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.  

[MudandHoneyCF]

Shopify can we PLEASE get this option!?!!!!

[bpglick07]

Please add this!! It's really a pain to have customers who have 4 emails or who accidentally misspell theirs and we now have two customers for them.

[cherishdesigns]

I have the same issues. 

Mine comes from someone I know paying outside of shopify (cash at work for eg) and I need to put it in the system and forget that they have ordered in shopify so I accidentally create them a new account. 

Merging these sales and accounts would be very helpful.

Thanks

[comfrey]

Seems like a no-brainer.  Why is this taking so long?  It is hard to be a customer-focused business when the tools do not allow for such BASIC functionality.

Come on Shopify? 

Get on it, please.  Thank you.

[ScotBell]

My take is having the customer "fix it" is not a good solution.

The burden should not be on the customer. Likely the customer will be angered were we to suggest this, as the problem isn't their fault.

And it's likely that the customer won't be able to log into the various accounts they have created to consolidate. Were they able to / bother to / remember... then they would likely not have created multiple accounts to begin with.

[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*