I totally agree. It’s a step in the right direction but not perfect.
But Shopify is working on a proper solution. They’ve recently (1,5 weeks ago) asked me to review some code documentation for a merge functionality. It seems you’ll be able to merge two accounts. From the current state of the documentation it does not seem you’ll be able to decide which information from which account you want to keep. But rather you choose a main account which the other account will be merged into. If the second account has information that the main account does not, like a phone number, that information will be transferred to the main account.
I have not idea when Shopify plans to release this though. It’s still in a very early stage. I expect it will be months still.
Just to point out, the solution Paul took the time to explain actually makes his app less necessary, not more. So, helping people out by giving them the only current solution to the problem is not pushing his app (except by making the rest of us think of him as knowledgeable and helpful).
Yes, Shopify should be able to do a true merge. But for now, this is the best way to accomplish unifying orders in one account.
FYI, I was just messing around and am now able to delete duplicate accounts. For the last few months we’ve been able to change the customer tied to an order. But, even if I removed all orders from a duplicate profile, there was still other data about the order that was associated with that profile so that it could not be deleted. Not sure when this changed but it has to be recent. You can now delete profiles with 0 orders, even if there was at one point order data tied to that profile. One step closer I guess.
You want to know HOW we have tons of profiles for 1 Customer? Shopify does not allow edits the Customer data after the sale is made. So SHOPIFY HAS CREATED THIS PROBLEM!
PROBLEM: If I try to update the Order with the Customer’s email. Shopify’s response is that email is already taken.
SOLUTION: Have your programmers update the software to ask “would you like to update the customer to this one?”
Oof hopefully that’s implemented as matching content an not purely overwriting indexes so things like additional shipping addresses are appended and not impurely pure 1:1 overwrites.
So two accounts one has 2 unique shipping address another has 3 unique address the merge should end up with 5 addresses not 3.
So many duplicate customers! For all the reasons already mentioned here but now that we are using Shopify payments, it seems like Shopify is automatically adding a new customer EACH TIME they use a credit card with a name attached! For instance “Ms Smith” creates an account & becomes a customer. Then she shops in-store with a credit card that has her name on it and another “Ms Smith” is automatically created by Shopify. Ms Smith comes in a week later and uses that same credit card and yet ANOTHER customer account is created…and on and on until poor Ms Smith has a zillion accounts, one for each time she shops. ugh!
The only thing I can think of is that this exact scenario creates “tens of millions of customers” using Shopify businesses. Sounds like a great marketing tool to increase their share price.
You can save yourself the trouble @evanhill . They’re already working on it.
Last I heard they were in a draft phase, thinking about how to solve this correctly. Next up would be to start development on the first version of the solution.
So, this showed up in my admin under a customer profile today (see attachment)… however look at the note: can’t be merged because of a credit card? Then another account said “…has a gift card and can’t be merged.”