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.  

[Tough_Traveler]

Asking the customer to delete a duplicate account wouldn't solve the problem, as the issue isn't the customer's own account, but Shopify's recognition of the same customer as different people.

As an example: Lisa has never created an account, but she's placed two orders, one using her email address and one using her phone number.  Shopify considers her two different customers.  It's impossible to add her email address to the order with just a phone number, because that belongs to "Lisa #1."  Obviously, since Lisa doesn't have an "account" there's nothing for her to delete.  And even if she could, what would happen to the order associated with that Lisa? There really needs to be a way to merge Lisa #1 & Lisa #2.

[dragonsgarden]

It's a big problem for people that offer digital downloads. If a customer purchased something and downloaded with email1 and on next order made an order with email2 there is no way for them to go back and retrieve previously downloaded files to have all in one place, unless I make them re-purchase them with a 100% discount code so they can keep a library all in one place.
Had some customers making a new email address that had to re-purchase and download a whole library of 50+ items. :s having a merge function would be just a 1 click thing to get all in one place, while now we need endless workarounds and customer guidance to achieve something that appears to be so simple on other platforms.

[Rich_Hamilton]

@dragonsgarden - off topic, but can you share a link to your store? Curious about your setup...we also sell digital content...

[ScotBell]

Thanks for asking. Our site is www.woodenboatstore.com

Let me know if you have questions / comments. We have a variety of items
that are available as print or digital... magazines, plans, some books
(especially how-to that we publish, study plans, a few paper models. We've
been selling PDFs for about 12 years. First via ZenCart (as our Sitelink
site could not), then via CommerceV3, and now through Shopify.

I'd be interested in seeing your site as well.

scot@woodenboat.com
www.woodenboatstore.com

[dragonsgarden]

Yes, here it is. I sell Embroidery and Sewing Patterns alongside physical products. 😊

https://www.dragons-garden.eu

[Powski]

Come on!

Quickbooks lets you do this. This is a massive PITA. FIX IT, please.

[CM269901]

We need this too! I have only been using my Shopify store for a few months and already have encountered this issue. 

Instances I have seen:

*Someone wanted to update their email and instead of reaching out they made a new account.

*Someone paid with their pay pay account that had a different email attached.

*Spouse made an order for them

*Forgot password and made a new account

it would be useful to select all that you want to merge then select the one that you want to keep as the main one. 

[Matt37]

Yes Please let me Merge Customers!!!!!  

This customer has 5 entries with transactions on each. I can't delete them because I don't want to lose her history.  We often have customers who ask about previous orders.  

WE HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR THIS FOR 4 YEARS.    

[AmbayaGold]

Indeed this has happened to a number of our customers. They have a problem with their account and sign up with a new one. This is also a problem with order history and applying the same discount to the customer. 

[AlphaWade]

+1 on this. My customers signed up with email then on their next order, they sign up with phone. Now, there are duplicate names.  We need the merge feature ASAP.

[Flightmasterone]

Yes, this is very much needed!

[alexxduvall]

Also chiming in to ask for this feature. 

We have multiple duplicate accounts - and a lot of our customers ask us to pull up their purchase history, so this becomes really tedious. 

How duplicates normally happen for our store is that a customer will make a purchase in-store through our POS and give their name but decline to give their email - then they'll make a purchase on our website at a later date which associates their name with an email/phone number - but then we wind up with two customer profiles for them and two separate purchase histories, sometimes 3 for one customer: just name, name & email, name & phone #.

[AllieRae]

I definitely agree with this comment - would be great if it were a feature they were focused on building. So difficult to work around this!

[michellegoo]

I'd like to reply to Rae from Shopify if possible as our store has the same issues with needing to merge customer accounts.  

1. We have an online and POS presence.  When customers use a different email address online, they now have 2 different accounts.
2. If a customer checks out at POS and staff forgets to put in their customer name, if they use a different credit card at check out, it comes up as Visa Cardholder, thus creating a different customer account.  When we try to go back and edit the profile, it lets us put the customer name in, but when we put in the email, it says that email is already in use so we cannot add that purchase to the customers profile - thus creating two different customer accounts.
3. If a name is misspelled on the customer profile, when the customer comes in and staff is looking it up, they end up creating a new profile with the correct spelling, not knowing there is an account, it just needs to be edited.  When we go back to correct the old spelling, we are unable to merge the files due to the 'email already in use' issue.

This makes it difficult to accurately gauge spending thresholds of customers, loyalty rewards for customers (with more than one account), it makes it tedious when returning without receipts because we have to look up their receipts under all of their profiles, it gives an inaccurate count for number of customers when doing emails and it duplicates emails when a customer has 2 different emails on their  different accounts.  

If there could be a way to merge customer accounts without losing any of the purchasing history, that would be fabulous and would get rid of all the issues listed above. 

[makers18]

100% agree and have the same issues you have.  It makes it very hard to track our loyal customers and their true spending habits. 

[CheeseTherapy]

This is crazy that a solution hasn't been created for this. I just did an SMS campaign to people who haven't placed an order yet. Turns out there were a lot in this customer segment who actually had, just that they had more than 1 account created. Some customers were really pissed off that they were considered someone who hadn't bought before when they had bought many times and were some of my VIP customers. This lack of ability to merge clients is affecting my business' reputation when I do these types of marketing campaigns. Come on Shopify, I pay you a lot of money each month, help us!

Sam

Cheese Therapy

www.cheesetherapy.com.au

[Tough_Traveler]

Yes, we REALLY need this feature.  The problem is even worse than just not being able to keep track of our repeat customers or market to them.  It actually interferes with processing current orders, which is the essential function of Shopify. 

This is what happens: Bob, a long-time customer whose email address is bob*gmail.com places an order, but accidentally types bobb*gmail.com.   Obviously, Bob never gets email confirmation of his order. So, he gets in touch and asks what happened, and I let him know all is well and it's shipping later today.  Then I try to update the order with his real email, but I can't put in his real email address because it's already taken by "Other Bob."  Who is the same guy. 

Now Bob is not going to get his order confirmation (which serves as his receipt), or his tracking number, or any of the other communications the system sends automatically.  And if we need to communicate with him about his order, I and my staff won't be able to look on the order to find his email address - we'll have to remember to look at our notes to find it.

I really can't understand why Shopify is not able to make it possible to merge customers.  It doesn't seem that complicated at all. I wonder if someone could develop an app that did it?

[TexasPatina]

Yes we need this feature, its crazy i cant just select the two accounts and merge the data together, the work arounds are impossible.

[Will_Cervarich]

We also need this for all of the same reasons others have already.

[Naomi_Lignier]

Yes we really need this option too! Had a customer mispell their email address and make an order... but they already had a prior account so I can't correct the email address in the customer profile (only in the order). I was surprised to not find an easy merge option.

[jjansen]

Any progress being made on this?  It would be of great assistance to us as well.

[AlexaGJemima]

We often get duplicates for one reason or another, but the most interesting I've found is when a customer pays with a card before I've added the customer to the cart and the card creates a new customer automatically, based on the name on the card. 

[OptiShotGolf]

Please make this an option.

[templeflakes]

Adding another voice to the "how is this not available yet" crowd.  Really curious how shopify prioritizes features when a request with 16 pages of comments apparently isn't something worth implementing. Sure would love to see a uservoice-like let me vote for features I need and let shopify identify things they are working on type clarity of user requests and company efforts.

[Kevin_Hartman]

We all need to hit up their support lines and request this over and over, via phone, email and chat. 

[mrkasmith]

Such a clear topic worthy of a "we hear you and a solution is near response"

[george_d]

We should, but I am not sure how much good it will do.

[MJ5]

This is an ongoing request from merchants and it is something that Shopify really needs to address as an urgent feature. Merging customer records should be core functionality. Duplicate customer records are common especially for an omnichannel retailer where a customer can be set up online and through physical store transactions. If Shopify wants their POS offer to be taken seriously, the development of customer merging functionality needs to be a priority.

Reading all the historic posts, Shopify doesn't appear to be taking this seriously. They should.

[jjansen]

Unfortunately, since this is such a long standing issue it looks like the only way to see action on this is to migrate to another platform entirely.  BigCommerce is looking better and better.

[Lawson_Thalmann]

Shopify does a great job of educating about how to increase CLTV (see here), but what's missing here is a fundamental concept that you'll never actually know your CLTV if you don't merge contacts. Your CLTV is liable to be cut in half every time a customer (or cashier) inadvertently creates a duplicate account. That duplicate account now also shows up in your conversion report as a newly acquired customer that might be celebrated by those who haven't realized how prolific duplicate accounts can be in a Shopify run business. So, now you have 2 metrics that Shopify will tell you to track, but it's really meaningless. They need to include in this lesson to take those metrics with a massive grain of salt! 

P.s. as I'm writing this, it looks like they prioritized making the UI on this community page like 4% better 😉 Good job! That's really moving the needle for our businesses..... *eye roll* 

[george_d]

I suggest we reply to that email blast about beautification of the UI accordingly. I just replied to it, with gusto. What an insult that email is. I personally don’t care about beautification if they ignore this issue for years and can’t provide us with such basic functionality.

[Fogo_Andrew]

Would love to see this ability. Super common with work vs personal email addresses or nicknames ending in multiple accounts.

-Andrew

[bongfooodie]

Sometimes customers create account with an email address and sometimes with mobile numbers. A merge feature would help us to lookback into order details of such customers. Alternatively block users to create an account if their contact information is already in the system.

[TedBikes]

This is truly a much needed feature.  Repeat customers pay with different cards at the POS which creates multiple histories for the same customer.  Yes the staff member should ask their name first before processing the transaction but it is not always feasible and is often overlooked during busy periods in the store.  The customer database is messy as a result and it makes searching a customer's purchase history quite difficult.

[Paul_vd_Dool]

It's been a while since my shameless plug, it's back a few pages, and I keep seeing messages of people with this issue. So if you all don't mind, I want to repeat myself and say that anybody with this issue might want to try out my app Doppelganger.

https://apps.shopify.com/doppelganger-app

It doesn't really merge accounts together as that is not possible but rather links them. Within the app, you can then see the full purchase history of a customer. I like to say it's not the perfect solution but it's the best next thing.

I've launched the app in October and am still working on adding new features that will hopefully alleviate the issues that come with duplicate customer accounts. Input (ideas) on new features is very much appreciated.

[VVBKBH]

I don’t want to give a third party my customers’ personal data. Your company’s *solution* shouldn’t be necessary @Paul_vd_Dool 

[Paul_vd_Dool]

That's fair. Granted, there are a ton of apps out there that require access to data like orders and customers so Doppelganger isn't an outlier in that aspect. But it's very good that you have such a point of view on handling your customer data.

If it's any consolation, Doppelganger only processes customer data within the app on your shop. It doesn't store anything in its own database other than some data of the shop itself.

[PaulNewton]

@VVBKBH I don’t want to give a third party my customers’ personal data. Your company’s *solution* shouldn’t be necessary @Paul_vd_Dool

---

@Paul_vd_Dool wrote:

That's fair. Granted, there are a ton of apps out there that require access to data like orders and customers so Doppelganger isn't an outlier in that aspect. But it's very good that you have such a point of view on handling your customer data.

If it's any consolation, Doppelganger only processes customer data within the app on your shop. It doesn't store anything in its own database other than some data of the shop itself.

---

A big sentiment that makes alot of merchants shy away from apps unfortunately not just customer account related ones. The way data privacy is shaping at some point their may need to be an affordance for these types of situations to obscure/restrict specific information served to apps.

So maybe, in any future api feedback about merging through apps , hashing(vaulting?) should be brought up as a first class feature.

 Since in it's crudest forms such apps would either be doing manual merge where nothing is even parsed because the merchant|staff is doing the confirmation, or trying to automatically merge by string matching some fields; so in the automatic case it wouldn't matter if the info is hashed between dupe accounts if it's the same string it will create the same hash. Fuzzy matching or inferencing would be a different issue.

[Rahamy13]

While I understand your sentiment @VVBKBH , the fact is we, the Store owners, have been asking for this functionality for a DECADE now... and Shopify (apparently) refuses to fix the issue. So Paul's efforts are very much appreciated, as it least he is moving towards some semblance of a solution, which Shopify apparently has no intention of doing. 

[AllieRae]

Thanks Paul. But as you have said it best, it isn't a fix. I don't want to go into a separate app to see history. When there are a bunch of people in the shop, and one customer is asking what size jean they bought but has multiple accounts under their name, this isn't an easy solution.  

It is shocking how many basic features are missing from POS. Shopify has 3 billion in revenue but can't hire the proper team to implement basic features/functions.....

[Paul_vd_Dool]

Let me put my sales hat on for a second @AllieRae and tell you that in the Shopify Admin you can easily go from a (native) customer page to the customer inside my app.

*takes hat off

But I get how even that can be cumbersome in a store with customers.

[claire_rr]

I actually can't believe this is still an issue, I've been following and requesting this for about 6 years.

For us, it most often happens when:

1. customer places some orders using only a phone number and some using an email address; or

2. customer submits an order online with a typo in their email address. we can't then update their email because it already belongs to another customer.

If only we could DELETE a customer from an order, then we could add the correct customer from an order. Once we've been through that we could delete the customer profile with no orders attached. Surely this is not that hard to do from a developer perspective? And it would make shopify a MUCH better platform. Please, please consider this!

[Kevin_Hartman]

Keep hitting up their chat and email support for this issue.  

[AllieRae]

It is shocking how many basic features are missing from POS.

1. store credits

2. properly run and reconcile inventory at your brick and mortar

3. multiple exchanges on the same transaction

4. merging customers. 

The have 3 billion in revenue but can't hire the proper team to implement basic features/functions.....

[sspooner]

AGREED!!! We have said this since the beginning I’m so happy you’ve made a list because that is the same issues we’ve written down as well!

Why can’t they fix this??

[sspooner]

AGREED!!! We have said this since the beginning I’m so happy you’ve made a list because that is the same issues we’ve written down as well!

Why can’t they fix this??

[carolerains]

Customers frequently use a different email on subsequent orders. We need to be able to merge them to properly track their total number of orders and spend. Sellers have been asking for this update for years, please escalate it Shopify!

[asm123]

Just bumping this up in the Shopify world! I'd LOVE to see this feature! 

[CDRess]

@Helen I saw you'd been replying to a different thread regarding this issue. Was hoping you'd look through this YEARS long thread, as well.

This is a constant problem.

It is crazy to me that other, far less robust platforms are able to make this feature happen but Shopify cannot. It is such a turn off, especially considering the amount of money I send to you monthly as the "industry standard" POS/commerce platform.

I read that you said you'll be adding it as a Feature Request. Is there somewhere that customers can add, or "thumbs up" feature requests? I want to involve my network of boutique owners in FLOODING you with requests for this feature to see if there's any way to actually force you to get to work on it.

[2faroffroad2]

Maybe we are thinking about this wrong. 

Maybe we should start listing why a company like Shopify would NOT want this feature added. 

- Merging would mean on 1 "listed" customer instead of 2. 

- Merging would mean there is only data record to sell vs 2 or more.  

- Merging users is not profitable so therefore they care less what we think. 

What's some other?