Customer Account Stuck on 'Classic Account Invite Sent'.

Technical Q&A
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Topic summary

A merchant reports recurring issues with Shopify’s classic customer account activation system, resulting in significant revenue loss over the past two months.

Primary Issue:

  • Customer accounts remain stuck on ‘classic account invite sent’ status
  • Activation emails arrive, but clicking the activation button fails to activate accounts
  • No merchant-side option exists to force-activate accounts

Specific Problems:

  1. New customers cannot activate accounts despite following standard procedures and resending activation emails
  2. Guest checkout customers cannot access their order history because their accounts remain unactivated

Shopify’s Response:

  • Recommended creating new email addresses as a workaround
  • Merchant views this as poor customer service for high-end clientele

Technical Analysis:

  • The merchant identifies this as a backend Shopify issue with activation URL/token generation
  • Merchants have no control over the activation link process in classic accounts
  • After weeks of troubleshooting, the merchant switched to ‘new customer accounts’ (which has its own limitations) to enable customer logins via generated codes

Current Status:

  • Issue remains unresolved and continues into 2025 according to another user
  • Merchant speculates Shopify may be intentionally phasing out classic accounts
Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I’ve had a handful of potential customers contact me in the past two months relative to their customer account not activating and their status being stuck on ‘classic account invite sent’.

We’ve lost thousands of dollars in revenue because of this Shopify issue. Our clients are high-end clients and do not have time to go through troubleshooting steps etc., though I’ve done this already with multiple customers as Shopify recommended and lost one or more customers in doing so.

Issue example 1) The customer will sign up for a customer account with their email, receive the ‘activate your account’ email, and then click the ‘activate account’ button to no avail. We’ve tried resending the account activation invite email multiple times and clicking the button in the email did not work. There also appears to be no way to force-activate a customer account (which there should be at this point to avoid this issue).

Shopify’s solution: Use another email address - We literally had one of our customers create a new email address (he only had one email) to get around a Shopify issue - This is the opposite of customer service in my opinion.

Issue Example 2) The customer couldn’t wait to figure out this issue so he checked out as a guest, and now wants to check back on his order. He cannot log in to his customer account to view the order as it’s stuck on ‘account invite sent’. Making a new email will not allow him to see the original order - His customer account must be force-activated in some way.

Please help to resolve this issue as we are losing money (literally thousands of dollars ) from this Shopify issue.

3 Likes
2

After troubleshooting and testing countless times in addition to spending hours with Shopify support over the course of a couple of weeks, I’ve concluded this is a backend Shopify issue going on that has to do with the ‘activation’ of customer accounts.

Generally, to create a new customer account a user would sign up with their email and then click ‘register’ which would trigger and generate a unique activation URL with a token attached which is sent to their specific email. This activation link will only activate their account if they click it from their exact email address inbox hosted by their respective ESP (Email Service Provider).

We, as merchants, have absolutely zero control over this activation link generation and process, nor can we bypass the activation when using ‘classic customer accounts’. That said, Shopify’s lack of support with this issue has caused us to switch to ‘new customer accounts’ which, of course, has its’ own limitations though customers are now able to at least login with the code that is generated.

Maybe Shopify is intentionally causing activation issues to force merchants to switch to ‘new customer accounts’ and deprecate the ‘classic customer accounts’ option.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

3 Likes
3

Still seems to be the case in 2025!!