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Why is merging duplicate customers complicated in Shopify?

AnnH
Visitor
1 0 19

It looks like I'm not the only one seeking to merge duplicate customers.  It seems this has been requested for years now with Shopify claiming it's too complicated.  I used Square for years before moving to Shopify and while there aren't too many things I miss about Square the ability to merge customers is one of them.  If it's not too complicated for Square to do it then how is it too complicated for Shopify which is certainly a more powerful platform/POS than Square?  

Accepted Solution (1)

stellalee
Shopify Staff
16 9 11

This is an accepted solution.

Hey there! I’m happy to announce that you can now officially merge customer profiles! Thanks to your advocacy and feedback - you can merge customer profiles to ensure you have the most accurate view of your customers.

Identify duplicated customer profiles with the same name, phone number, email address, or another overlapping attribute, and then merge customers to make sure you maintain quality customer data.

To merge customer profiles:

  1. Search for a duplicate customer in the Customers page of your Shopify admin.
  2. Click on the customer’s name and review their customer profile data to identify what data needs to be kept or removed. 
  3. Click into one of the duplicate profiles .
  4. On the bottom right of the profile you will see a heading called, Customer Data.
  5. Click the button in that section that says Merge customer.
  6. Search for the customer profile you intend to merge. 
  7. Complete the merge steps.

 

Keep in mind, not every customer profile can be merged. There are some limitations for merging profiles that you can review in the Shopify Help Center.

We know this has taken time, and we appreciate your patience. We are excited to be launching this improvement for you today and look forward to hearing your feedback so we can keep improving your experience maintaining customer data in Shopify.  

Stella | Development Manager @ Shopify

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Replies 35 (35)

Rachel_Marshall
Tourist
3 0 11

agreed - this is a feature that i need, and my customers want.
(too complicated? for the folks who built an entire online ordering and shipping platform??)

VintageAlchemy
Tourist
8 0 18

Replying to this thread as well about merging customer accounts. WE NEED THIS FEATURE!

KalaJordan
Visitor
2 0 3

Any word on whether this is in the queue? 

@Shopify 

Shopalldaye
Visitor
1 0 2

We really NEED this Shopify 

Edward-Newgate
Shopify Partner
570 22 61

Hi 

I found this method to merge customer data on Shopify, hope it's useful for you.

By the way, If you have any trouble while doing business on Shopify, this website: Avada Commerce would be useful for you. 

Hope it helps!

Was my reply helpful? Click Like or Mark it as an Accepted Solution to let me know!
CVT
Excursionist
20 0 8

The note above does not remedy the problem of duplicate customers in Shopify. The title is "Merging Shopify’s customer data with Repeat Customer Insights analysis" which is not what is requested. 

 

The request is for  a way to merge two Shopify customers into one record. 

 

We need it too! 🙂

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Hello, Community Members! Thank you for starting, and contributing your concerns to this thread. 

 

I can understand how being able to merge customer accounts would be helpful. Therefore, what I can do for you, is submit feature requests to our developers on your behalf so that they are made aware of this, and we can hopefully get it put onto their to do list.

 

In order to properly relay your specific requirements for this feature, I’d really appreciate it if you could reply within this thread with more information as to how it is impacting your particular business. For example: 

 

  • Do you have customers who have placed POS orders and online orders, but end up with two different customer accounts?
  • Is this impacting your reporting? (ie. issues caused by typos)
  • Are you needing to fully understand how much your large wholesale customers are spending?
  • Do you have multiple customer accounts from the same POS, where the buyers have been using different credit cards?
  • Have your customers purchased subscriptions through one email, and new orders through another email address?
  • Do you find your customers are using both a work and home email, but ordering from both, in which case you’d like to have them show up as one distinct customer?

 

Thanks for your cooperation!

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

CVT
Excursionist
20 0 8
Thanks for reaching out!

We are primarily users of Shopify's *POS *system and duplicate customer
creates a problem at the register when customers would like to make a
return or exchange and have misplaced their receipt. The cashier may have
to comb through past orders of several customers to find the order, reprint
the receipt and then scan the QR code to use it for payment. It's very
cumbersome.

Why duplicates are being created is not clear to me. I thought cashiers
must have been having trouble locating customers, but there are SO many
duplicates that I don't think this is the case.

Regarding customers using different credit cards - does this apply only to
online ordering or also to POS transactions? i.e. if an existing customer
comes to the reg, the cashier pulls up their customer record and adds them
to the order and the customer uses a different card than the last time,
will this created a new customer record?

We do have customers with multiple emails, so it would be helpful to be
able to add more than one email to a customer record.

Thanks!
Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

That does sound cumbersome, @CVT! An email address is the unique identifier for a customer account, and only one email address can be associated with a customer account. So the easiest way to search for a customer on the POS is by their email address. That being said, the POS shouldn't be creating duplicate accounts for the same customer, unless they’ve given different email addresses each time they’ve purchased. Have you checked to see if this is the case with each duplicated account? Let me know what you find out, and if there are duplicates of customers with the same email address, we certainly need to look into this further for you.



In regards to the customer using different credit cards, the POS can detect a card that was previously used. It doesn't save/store the card details anywhere, but rather it depends on what information is made available by the customer's bank. That's why you may have noticed that on some orders that were made as a guest through your POS (meaning without an account), show the customer’s name on the order; The information is being provided from the customer’s bank, since that card was used previously. The credit card used for online orders on the other hand, are mostly impacted when using Shop Pay, since the Shopify checkout does not store customer’s credit card information. A customer’s Shop Pay account is separate from their Customer account for your store.

 

Moving forward, I have submitted a feature request now on your behalf for merging customer accounts when multiple email addresses are used. Although I can’t promise when or if this feature will be implemented, I recommend keeping an eye on the Shopify Changelog. All recent updates to the platform are posted here, so this will be the best place to find out about any updates regarding the ability to merge customer accounts. 

 

Let me know if I can help with anything else!

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Rich_Hamilton
Excursionist
21 0 113

After being a Shopify customer since 2012 we have many duplicate accounts and there's a significant need to clean this up. It is directly impacting our ability to manage our relationship with our customers. Here's a listing of things I need to effectively manage my customer base:

- Customers need to be able to change their own email address at will. They should not have to contact the Shop vendor to do so.

- When a duplicate customer record is created for whatever reason, the Shop owner needs to have the ability to merge the two accounts to provide a consolidated sales history. Cases where this might occur:

* Customer uses a different email address to make a purchase.
* Customer makes a typo in his email address.
* A Friend or relative makes a gift purchase and then we want to tie that account to the main customers.

We need to be able to "clean" our database as much as possible in order to identify repeat customers and to use tools like anniversary coupons, Sales level discounts, etc.

Also, since we sell digital product that requires downloading, having all a customers orders in a single interface is a must.

I need to be able to query the database on a name, and if the search results generate 2 (or more) records that I know are the same customer then I need the option to merge these accounts, including all order history.

Rich_Hamilton
Excursionist
21 0 113

Here's another thread from this forum full of people with the same problems:

https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/Merge-Customers/m-p/963921#M211208

There's another one too, which had even more posts, but I can't find it at the moment.

 

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Thanks for your feedback, @Rich_Hamilton. We appreciate that you’ve chosen to use Shopify for so long, and it’s important to us to continue to improve the platform to stay current for an evolving business like yours.

 

We certainly want you to have the best possible relationship with your customers, therefore, I have submitted the following two separate feature requests to our developers on your behalf. Thanks for elaborating on how these are important for the way your business operates. I’ve included your exact reasoning in the submission. 

 

  1. To have the ability to merge customer accounts 
  2. Allowing for customers to be able to edit their own account details, including their email addresses

 

As I mentioned previously within this thread, the Shopify Changelog is the best place to watch for updates to the platform as they happen. Therefore, if/when these upgrades are made, checking the Shopify Changelog is the quickest way to be informed about it. 

 

Thanks again for taking the time to provide your input, and If I can help with anything else, just let me know. 

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

katiefinn
Tourist
6 0 2

We also are in need of merging duplicate customer accounts. 

For me, it's about point accumulation through a loyalty program and to look up previous orders.

My clerk is entering new customer info instead of looking them up first. We also had an issue with Mailchimp exporting a bulk email list which also created duplicates where an email address wasn't already attached to the customer name. 

Being able to merge customers sales and info is paramount to our loyalty program.

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Thanks for contributing to this thread and being specific with how merging duplicate customer accounts would impact your business, @katiefinn. I have passed your feedback along to our development team. Thanks again, and please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

cgreenejewelry
Tourist
8 0 4

Any update on this? We have several multiple accounts - some with misspellings, different emails, etc and would love to find a way to merge!

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Hey, @cgreenejewelry. Thanks for checking in!

 

I don’t have an update regarding this, I’m afraid. But I have submitted another feature request for it on your behalf, so thank you for your feedback. Moving forward, the best way to keep informed about any changes to the platform, is on the Shopify Changelog; This is where all recent updates are announced.

 

If I can help with anything else, please let me know.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Traybarber
New Member
6 0 0

Hi there.  Is there any update on the merge feature of two records?

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Hi, @Traybarber. Thanks for reaching out. At this time, I don't have any updates to share in regards to this. Please continue to regularly checking the Shopify Changelog; this will be the best place to find notification of it and/or any other platform updates. Thanks!

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

alexxduvall
Tourist
3 0 16

Hi - 

Chiming in here as I see someone from Shopify is replying in the thread. Also worth noting is that there is a 14 page thread dating back years filled with explanations of how this is a problem for various Shopify users, different ways multiple customer profiles occur, and what kind of impact that has on businesses. Any progress on this request would be greatly appreciated by the shopify community, and its largely disheartening that no progress has been made in the time that the other thread has been open. 

 

In response to your questions:

 

  • Do you have customers who have placed POS orders and online orders, but end up with two different customer accounts?
    YES! Usually, it occurs when in-store customers don't provide an email, then shop later online and create an account. Being able to merge the two (sometimes several accounts) to accurately track high value customers would be incredibly helpful. 
  • Is this impacting your reporting? (ie. issues caused by typos)
    YES! We cannot generate the lifetime value of our customers at all because of multiple profiles per customer with various orders associated with each. 
  • Are you needing to fully understand how much your large wholesale customers are spending?
    YES!
  • Do you have multiple customer accounts from the same POS, where the buyers have been using different credit cards?
    YES!
  • Have your customers purchased subscriptions through one email, and new orders through another email address?
    Not subscriptions for me, but people not being able to access their purchase history through the account they create. 
  • Do you find your customers are using both a work and home email, but ordering from both, in which case you’d like to have them show up as one distinct customer?
    YES! Additionally, we sell to customers that have associated companies, and having a feature to group customers into companies to see how much they spend would be helpful (but probably wishful thinking). 

Thanks in advance for any help. 

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Hi, @alexxduvall. Thanks for reaching out and for answering the questions from earlier in this thread. It really helps to know exactly how being able to merge customer accounts would impact your business; I have passed along your answers and submitted a feature request on your behalf for it now too.


I completely understand your concerns about being able to merge customer accounts. Please know that the Shopify developers are continuously working on improving the platform for both the merchant and customer experience. As you can imagine, they receive a lot of feature requests on a daily basis, and they are doing their best to evaluate and prioritize those improvements that would be most impactful to as many merchants as possible. So, thanks again for your feedback on this, and I’m hoping and advocating for this upgrade as well. The best way to stay up to date on all platform updates is through the Shopify Changelog, so keep checking it!

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

CVT
Excursionist
20 0 8

Looking at the changelog it seems that Shopify has invested it's development resources in expanding to other countries, rather than serving the needs of their existing client base. I am also disappointed and more than a little frustrated about getting the same response to every request. 

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Hey, @CVT. I can understand your point of view and why you're feeling frustrated. Allow me to offer a glimpse into what happens after each merchant expresses a need for a new feature or functionality; Hopefully it helps to ease your frustrations. 

 

Shopify receives a very large amount of feature requests on a daily basis, and every single one of them is submitted to our developers. Each request is categorized, and continuous updates are provided to the development teams notifying them of new and relevant feedback within their product specialty. Meanwhile, an investigation into the context of each category and it’s specific requests occurs. Plans are created to understand what needs to be built or improved, why it should be done, and how to go about doing it.

 

As you can imagine, each step of the process takes a lot of time, planning, testing, people, resources, etc. before it is completed and released. So, although it may appear as though the priority of platform improvements is not optimal, it doesn’t mean that solutions to other requests are not already in the process of being developed.

 

Our amazing development teams are doing everything they can to help improve the Shopify experience for as many merchants as they can, as quickly as they can. So, thanks for your patience and understanding. We truly appreciate it. 

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Chris_Malone
Tourist
8 0 5

This feature is badly needed in a retail environment as well. If a customer uses a different payment method not already on file, or the wrong name is selected by an employee when adding a customer, it screws the whole thing up. I use a loyalty app as well and this can be really confusing.

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Thanks for contributing to this thread, and for specifying how it is affecting your business, @Chris_Malone. It's very important to know this type of information, and I’ve included it in my feedback submission to our developers. All the best!

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Lawson_Thalmann
Shopify Partner
76 0 64

I agree with all of the above sentiments and also need this very badly! I was a significant Shopify shareholder, but started selling due to some poor decision-making about how to allocate development resources. Someone previously said it well that they're spending resources instead on selling internationally. That may make more money for Shopify in the short-term, but in the longer-term, better "retail operating systems" will be developed having these very basic features that retail businesses need and long-time Shopify users will end up switching. Could be the downfall of Shopify in the future, but time will tell! 

The rewards program we're about to launch is going to struggle due to this. I also have no faith I'll be able to calculate CLTV any time soon. These are all things Shopify will talk about in their blog about how to do it at a high level, but when the rubber meets the road, Shopify holds merchants back from truly realizing these things. Those international merchants that are being onboarded now will eventually realize this too. 

Paul_vd_Dool
Shopify Partner
107 6 95

Hi,

I hope you will all excuse me for shamelessly plugging my own work here, but I've been working on an app to address this issue of duplicate customer accounts.

It's been published in the Shopify App Store recently.

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

It doesn't allow you to actually merge accounts but rather link them together. You then get a single overview page with all information of the linked accounts. Including a list of all orders.

It's still an early version and I'm still working on new features, like the option to display a full list of orders from all linked accounts on the customer's order history page in the storefront.

I'd love for you all to give it a try and let me know what you think. I could really use input on making it as useful as possible, so I'm open to feature requests.

Doppelganger - Managing duplicate user accounts
Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Hi, @Paul_vd_Dool. Thanks a lot for sharing your app here. It looks like it’s a really great alternative to merging customer accounts, as we have been discussing within this thread. Even better that it’s free! 

 

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Paul_vd_Dool
Shopify Partner
107 6 95

Thank you @Helen.

I do have to note that it is free for now.

There are costs on my side, like hosting and those costs increase with an increasing amounts of users using the app. I wanted to get the app to the public as soon as possible and haven't dealt with adding billing yet, but I won't be able to ignore it much longer.

Doppelganger - Managing duplicate user accounts
Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

That makes sense! Thanks for your transparency, @Paul_vd_Dool.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Francisco_MW
Excursionist
13 0 62

Thank you. My answers are similar to what everyone else on the thread seems to be saying:

 

In response to your questions:

 

  • Do you have customers who have placed POS orders and online orders, but end up with two different customer accounts?
    YES. I have some customers who have created POS & Online Orders 
  • Is this impacting your reporting? (ie. issues caused by typos)
    YES. Reports based on customer order totals (or number of orders) are off since some of my customers have their orders spread over 2 (and even 3 ) different accounts.
  • Are you needing to fully understand how much your large wholesale customers are spending?
    YES
  • Do you have multiple customer accounts from the same POS, where the buyers have been using different credit cards?
    NO
  • Have your customers purchased subscriptions through one email, and new orders through another email address?
    N/A - No subscriptions sales
  • Do you find your customers are using both a work and home email, but ordering from both, in which case you’d like to have them show up as one distinct customer?
    YES. In addition to multiple email addresses some some of the duplicates are created from simple typos when the customer entered their name.
Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Thanks for your input, @Francisco_MW. I have passed your specific feedback along to our developers now too.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

BenBeachman
Visitor
1 0 1
  • Do you have customers who have placed POS orders and online orders, but end up with two different customer accounts?YES. CONSTANTLY
  • Is this impacting your reporting? (ie. issues caused by typos)

Absolutely I cannot tell how many customers we gain because we get about 10% of our customers duplicated, so it shows totally false customer acquisition growth and the data is useless.

  • Are you needing to fully understand how much your large wholesale customers are spending?

No

  • Do you have multiple customer accounts from the same POS, where the buyers have been using different credit cards?
  • Have your customers purchased subscriptions through one email, and new orders through another email address?

Yes this is a major issue. Customers will get a new email address, or autofill an old one, and then permanently they are now two people. This means I can't tell how long they've been a customer, organize loyalty rewards, or see the total lifetime value of my customers because they are divided into two, or sometimes 3 or more accounts. This could be so easily fixed if we could merge them like square and salesforce both allow you to do. All we need to do is search their name and merge the fields and order history together, it's not rocket science.

 

  • Do you find your customers are using both a work and home email, but ordering from both, in which case you’d like to have them show up as one distinct customer?

Yes again, same problem as above. Email is the #1 issue at hand here.

Helen
Shopify Staff (Retired)
1425 174 285

Thanks for sharing your feedback as well, @BenBeachman. I’ve passed it along.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

stellalee
Shopify Staff
16 9 11

This is an accepted solution.

Hey there! I’m happy to announce that you can now officially merge customer profiles! Thanks to your advocacy and feedback - you can merge customer profiles to ensure you have the most accurate view of your customers.

Identify duplicated customer profiles with the same name, phone number, email address, or another overlapping attribute, and then merge customers to make sure you maintain quality customer data.

To merge customer profiles:

  1. Search for a duplicate customer in the Customers page of your Shopify admin.
  2. Click on the customer’s name and review their customer profile data to identify what data needs to be kept or removed. 
  3. Click into one of the duplicate profiles .
  4. On the bottom right of the profile you will see a heading called, Customer Data.
  5. Click the button in that section that says Merge customer.
  6. Search for the customer profile you intend to merge. 
  7. Complete the merge steps.

 

Keep in mind, not every customer profile can be merged. There are some limitations for merging profiles that you can review in the Shopify Help Center.

We know this has taken time, and we appreciate your patience. We are excited to be launching this improvement for you today and look forward to hearing your feedback so we can keep improving your experience maintaining customer data in Shopify.  

Stella | Development Manager @ Shopify
Shopify
Shopify Staff
185 4 207

To help ensure feedback on the new Merge customers feature isn't missed we've created a single feedback topic, and locked this particular topic.

 

If you have any feedback to share please post a detailed message in this topic: Merge Customers - Feedback And Questions

 

Thanks!

Shopify 
 - Was my reply helpful? Click Like to let me know! 
 - Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution
 

- To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog