaboat]

+1 here that we really need this feature! For our store, because our customers sometimes enter in only partial information (e.g. email and not phone, phone and not email) - so there ends up being two customer profiles for them and it causes a lot of trouble on the customer service end of things. 

[KristyCRA]

Thanks! I just opened a ticket too.

[michellegoo]

Trust me, I have opened up a support ticket with them.  I've called on this several times.  The standard response is, "We'll send this information to our developers and see if they can resolve the issue."  That was over a year ago...  But it never hurts to do it again.  Thanks for the reminder!

[James-21]

@Rich_Hamilton 

In addition to raising support tickets perhaps we can also be really clear and specific about what is being asked for i.e.

- a button / functionality for a Shop Owner to manually merge 2 records into a single master record, including all transactions, orders etc 

There might be other ways to get Shopify’s attention on this, such as perhaps reaching out directly to their developers (I think based in Canada) on LinkedIn or raising on Shopify social channels? 

[makers18]

Hello!  I would like to see if there has been any progress on Shopify's end to fix this issue that so many business face with customers.  Other than a "work around" is there any way that we can merge customer accounts, so we can properly collect customer data and monitor spending?  

[mrkasmith]

This is an important feature that we all need.  I've read all 11 pages of comments and it's clear why we too see duplicate customers.  Frustrating.  Let's move forward with improvements that your customers like us request.

[Bryan_Freefly]

It's disheartening to see how many people have requested this feature and to not see any improvements or updates on it in the changelog or announcements page. 

I reached out to support to find out what workarounds were available and none were offered that help the customer see their collected purchases. In fact, I got the same line from support that you provided, about watching for updates on the announcement page. 

Here's my primary use case, that hasn't been covered in the 11+ pages of comments in this thread: 

- Two employees from the same company place an order on our store, with their unique company emails (name@companyname.com). Someone from the company is the primary purchasing person, and they want to see all of the purchases from their company when they log in, and not just the orders they personally placed. The other software we use for tracking accounts has an option for this, to allow a primary account with secondary accounts or "subcustomers". Think of it as parent and child accounts. With no way to link the purchases across companies, even though they have the same @companyname.com email, the primary purchasing person can't see other orders placed by the company. Nor can we create comprehensive reporting in Shopify for them as a company. This is a bad customer experience. 

My secondary use case is: 

- You would be shocked at how many people have more than one email address they use regularly. They place an order under one email, and then their next order is under another. Then contact us from a third email. This creates a wild goose chase on our side to track down their order information. "Yeah, I ordered last week. Has it shipped?" "I don't see any orders under this email address, could you have ordered it under another email address?" "Potentially, I regularly use 4 different emails, can you check them all?" 

[Color_Reinholz]

Is there any update on this, we also need it! This seems like it should be a high priority for shopify given how common the need it

[elderberrygrove]

Is there a common factor in duplicate accounts?

Yes, customers forget a password, or that they have an account, and create a new acct. 

Being able to merge accounts would allow me to have better data on customers reordering.

Please include this much needed feature.

thanks!

[RBX]

Any updates on this one? It has been quite a while...

[GardenersKit]

Any update on being able to merge customer profiles? This seems like the most straight forward request and wanted by many of your clients. What is going on that we cannot merge two profiles??

[kristinking]

Importing my orders from Wordpress caused duplicate customers, once those same customers ordered from my store once it was on Shopify--despite the customer information being the same for all orders.

Being able to merge is very important. It allows us to track VIP customers who order often and how much money they have spent. It should definitely be a standard feature for Shopify, as with merging orders. Multiple orders happens when someone orders more than once right after another... there is no (easy) way combine it to ship them together. I care about my carbon footprint and do a workaround to ship it all together, but it is very time consuming and involves risk of many needless automatic emails being being sent to the customer. Tracking can get confusing too once I do the workaround.

So merging orders is not only more efficient, but better for the environment in regards to shipping. These features should be a priority for Shopify!

[Deborah_Davis1]

Is there any updates of this feature?  It would be really useful to help clean up our customer accounts.

[makers18]

Not a word unfortunately.

[JFlores001]

This feature is definitely needed!

I think some customer duplicates are made when a customer uses a different credit card, though not sure about this exactly. I'm sure it's also happening when a customer is orders online and then comes in-store to buy stuff.

One of the things that happens and is frustrating for both us and customers is when they're shopping in-store and want a receipt sent to an email address or phone #, but Shopify has six duplicate accounts for this customer (and only one has the correct email), and so their email address or phone # doesn't show up in the field, making this customer have to re-enter their information every time. This can be time consuming for us if we're trying to be quick with sales.

On the admin side, I haven't been able to enter the email address for the other duplicate accounts, so there's no real way for me to fix this issue without deleting accounts.

[Kevin_Hartman]

Hello Rae,

Can you tell us if this feature is even being discussed at Shopify?  Or is this a pipe dream we should all just wake up from? 

[michellegoo]

Sadly, it appears to be a pipe dream...

[mnearents]

An acceptable solution if merging customer accounts isn't possible would be to allow us to move orders between customers so that we can delete the old customer account. That would work for me as I would simply associate all the orders in account 1 with account 2, and then I could delete account 1. 

A full customer merge would obviously be better.

[PrecedenceDev]

I was just checking a client's service who has us as a customer. It seems that my initial personal orders linked/saved my Paypal email address (which, by the way, is extremely NOT ok) and then one order I made was a quick "oops I forgot these items" and that order did not save an email address at all, so for my personal account with them there are three customer records. I have tried to update all customers to the same email address, but this does not work either.

Then a new employee has been ordering from the business with her own email address instead of the business email address for business purchases, so if we'd made previous business purchases, this also would have created a new account that our business would have wanted to merge.

I hope this helps you resolve the issue and understand the requirement to be able to merge customers.

Editing existing customers does not "ensure that new orders are placed under the active account only" when there is ability to create MORE records.

Even the ability to allocate an order to another customer would sort some of these troubles.

JS

[hacketyapps]

We've also been dealing with this issue for our app Engagely. That's why we started on building a prototype to try and fix this issue. The biggest issue with our solution is how to transfer loyalty points or other app related data.

We'll update this thread once we have an mvp that merchants can try out.

[CrissChaney]

I would also like to have the ability to merge customer accounts- for us the problem is, if a customer puts in the wrong email address when ordering online, they don't receive their email notifications, but if they are a repeat customer- I can't put their correct email address in so that they can receive their order notifications, because it won't let me have two different customer accounts with the same email address, but then it won't let me merge the accounts- so now we're stuck going in circles....

[mnearents]

I wonder if someone could develop an app that allows you to associate
customer accounts together artificially. So that when an order
confirmation goes out, for example, the app could see whether there’s an
associated “parent” account and send a notification there too. Or when
you’re viewing orders, you could view them across the associated
accounts.  Obviously I don’t want to pay for another app, but it could
be a temporary solution. It would be doubly cool if someone developed it
as an open source app we could all self-host, thus preventing shopify
from making money on a public app. 

But also if we just keep responding to this thread it shows that it’s a
feature that needs consideration. That is if their UX designers follow
these threads. 

[CDRess]

Honestly, how is this not a feature? I have worked with several email, shipping, and POS systems in the past and I cannot think of one that didn't have this functionality. It is desperately needed for creating an accurate customer profile. Please consider implementing this ASAP.