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.  

[Lauren_Fennema]

Hi! Any update on this feature?

I know Shopify plans to roll out a bunch of new functionality - hoping this has been prioritized. Would be super helpful for Shopify to help:  

1. Scan a set of data points to identify potential customers to merge (first name, last name, ship to address) 

2. Produce a list of customer records that could be the merged

3. Allow us to auto-merge or select records and merge. 

Currently we have a ton of repeat customers showing up as "new" due to: 

- originally checked out with email, then checked out again with mobile #

- mis-spelled email

- checked out using a nickname or abbreviated name (i.e. Ginni vs Virginia, Jenn vs Jennifer)

- checked out without email on our POS, then checked out with an email on web

As everyone has outlined, it is extremely time consuming to understand new vs repeat customers, not to mention a hit to our business. Retention is the key to ecommerce success and identifying repeat customers is Ecommerce 101. This is the kind of functionality I would expect to be native to Shopify, not pushed to apps or other paid services. 

I love all the perks and partnerships (i.e. marketing tools, facebook stores, plugins, etc) but would also love to see Shopify prioritize basic native functionality like merging or managing crucial data points like repeat customers. 

[makers18]

There has been no progress at all, or at least no communication from Shopify.  It is obviously a major issue for the businesses, but Shopify has not addressed or made this a priority.  Very disappointing as a business owner trying to grow our online business.  

[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.

[joshdane]

We are also looking for merge customer functionality. 

Or at least Shopify natively notifying us someone is a repeat customer. 

[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?" 

[ScoutsOut]

No merging still

[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. 

[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

[abielski]

This is a much needed feature indeed. At our store, a customer signed up once with her email address and second time with their phone number, and now there are two customer accounts for her.

[Kevin_Hartman]

When will shopify at least start to address this issue?  I brought this up 11 years ago and still nothing.    How hard can it be?  Your work arounds only cause more work, very inefficient. 

[mkmnails]

Please please please update this!

[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??

[jenniferj1]

For us it happens on point of sale A LOT. If a customer is not added to the cart BEFORE they use a credit card - it defaults to the name of the person on the credit card. Not just "no customer" so I can add one later... it literally sets up a brand new customer with just the first and last name of the card. Either get rid of auto-generating a customer from a credit card or let me merge customers!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have multiple businesses that send runners each with their own card but I KNOW the purchases are for a single business. I can change the name to match but I can't re-use the businesses email or phone number. I've only been using point of sale for 5 weeks and I already have over 15 customers for a single business. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TRACK ANYTHING!?!?!! And since I can't re-use email or phone addresses I can't even put in a phone number to pull them all up. I have to make sure each has the name typed in the same.

So for point of sale - it's not even an archived vs. active thing. It is literally creating new customers with each credit card purchase!!

Yes, I know I could just "make sure to add the customer to the cart first" but that is not a realistic solution. Things happen. I have a line of people waiting to check out. The courier doesn't know which store sent them, or my employee forgets. We need to be able to merge customers.

PS- I can't enter a company name unless I have a physical address associated with it even if it is a business not a person making the purchase.....Company name should be a basic info field and not require an address to enter. Especially with POS. I have runners come in and say this is for "Business B" and I have to put "Business B" in the last name field so it will pull it up for employees... Or they have to look it up on a hard copy list (in 2021!)... not everyone knows the first and last name of a business owner or sales manager..... uuuugggggghhhhhhh

[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.

[Lindsay_Sevigny]

We would love this to be a feature.  We have many customers who have several customer profiles, because they either use different credit cards in-store and don't provide an email, or different email addresses online.  For example we have one customer who has 4 profiles, because she shops in-store and online.  She has used 2 different email addresses online, and has also used 2 different credit cards in-store, which has created 2 different profiles. 

The ability to merge her profiles (and all of the other customer duplicates we have) into one would make it easier to track her purchases, look up her purchases if she needs to exchange and forget her receipt, and for rewards program usage.  

Am I making things up, or did this used to be a feature years ago?