Shopify replaced the in-customer-page search with a “customer segmentation” interface, removing direct name search and sorting. Merchants with large lists report difficulty locating customers by name without paging and manual find.
Official guidance: Use the main/global admin search bar to find individual customers. A Shopify rep shared help links and a screenshot, and said feedback is being passed to the product and Help Center teams.
OP confirms the global search works but says it’s unintuitive and should be documented on the segmentation help pages. No product change was committed.
Broader feedback: Multiple users call the change poor UX (user experience), ask to restore the old search or hide segmentation behind an “advanced” mode, and criticize lack of prior notice/changelog transparency.
Unresolved needs: Bulk actions for duplicate accounts under the same name (global search shows results but doesn’t populate the main list for bulk edit/delete). No segment filter for first/last/customer name and no alphabetical sorting, making management of large datasets (e.g., 25k customers) hard. Users also want flexible name-only searches (first or last, not both) and better handling of multiple emails.
Status: Partially addressed via global search; core bulk and name-based segment capabilities remain unresolved. Screenshots were provided.
It seems Shopify decided to replace customer searching with segmentation in my client’s shop. Now there is no way for him to search by customer name. WTF?
How does one actually search for “Bob Smith” using the customer segmentation interface in the Shopify Customer Admin?
It’s not even possible to sort by customer name. So if the shop has thousands of customers, are we now supposed to page through dozens of pages of results and use ctrl+f to search for customers, page by page?
Hi @Chad_Johnson , thank you for sharing your concern about this new feature.
Using the new customer interface you would want to use your main search bar to search for customers individually. You can read more about this search bar on this page here. I would also recommend taking a look over this page here. It includes more detailed information on how to use the new customer segmentation feature.
Please let me know if you have any other questions about this. I’d be happy to look into this with you further. If you have any feedback on how this change will affect your work flow please also let us know. We are always looking for feedback when we role out new features.
Thank you. That works.
In my opinion, this is not very intuitive, and using the global search to now search for customers should be documented on one or both of these pages:
@Chad_Johnson Thank you for your feedback on this. I’ve shared this with our team who look into improvements that can be made to Shopify and our Help Center documents. This insight allows us to know what to work on for the future so I really appreciate it.
Wow.. I just noticed this as well.. Shopify, what were you thinking?
“Lets take a really easy to use filtering capability that anyone can understand and replace it with something complicated!”
Thats the most horrible UX decision I could possibly imagine. I would highly suggest bringing back the old bar and hiding that stuff under and “expert-mode” somewhere.
This large change made to how the customer section of the admin functions is frustrating and even looks like a code section instead of a friendly end user section.
You can no longer utilize the search the same way, or get the same results.
There is no indication about this in the changelog. When I called support for help in figuring out how to get the info we had access to yesterday, he said that’s the nature of web based software. I would like to point out that so is giving your client base notice that you will be removing a function or changing a function, or at a minimum, putting that on your changelog. The changelog doesn’t document all the things you are constantly changing (see how we edit variants and this new customer ‘segment’ thing now as two recent examples). It seems from my end user perspective that Shopify is run by devs who don’t remember what it is like for non-tech savvy end users. My husband has been in IT for 25 years and he hears me and sees my frustrations as an end user and it has helped him to have a better communication style with his clients.
I don’t know of many software companies that make big changes without even bothering to tell their end users. Perhaps you can consider this for the future. Give a one week notice that the way the user is using their software (every single day, reliant upon for the success of their business) is going to change. That would be nice - and a real friendly user experience.
I want to chime in and say that I too find this change to be inexplicably awful. There are MANY instances where searching via global, for example if a customer has purchased with two different emails. PLEASE revert and add this VERY “I am a shopify developer and this makes sense for ME as opposed to a business owner” feature an “advanced” link or something. Truly, I am shocked by this step backward and it messes me up regularly since it was introduced.
This should NOT be marked as “Accepted” Solution as the matter is NOT resolved when searching for multiple account under the same name. I mean the multiple accounts show up in the search BUT not in the main listing below therefore they cannot be edited in bulk, like adding tags, delete them etc…
And there is no way to create a segment function like “customer_name” or something like that that would retrieve the list of all the customer with that name.
Allow me to explain better:
I have a customer that created multiple accounts (many) and I need to delete all of them but one. Searching by the customer name on the top bar does NOT solve the issue: when searching for his name although all accounts under that name show up I have to go one by one to delete or to do any other function.
WE NEED the names to be retrieved with a Customer Segmentation like “Customer_Name” or “Custome_First_Name” or “Customer_Last_Name” so that all of them will be listed in the results below with the ability to thick them and apply the editing needed like adding or remove tags and delete them!
To make matter worse, there is not even a way to sort customers by alphabetical order that could hel unless you have about 25,000 customers like us!
We LOVE Shopify but we are very (VERY) disappointed on this failed “enanchment” of the Customer module.
