How can I combine multiple customer accounts?

[peachyamanda]

Hey Shopify!

so I have customers that accidentally make multiple accounts using different email addresses. This is causing havoc for our rewards program because our rewards are based on their shopping history. And the shopping history is tied to multiple accounts. So for example if we have a VIP tier that requires $5000 spent, the girls want to make sure that all of their shopping history goes into their rewards account so they can achieve the next year. I am able to move points over within my rewards app when I come to the other other which is easy, but I’m not able to move their shopping history over. I would need to be able to merge the accounts on the Shopify side but I can’t find out how to do this. Please help! 

[Holly]

Hi @peachyamanda !

I completely understand your need for merging customer accounts. Often times, a store owner's need to merge accounts is due to a conflict with a very specific part of their business. So we completely empathize with your situation and need for this feature to be available.

With that said, it is not a feature that is offered at this time. The consolidation of customer accounts can pose problems specifically with the email address associated to the file as customers can easily change or lose access to their email address. This is something our development team continues to work on in hopes of finding a secure way to merge accounts.

I will be more than happy to add your specific scenario to our file regarding this feature request in hopes that it can be resolved sooner than later.

For now, the only workaround I can see for you would be to utilize Customer tags to link accounts together. It might be worthwhile reaching out to the app developers for your rewards program to see if they can merge accounts based on tags on their end. 

I hope this helps. All the best!

[nothanks]

This has been a concern of businesses for well over 5 years at this point and Shopify has yet to provide a solution. Seems like you should or else businesses are going to go with a more immersive technology.

[Megaera]

We need this feature too. Couldn't your development team build it so that there is an option when merging customer accounts for the merchant to select which of the existing email addresses should be used on the resulting merged account?  

We usually end up with duplicate accounts when clients create more than one when placing online orders especially over an extended period (ie years apart). 

Tags aren't very helpful because we really need to be able to view our clients complete order history as easily as possible, not to mention that it doesn't help with sales data and rewards etc. 

[KristenDScott]

Why is this STILL  an issue??? I started using Shopify in 2020 and was angry about this issue then. I have one customer who has made SIX accounts now, and it's screwing up the analytics for her. Tags will not fix this issue. Square from day one made it easy for me to consolidate customers, and they've been around for longer than Shopify. You need to fix this.

[RichL]

I agree with the other posters on this thread and other similar threads: This really needs to be resolved. We have many customers with 2, 3, or more accounts and the fact that we can't consolidate means they miss out on VIP Club benefits, and often causes confusion when they can't see some of their prior orders when they log in, etc. It's a mess and just continues to get worse.

Shopify developers: There are ways to resolve this, securely, and without causing customers to lose access. As implemented right now, customers are inconvenienced and store owners like me have to figure out inadequate workarounds. If accounts can be merged in apps, they can be merged in Shopify.

[Tony-M]

Merging the accounts and keeping the secondary email addresses as aliases shouldn't be that hard. It would also ensure if they change email accounts their order history would travel with them

[Cubic_Zirconia]

10 year Shopify user here. We've wanted this feature and asked for it since 2014. Yeah, it creates a mess. We didn't even realize how big the problem was until 34 of our top 250 all time VIP customer accounts turned out to be 8 actual people who each had 2 to 6 separate Shopify accounts on our website with different email addresses.

So no doubt there's a lot of people who have 2 to 6 accounts with smaller spends in each and they ought to be getting more rewards / VIP status / freebies / Klaviyo email followup deals and discounts...but our Shopify system can't recognize them because each individual account doesn't meet the minimum orders/spend threshold for that VIP customer tier.

That also results in the difficulty in finding information that may have been imparted only on one of 10 past orders-- using an email address different than the one a customer gives when they call in about a pending order...and can cause us to look disorganized, or even make a mistake like ship a ring using 2018's ring size when the customer notified us in 2021 that their ring size had actually changed. 😞 Merging those customer accounts would solve the problems solved by our team often not even realizing multiple customer accounts exist in a need-answer-now-customer-on-the-phone situation.

Shopify has helped provide our family a nice living. We have few complaints. The software is living and breathing and consistently being improved. That said, I've also been personally responsible for putting almost $50,000 in revenue into Shopify via merchant fees, membership and extras. I don't believe this is too much to ask, for Shopify to prioritize getting this done.

We all know repeat, high-spending customers make up a large percentage of any Shopify shop's annual revenue. Shopify ought to be doing everything possible to help Shopify merchants identify these people, form and improve relationships with these top customers and sell them more stuff (even if they have multiple email addresses).

Imagine logging in to Shopify and a card pops up that says "Please review these 14 customers that may be duplicate accounts, with a matching phone number, name, address or IP address. Merging customer accounts can be a best practice to identify and nurture relationships with top customers-- even when they may have transacted orders using different data at different times in their customer journey".  THAT card showing up on our Shopify log-in screen would not be 'dismissed'. It is far more useful than some of the other new Shopify updates with log-in prompt cards we've seen recently. That prompt would be acted on immediately! 🙂

WORKAROUND for those using Klaviyo (which Shopify just invested $100M into if I'm reading the biz news correctly): Merging two profiles in Klaviyo is easy. You may be able to accomplish some of what you wanted to do in SHopify there instead. Some, anyway. We did.

Mr. and Mrs. CubicZirconia

[WWILKE]

We also desperately need this feature. Please have your developers work on this.

[Simon_says]

Same here.

• we do have clients creating an account with TYPOs
• Business vs. Private Email addresses (or multiple private / e.g. alias addresses)
• users creating an account on the Europe (DE) as well as the International (EN) store

There is a huge need to merge Customer Accounts within as well as across ShopifyStores. Ideally being able to say which account should be the one to keep, migrating all the orders to that account and remove the others.

[copelandcoins]

5 years with Shopify and no solution has been presented. This can't be that hard for the smart people that created everything else in Shopify.

[paulmetro]

Hey Holly,

Have there been any updates on merging customer accounts?

[RichL]

Holy cow! We just got the feature! It appears on the Customer page, right
column, in the Customer Data section:

Customer data
MERGE CUSTOMER
InfoNew
Merge two customers into one for a more accurate view of your customers.
This will combine order history and analytics.

But it seems limited or perhaps buggy. The first customer I tried resulted
in this message:

James Jackson has a credit card and can’t be merged.

I have no idea what that means.

[LFK]

I also got it yesterday, I've been having issues with merging customers with accounts, even after I disable their account. It's also not possible to keep a secondary email or phone number. 
At least something is finally happening!

[LBB67]

Got the same error message myself.

Exactly right (I have no idea what that means).

[jhubele]

We also have customers with more than one email address that need to be merged.
It creates always problems and complaints because our discount program (based on purchase history) will not work correctly.

Is there a way to upvote this feature?
  

[Ren]

Hello! Ren here helping Holly out with this.

Just wanted to drop in and update those of you who have contributed your feedback to the thread that I have made note of your comments and have added them to the file as per Holly above, regarding the demand to have this as a feature request.

Again, thank you for adding your thoughts and contributing the valuable feedback that you have.

As mentioned above, please consider utilizing customer tags as a workaround to link accounts together.
I'll be keeping an eye on things and will update here once I have any new information or relevant details.

[copelandcoins]

Thank you for the update and…it just needs to be done. No more excuses on this one, please.  It’s costing us time and money and other software can do it. I get multiple emails a month over this and I’m a tiny business.  It’s not all about owner experience, though it continues to happen and builds the frustration.  It’s a customer service issue that makes us all look bad. 

[ChubbyLeaf]

Based on Holly’s passion and acknowledging that the lack of this basic merge function is negatively impacting businesses seems like it would be easier if the update described where you were 2 years ago with this issue and where you are now with a fix? 

What is the update or what has changed since Holly above said what she said and commented “it’s not a feature that’s offered”  and with that being asked (for argument sakes) we’re pretending that Holly above is the 1st person to ever respond to this specific issue?

It’s just hard to imagine the 1st update to this issue of basic needs in the last say 2-3 years was Holly above saying …….it’s not available, just use tags?

[khard]

Shopify launched the Merge Customers feature!

https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/merge-customer-profiles

[LBB67]

I have 1 customer with 4 different profiles from misspelled emails all I wan't to do is merge all her purchase history into the one account and delete the incorrect ones. All I seem to get is the same error over again, (customer has a credit card and can’t be merged).

Shopify, why would you put a block on this type of task?

So basically this new merger feature is totally useless.

[Ren]

Hi all, 

Some of you beat me to it, but yes, the long-awaited customer profile merging feature is brand new and it's here. You can read about it on our help document page as well as learn about some of the important considerations before proceeding with merging profiles. 

We have taken note of the credit card error message and welcome any additional feedback as merchants begin to utilize this feature. 

Thank you!

[RichL]

It would be so awesome if this actually worked.

In addition to the "customer has a credit card" error, which pops up for
most of my customers, we also can't merge customers who have accounts or
gift cards (or subscriptions, discounts, metafields ...)

So, not much of an improvement.

[Ren]

Thanks so much for the new feedback @RichL. 

Just so I'm understanding correctly, you get the same error when attempting to merge profiles that are linked to discounts and subscriptions? At this time, these are known limitations during this phase of the feature roll out. Also, please keep in mind that this feature was built for merging customer profiles and not customer accounts. 

Any updates or changes to this release will be noted on our Changelog.

With these current limitations. What percentage of your profiles have you been able to merge?

[RichL]

I don't know which circumstances cause the "customer has a credit on file"
error. That's a question for the Shopify programmers.

"... this was built for merging customer profiles and not accounts" -- Now
I'm even more confused as to what this feature is good for. If the customer
creates two accounts under different email addresses, does one of them have
to abandoned when merged, including order history? Do both accounts stay
open?

I can't answer the question about "what percentage of profiles have you
been able to merge?" I tried several at random and only succeeded once. I
can't justify putting staff to work testing this feature further since it
obviously don't have much use yet.

When it combines accounts and works for all (or at least most) customers,
we'll be glad to use it. As deployed, it's not a useful feature.

[Ren]

Thanks for the additional thoughts, @RichL. 

To clarify, Customer Profiles consist of the order data that is automatically collected when a customer places an order. Whereas a Customer Account is created by the customer and used as a login for the customer to view their orders and profile information. This feature involves the merging of Customer Profiles only - I hope that helps clear up the confusion!

In this case, the customer profiles would merge the following information into one profile:

• orders
• draft orders
• addresses
• email address
• phone number
• name
• notes
• tags
• tax settings
• timeline events

Thank you again for your feedback! I will be sure to return with any updates or relevant changes.

[annahm]

Does it work for you? I do not have the merge options. They are brand new test accounts so they are do not have any of these limitations. I reached out to support but they were not helpful.

• either of the customer profiles to be merged has a credit card
• either of the customer profiles to be merged has an account
• either of the customer profiles has a subscription contract
• either of the customer profiles is a B2B customer contact
• either of the customer profiles has active gift cards
• either of the customer profiles has discounts applied
• either of the customer profiles has metafields applied
• a customer profile merge is in progress
• a customer data request is in progress
• a customer data redaction request is in progress

[Ren]

Thanks for chiming in, @annahm. 

Are you currently attempting from a Development store? The option would be available but you would need to enable Customers and Request Customer Data permissions first, otherwise the merge option won't appear. 

Let me know how that works out for you! 

[HamzaS · Accepted solution]

You can now 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 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!