Shopify merchants are trying to automatically set a customer’s notification language, such as English or French, based on browser language, account preference, or another customer-selected setting. The main problem is that Shopify sends emails according to the customer profile’s locale, which many stores have had to update manually.
Several workarounds were discussed:
A CSV import method previously allowed merchants to add a “Locale” column and bulk update customer notification language, but a later Shopify update reportedly blocks this column during import.
A newer technical workaround uses Shopify Flow plus a custom app with customer read/write permissions. When a customer tag is added, Flow sends a GraphQL API request to update the customer locale, for example to “fr” for French.
A limitation was noted: Shopify Flow HTTP requests are not available on the Shopify Basic plan. The latest update in the thread points to a third-party bulk customer data editor app as an easier way to change customer locale in bulk. The original request for fully automatic browser-based language assignment remains unresolved.
My store runs with 2 languages, English (Default) and French.
Notifications (order confirmations, account activation, etc.) are sent to my customers depending on what’s set up in their customer profile.
By default, everybody receives their notifications in English but if I want a French customer to receive it in French, I have to manually go to his profile, go to “edit”, and change manually the language to “French”.
We have the same exact issue. How can we have customers automatically choose their notification/communication language preference within their customer account page?
We have created a language selector for them with our developers, but unable to have the settings change in the Shopify backend.
Here’s the flow:
1- Client signs up or logs in
2- Client has a Preferred language option in his account page (not the same as the language selector for the whole website) (successfully accomplished)
3- Client changes the preferred language from English to French
4- Website language changes to French (successfully accomplished)
5- The customer’s default notification language should change in the backend of Shopify in his customer profile (as per Brice514’s picture above)
I have the exact same problem. Did you find any solution for this?
Even if I manually go in on a Customer and change their default notification language it goes back to English (Default) when a new notification email is sent.
Hi, I was trying the method you mentioned here. How am i suppose to find the language code? I’m using Chinese (Traditional). I tried to add a column with title Locale and fill in ZH_TW, but it doesn’t work…
I was recently working on something like this, where we can change customers’ default language notifications from Shopify Flow using tags.
To do so, you first need to create an app from the Shopify Apps setting of your store.
1. Store Settings > Apps and Sales Channel > Develop Apps > Create an app 2. The app must allow read/write customers. 3. In Shopify Flow, Start when customer tags are added > check if the tag is equal to “[tag]” > Send HTTP Request