Merge duplicate customers

[AnnH]

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?  

[Helen]

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. 

[Chris_Malone]

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]

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!

[Lawson_Thalmann]

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]

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.

[Helen]

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! 

[Paul_vd_Dool]

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.

[Helen]

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

[Francisco_MW]

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]

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

[BenBeachman]

• 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]

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

[Traybarber]

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

[Helen]

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!

[stellalee · 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.  

[Shopify]

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!