Merge Customers

[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.  

[PaulNewton]

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@Paul_vd_Dool wrote:

Likely because they're not allowed to say it's not possible.

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Shhhh 😉 ,that's a frustration most merchants don't even know they have with shopify. Corporate non-policies of optimism that just create cultural pessimism in the ecosystem, which can be a fine thing.. in other industry platforms.

Not in ecommerce which contains within itself multitudes of other industries making that type of handling toxic to business owners who need actuality regardless of how complicated it is to candy coat a forced reality.

It's why issues like this, or the forums unanswered sections,  gets more and more unmanageable as time goes on because peoples feelings have to be kept glossy and brand copacetic.

I've read a theory from someone saying it might have to do with the "guest checkout option" and it causing some architectural issues. But I doubt that.

My personal best guess is that it's indeed an architectural issue but then caused by old legacy code that's impossible to change without breaking everything.

Architectural and procedural with legacy as a force multiplier the longer it goes, is my take. Account merging is a process not something fixed alone by diffing rows of data. For a single small business sure use excel ez gg , anything larger with auditing and here we are..  stuck.

I've created it less than two months ago in an attempt to not truly solve the issue of duplicate customer accounts (which would be actually merging accounts) but at the very least provide an alternative option

Great viewpoint, merchants should use the best tools available for a problem.

I wouldn't bet on any native merging feature in the near feature at least prolly until far after some other key platform features exist; like logging, backup , or undo. Some ancillary fundamental thing that facilitates merging as a process because merging accounts is a super messy thing once money is attached through various means.

[makers18]

Oh wow. That is horrible. I don’t understand why it isn’t a basic feature.

[JAndersonCT]

Agreed, I had to tell a customer today that I didnt have the ability to merge her account.  It was rather embarrassing.  

[LaFlamencadeBgn]

I need this function too.

[mnearents]

This is a feature Shopify desperately needs. The biggest reason for us:

1. Forgot they had an account because of time between purchases, used a different email on subsequent orders. 

Second biggest reason:

2. We imported a ton of customers from when we weren't on Shopify. That data was old and by the time we relaunched our shop, so many people had lost access to the old emails and were using new ones, and they couldn't remember having used the old ones. 

From a UX perspective, you can never expect customers to remember which email they used for purchases. We have thousands of duplicate accounts with orders on both accounts so that we can't simply delete one of the accounts. It's super important for us to have a single source of truth for each customer.

[eatpye]

Yes, this should be a high priority! Just to clarify, it's not an "account" that causes a duplicate customer record and there are many ways 

in which it can happen that have already been outlined by other users. In addition to customer loyalty, this is critical for marketing segmentation.

As an example, we use Klaviyo for it robust features and how well it can work with Shopify. Oftentimes, the key functionality is targeting specific email messaging

to customers based on their past behavior such as products purchased, LTV, number of purchases, etc. I could go on and on. For example, I would like to use Klaviyo

to target a segment of customers that used to be frequent purchasers but fell off. If my messaging was asking why they stopped buying from us or offers an incentive to come back, while they are actually still purchasing but with a different email address or phone number, that's a problem. So, now because I see that this would happen a lot, 

I am hesitant to proceed with my marketing because I don't know how to filter this out. So, firstly, I need to figure out the best way to merge customer records and Shopify

needs to be able to identify when a customer is creating a duplicate customer record and prompt them to update the old record with the new email or phone number or whatever to prevent

duplicates going forward. That would be slick. The merging part is old tech. I used to merge customers in Magento over a decade ago. Thanks for listening. Caleb

[Discoverytrek]

This is an important feature for us. Duplicate accounts are often created when a customer uses more than one email address or changes email addresses, or if they forget a password, they just create a new account.

[eatpye]

I feel like it would be less of a problem if Shopify references the phone number as opposed to email.

[dprose]

I would love to see this feature as well!

We recently integrated Shopify with HubSpot. It pulled in all of our Shopify customers and for the first time, I could actually see accounts that HubSpot flagged as possible duplicates. Out of 40k total customer accounts in Shopify, there are 1,500 probable duplicates. That's a lot! Many of these are legitimate secondary email addresses/accounts that people use to differentiate between personal and work accounts, or between different family members. But I would say at least 10% of them are just email address typos. For instance the user typed "@gmil.com" instead of "@gmail.com". Then when they realized they weren't getting any email notifications for their orders, they went back and created another user account with the correct email address. So we probably have at least 150 duplicate accounts that are the result of typos and we don't have a good way to correct those accounts in Shopify.

The ability to surface possible duplicate accounts and provide an option to merge accounts would be incredibly helpful!

[BYSAlways]

Hi,

We have this issue as well. The way it happens with us is we do an in person/ pos sale and the customer chooses to enter their phone number for the receipt. Later the customer signs up for text marketing and a second profile is created. I try to edit the original profile by entering their phone number, this is when I'm met by the error that "the number is already taken". I do not have an email for the customer because they've chosen only to provide their number. 

Then when I look in Klaviyo the customer shows up as a new customer, with no purchases, but in shopify they have multiple POS purchases. This becomes an issue when I'm segmenting and trying to email those "without purchases". 

Thank you.

[LuxEmporium]

It seems like some of our customers have ordered from multiple email addresses. It would be great if we can merge them.

[Lawson_Thalmann]

Okay, we're all on the same team here so let's try to come up with a workaround since Shopify isn't helping us any time soon. I have a crazy idea.... Please let me know thoughts people have on whether this would work. This would mainly be for Shopify Plus stores but in theory regular users could create a whole new account.... 

1. Open a new "store" on your Shopify account. This gives you a clean slate with 0 customers. Thus, no duplicate customers. But, also no orders. 
2. For all the duplicate customers, you create ONE account for them in this new store. For example, someone has one account under name@gmail.com and one for name@company.com . There’s a bunch of orders in the original store under both accounts. Ask the customer which email they want to use going forward (and phone number). Say it's name@gmail.com. We create the new account in the new store under that. 
3. Then, we can backdate that account with the orders from the two duplicate accounts by creating orders via API under that new account for name@gmail.com in the new store. (Could also use the transporter app or the Syncio app which you can also transfer products). This would allow the customers to see their whole order history under one customer record rather than 2+. It would also still give us the historical analytics within that new store.

Thoughts? I have to exhaust all possible workarounds before concluding I need to switch platforms altogether. Would love to stay on Shopify if possible. 

[Kevin_Hartman]

No one wants to pay for another subscription from Shopify, and rebuild their entire website, including transferring domain names.  Only to have to manually merge customers as they come on board.  And redoing and post dating all existing orders it even crazier.  I currently have over 100k orders from about 6k customers.  And they duplicates will still occur thus you're back to square one.    Doing shopify's export>excel>merge>import workaround would be easier, but still stupid. 

[PaulNewton]

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@Lawson_Thalmann wrote:

1. Open a new "store" on your Shopify account. This gives you a clean slate with 0 customers. Thus, no duplicate customers. But, also no orders. 

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For Plus use expansion stores, or sandbox stores talk the the merchant MSM for that Plus store.

• For all the duplicate customers, you create ONE account for them in this new store.

For ELIGIBLE customers with duplicate accounts.

Validation & authorization has to be a first class citizen/word in specing this type of stuff for large retailers. Revenue can be lost when accounts vanish that shouldn't when tons of accounts are involved. Wouldn't do this this without validation as a requirement for which accounts are allowed to merge; most likely involving a customers request with dual auth, or accounts-mgr sign-off, etc.

Else a big problem can become if any of that data was ever backfilled/overwrite the source an account is gone and no longer in stuff like funnels, marketing campaigns, purchase behavior. And some other account gets things like purchase behavior from the now attached orders.

(Could also use thetransporterapp or theSyncioapp which you can also transfer products).

Also see the usemechanic app for scripting custom business logic like this.

This would allow the customers to see their whole order history under one customer record rather than 2+

Some of this would be easier if we could just create objects in liquid through json then we could put eligible secondary account data in customers.orders from metafields and skip alot of the reason for needing to merge.

[Paul_vd_Dool]

@Lawson_Thalmann, a potential issue with your idea is the fact that you can't actually reproduce an order to the letter. It will get a different order id and an order date of the time you're creating it. So an order that was actually made last year will now register as if been made recently. I've explored that avenue for my app, thinking I could perhaps replicate orders to an account and delete the original orders and then the customer account that is marked as duplicate. But that messes with metrics and might force you to get really creative with your bookkeeping since revenue from last year will now show as revenue from this year.

[Kevin_Hartman]

Here is the latest I received from Shopify:

Hey Kevin,

Azhar from Shopify Support here, hope you have been well today.

Just quickly reaching out regarding our conversation from earlier, I've just heard back from that technical team regarding your request to get additional information on whether you would be able to merge customers in the future.

The technical team specified that there are currently no public facing documents regarding this request, resultantly we would not be able to divulge any information on when exactly this feature may be introduced. However, we were both able to notice that it is indeed a common request by other merchants, and resultantly it is extremely likely that the design team is looking to implement this in the future.

I know this may not have been the exact answer you were looking for, however currently this is all the information we are able to provide regarding this.

[indignaz]

Talking about something and committing to something are two totally different things, and you have a huge amount of your customer asking for the same simple feature.

This makes me feel unconfortable of being one of your customers

[2faroffroad]

Adding my request to the pile of others... 

Just got off the phone with a customer who checked out via phone number. He was about to file a chargeback because the order was not showing up under his account. Figured I could just merge so it would show..... 

NOPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seems simple...

Do you need me to draw up a simple SQL line for you to show your "team"?

Maybe they are not skilled enough to accomplish this. IDK. 

[Tough_Traveler]

We turned off the option to check out with a phone number.  It created too many duplicate accounts.  Even worse, people who check out with their phone number later want to add their email address to the order so they can get automatic updates, and we can't because the email belongs to the "other" customer.

I once heard the suggestion that Shopify won't do it because of worry over violating customer privacy laws.  For example, if I accidentally merge two accounts that shouldn't have been merged, now Customer A is getting Customer B's private information.  It's not like credit cards have been stored in the account, but perhaps there is some other privacy concern.

[Kevin_Hartman]

That could be true.  But why would they not let us know this?  At least it would settle it.    But they could also put a disclaimer popup when we do merge customers that would hold us responsible, and I am willing to take on that responsibility. 

[PaulNewton]

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@Paul_vd_Dool wrote:

 you can't actually reproduce an order to the letter. It will get a different order id and an order date of the time you're creating it. So an order that was actually made last year will now register as if been made recently.

that messes with metrics and might force you to get really creative with your bookkeeping since revenue from last year will now show as revenue from this year.

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Old way was nixed in ~2017

https://community.shopify.com/c/api-announcements/upcoming-changes-to-the-quot-created-at-quot-value... 

So in a way ,when the default properties aren't reliable after a merge , a current blocker for app/workarounds acceptance is an inability to supplant other properties, like metafields, to get back accurate reporting.

It would still be kludge with created_at not being backdate able, but maybe shows a fundamental feature request sidestepping the core issues that could have more chance to be made than account-merging.

What I mean by using other properties as an alias of another property i.e. created_at swapped for processed_at , order.metafields.account_merge.created_at, etc etc in places like reports/analytics. Like an admin setting. 

Note properties like processed_at are not exposed in places like liquid for themes or notifications so yet another alias is needed. More kludge.

[PaulNewton]

@ all, In case you missed it there is a older sister thread, thatcurrently has some very good shopify replies with info and a bit of internal insight as to why this is such a hard problem that will take time: 

Shopify-Gabe: Yes, this feature request goes back to even before 2015 unfortunately, and we currently have a few request tickets in our developer backlog. Good News: The collective status is now "in planning"

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/merge-two-customer-accounts-into-one/m-p/1330405... 

[kardenlane]

Duplicates happen in different ways.   When this happens we have no way to accurately look at a customers lifetime history because we can’t merge accounts. 

- duplicates can happen when doing a mass import via a csv file

-duplicates can happen when a customer uses a different credit card

- duplicates happen if the customer has multiple email addresses

- duplicates happen sometime when customers place orders online

This is a basic function of most any other software we use in my other businesses.   

[taylortoolworks]

Being able to Merge customers would be extremely beneficial for our company as well. 

[TastyTiger]

Doesn't matter how duplicates happen, matters that we can MERGE them when it does. 🙂 Seriously, doing the right work is making them mergable. Just removing the barrier when I try to change customer X's info on one of their "extra" accounts could work. It won't allow me to add an email address for that customer if it's "already in use." Remove that baloney from the admin side and we all win. 


The duplicates happen when a customer orders and somehow the system didn't catch their email, or when they order with different email addresses, or when they order with just a phone number.

Some of my customers have 3-4 accounts at this point... Of course it's the better customers that I want to treat well but cannot do so in any reasonable fashion. 

Time to spend more time on this than whatever you're spending dev time on yet? 

[Abdalla89]

Hi Rae,

Any updates regarding merging customers. I just moved to Shopify, and I have added all my old customers and orders in person. Now, a returning customer has made an order and a new account was made. the previous account that I made was with his phone number, and now he used his e-mail, although his phone number is on the shipping information of the order. 

When I tried to add his number it says that the number already exists, it would be very great just to have the option of merging either by e-mail or phone number, if any conflict was found.

[Tough_Traveler]

@Abdalla89 Look above the customer name on the order, and you will see the option to
Remove Customer. Remove him and then click "Add customer" and add the
"original" version of him. You should be able to then delete the duplicate
account and add his email address to the original account.

[WDSAdmin]

You can not delete the old customer after you reassign the order, as the database still has ties to it. Additionally, if you sell digital content like we do you must go into that platform (for us it's FetchApp) and also make changes to the order to make its download accessible to the customer. Manageable for a single order, unacceptable for any amount of volume.

This "change of customer" is a band aide at best, and a poor one at that.

[swestypants]

Has there been an update to this? We've noticed an uptick when people choose to use PayPal. PayPal seems to override the email they are using to check out - which has made it really frustrating and impossible for customers to maintain their rewards. 

[Paul_vd_Dool]

Shopify is actively working on a solution. I can't say when we can expect anything.

[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?