I have an issue with Shopify transferring shipping and billing data to our backend system. Our system picks up an XML file for the default account address. If the shipping address for the customer is different to the billing address, when we import the data in to our system it changes the account address to the shipping address.
To describe from the beginning as a user - A user will buy a product as a gift for someone else. The shipping address would be different to the billing address. However, in the backend of Shopify, the account address swaps to the shipping address. Hence why this is being pulled through to our CRM systems making it complicated.
My question is, why does the account default address change when a user wants to add a different shipping address? Did this change recently?
I just wanted to confirm this is expected behaviour. On creation of a new order if the shipping address is different than the current default address it will become the new default address on the customer account.
I can understand why the current behaviour is not ideal and if you like I can add your company to the current issue being tracked in our system. Unfortunately I don’t have a timeline for a change/fix to this functionality.
Many/most of our customers drop-ship their orders to their clients. Changing a default address to the shipping address not only is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist (customers are perfectly capable of updating their own information if they are permitted to do it), but it causes huge problems for online sellers, and especially ones who sync databases, automations, CRMs, mailing lists for printed literature. It’s crazy. I see this issue has been brought up for years and no one has taken the time to fix it. Beyond frustrating. We are a B2B company where our each of our returning customers are placing custom orders for each of their clients, and now we are prevented from mailing anything to a list of our customers because most of them have shipped directly to their clients, meaning that I would inadvertently send our price list or catalog to the end-users, and not the wholesale buyers. This would be a disaster to say the least. And even after there is a fix (if ever), the prospect of trying to find a way to manually sort out who is who now is just ridiculous. We don’t have 100 customers, we have thousands of contacts that are out of whack, and the problem just grows with every passing day.
At the very least, I’d like to know why this is the way it is, and why it’s been abandoned by Shopify for years despite many requests. Is there any possibilities if this change affects badly to the other stores? @_JCC
We have a lot of customers who order gifts in our store.
It’s driving me crazy right now during the gift-giving season because there are so many customers who make their billing address the same as their shipping address.
Also, when I uncheck “Use the shipping address as the billing address by default” on the checkout setting page, if I remember correctly, the second option (use a different address) used to be selected by default in the checkout where you choose the billing address, and the fields were open to fill in, but I’m not sure.
And it’s not now. This makes a huge difference to our gift order customers…
Have there been any updates with this? The nature of our Shopify store is 95% people sending gifts. It makes us look bad when the automatic order confirmation emails are constantly addressing our customer by the wrong name because it changes their default information every time they send a new gift. Shouldn’t the default address be just that? The default?? It’s really aggravating,
No. Only if they select “same as”. This is why it doesn’t make sense. customer sets billing, and then default account address changes to match shipping.
I noticed that this appears to be resolved in our shop as of a few weeks ago. It’s still a problem when someone is lazy and leaves the “same as shipping” box checked, but at least the shipping address seems to have been removed from the equation.
AND LITERALLY 24 HOURS AFTER I SAID THIS - IT’S DOING SHIPPING ADDRESS AGAIN. it had appeared to be working properly for maybe a week or two. This revert back to the undesired behavior came the same day they deployed an update to the customer management menu where you can edit contact, manage addresses, etc - these used to be separate buttons, but today they are combined into one menu on a customer’s profile page.
This just started happening in our store. I care less about the default address, the issue right now is that the wholesale accounts who drop ship to THEIR customers. The name on the Ship To is changing the entire customer account to the person the order was drop shipped to. The customer account should not change to the name of the person the order was shipped to OR billed to. The customer account name should not be changed unless the customer changes or requests it changed by one of my staff. Why is this happening now? It’s creating a lot of angry confusion for the account holder because we are no longer able to search the customer by name if they didn’t ship the last order to themselves.
I’m glad you found an app that fixes this, but this is absolutely unacceptable. There is NO WAY we should have to purchase an app for $39 a month to fix Shopify’s problem!
We’re experiencing the same problem and it just began a few months ago. It’s terrible! Our customers earn points based on their orders and Shopify is now screwing up that system along with the problem of addressing our customers by the name of whoever they ship something to. Totally unprofessional.
This should NOT be “expected behavior”. Shopify is changing the name on our customer accounts to whoever they ship a gift to. That is unacceptable. We’ve had Shopify for several years and this problem just started a few months ago. And it isn’t across the board- it’s random.
Shopify needs to fix this problem immediately. It’s totally unprofessional.
Thanks for posting. While many things have changed since the original post the behaviour of the customer being updated with the most recent order’s shipping info as yet has not.
If this behaviour is a concern for you please reach out to Support directly and mention your store or partner account and describe a little bit about the situation the behaviour causes so that your concerns can be more accurately reported on.
We have this App installed, however, if this is a FIRST time customer who creates an account online and ships to a different address, the default address is always set as the shipping address. When we do an export of our customers for a physical mailing of catalogs this has created a headache for our office trying to manually weed out these customers. Yikes. (However, this App appears to work with customers who are pre-existing. We’ve been using shopify with this app installed for over a year, and just now are doing our first catalog mailing where we discovered the default address swap)
This is so unacceptable. And the problem has grown - as many here have recently reported - starting in approximately May 2023 - it’s not just the “default address” that is changing, but now the entire customer contact name is changing. The name also changes upon fulfillment. We reported to shopify, but of course, they blamed other apps. The only other app that would have any access to both new orders and shipped orders is AfterShip. I have sent them miles of screenshots and spreadsheets and data and they deny it as their problem too. This is a mess and there’s no way we can continue this way.