I’d like to suggest a small improvement to Shopify Checkout.
When a customer manually enters an email address during checkout and then pays with Google Pay, Shopify replaces the manually entered email address with the email associated with the customer’s Google account. Shopify Support confirmed that this is the current behavior of Shopify’s Google Pay integration.
In our case, this unfortunately resulted in a returned parcel because the customer never received the pickup notification at the email address they expected.
It would be very helpful if merchants could choose whether to preserve the manually entered email address or replace it with the Google account email when a customer uses Google Pay.
I believe many merchants, especially in countries where customers commonly use a different primary email address than their Google account, would benefit from having this option.
This would improve the customer experience and help reduce failed deliveries caused by unintended email address changes.
Worth knowing this is not really a Google Pay issue before you frame the request, because the same thing happens with Apple Pay and Shop Pay. The wallet hands back its own contact details as part of the payment sheet, and checkout treats those as the authoritative buyer identity. With Shop Pay it can go further and attribute the order to the wallet account entirely, creating a separate customer record under that address. So what you hit is the accelerated checkout model behaving as designed rather than a bug in one wallet, which is probably why support confirmed it so readily.
That also means there is no setting to flip today, and it is not something an app can quietly patch for you either. The buyer identity available to checkout extensions is read only, so an extension can notice the mismatch but cannot block it or put the typed address back.
For damage control in the meantime, the contact email on an order can be edited afterwards from the Orders page, so if you catch it before anything moves you can correct it and resend the notification. The hard part is catching it, since nothing flags the swap for you.
Given yours ended in a returned parcel, the angle I would lean on in the request is the delivery consequence rather than the preference. A pickup notification landing at an address the customer never expected is a fulfilment failure with a real cost attached, and that framing usually travels further than asking for a toggle.
Did the address they typed survive anywhere on the order, or did it disappear completely?
That is not anything that will ever happen. Sorry but when I choose Google Pay, I as a customer expect that my Google Pay credentials and contact information are used. Thats why I choose Google Pay. Same goes for anything else. If, by mistake, I enter the wrong address and choose Shop Pay because I just noticed it, the entered email should never override my Shop account settings.
If a customer deliberately enters an email address during checkout, it’s usually because that’s where they expect to receive order confirmations, shipping updates, and pickup notifications. Automatically replacing it with the Google account email can create confusion especially if the customer actively uses a different email for online shopping.
Giving merchants a simple setting to choose the behavior either preserve the manually entered email or use the Google Pay email would provide much more flexibility while maintaining compatibility with Google Pay.
It could also help reduce failed deliveries, missed notifications, and unnecessary support requests caused by customers not receiving important order communications.
I think this would be a valuable enhancement to Shopify Checkout, particularly for merchants in regions where customers commonly maintain separate personal and Google account email addresses.
I hope this helps and if you found it useful, please consider marking it as the solution so it can help others as well.
Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. I really appreciate it.
I wasn’t aware that the same behaviour also applies to Apple Pay and Shop Pay, as I haven’t had any experience with those payment methods yet. Thank you for pointing that out.
Before posting here, I also discussed this with Shopify Support. They confirmed that this is the current behaviour of Shopify’s accelerated checkout integration and suggested submitting it as a feature request in the Community, as this option could be helpful in cases where customers use separate email addresses for their Google account and their regular communication.
Thank you also for mentioning that the contact email can be edited afterwards. Unfortunately, in our case the email address entered by the customer was already replaced during checkout, so the order only showed the Google account email. Because of that, I had no way of knowing that the customer had originally entered a different email address, so we didn’t realize there was an issue until the parcel had already been returned.
Yeah the community forum is not the place for a feature request. Shopify staff are not in here. Who are you requesting? We are all merchants and app developers. Requests go to Shopify Support. That is literally your only line to any staff until they come back or create a specific category for feature requests that they check in on.
Well, this is a Great breakdown.
Explaining the real world use case adds a lot of value here. Go ahead and publish this on the Shopify Community Feature Requests board, in the Checkout or Payments section. It is precise and persuasive as is, so it is completely ready to go.
On the feature requests board, do not go hunting for it. I pulled the full category list for this community and there is no feature requests board in the English section. The closest thing that exists is a wishlist board in the Japanese section, and it only covers apps and themes. So that suggestion would have sent you looking for something that is not there.
What does carry weight is a support ticket where the request is attached to your store and to a real loss. A request with a returned parcel and a number on it reads very differently from a request on its own. Give them the order, what the customer typed, what the wallet wrote over it, and what the return cost you.
For stopping it happening again, the fix I would reach for is not about email at all. Make the shipping address phone number required in Settings, Checkout, in the customer contact section. Every pickup network I have dealt with in Europe sends the arrival notice by SMS as well as by email. Wallets do fill the phone field too, but the number a wallet carries is the one on the device the customer is holding, so it tends to be the one they actually watch. That way a wrong email stops being the only thing standing between the parcel and the customer.
The one window you do have is before you fulfil. Editing the contact email on the order works right up until the fulfillment is created, because that is the moment the carrier is handed the contact details. After that you are only editing your own copy of them.
Are your pickup deliveries going out through Packeta or GLS?
Thank you again for taking the time to explain everything in such detail. As someone who is still very new to Shopify, I found your explanation very helpful.
Before posting here, I also discussed this with Shopify Support. They initially suggested submitting this through an Ideas Board, but despite spending quite some time looking for it, I couldn’t find one. For anyone else who might be looking for the same thing, I also came across this Community discussion about the lack of a dedicated feature request board, which I found quite interesting: Can we get a "Request a Feature" board? Seriously . That’s why I decided to post it in the Community instead, hoping to hear other merchants’ experiences and perhaps receive some advice.
I also found your suggestion about relying more on phone numbers interesting. I had the same thought myself. My only concern is that, especially for a new and still relatively unknown store, requiring customers to provide additional mandatory information during checkout might increase checkout abandonment. At least here in Europe, many customers seem to be quite cautious about sharing their personal phone numbers.
Regarding the “window before fulfilment”, I think we may have been talking about two slightly different scenarios. In our case, the customer manually entered one email address during checkout, but after completing the payment it had already been replaced by the Google account email. By the time I opened the order, I only saw the Google account email and had no indication that a different email address had originally been entered. Because of that, I didn’t know there was anything to correct before fulfilment. I only found out what had happened because I was eventually able to reach the customer by phone through another person. To answer your question about the delivery, in this case it was Packeta.
Perhaps this is what made this case complicated. If Shopify somehow indicated that the contact email had been replaced during checkout, I could have somehow contacted the customer before fulfilling the order. But since I only ever saw the updated email address, I had no reason to suspect that anything had changed.
Thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts, suggestions, and experiences. It’s been very helpful to hear the different perspectives. I’ll also reach out to Shopify Support again and see if there’s a way to submit this through a support ticket as well.