Is it possible to login a customer using Shopify API without multipass?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Main issue: Logging a customer into a Shopify-hosted storefront using credentials from a non-Shopify site, without using Multipass (Shopify’s single sign-on). The flow: user signs up on an external site → a Shopify customer is created via Admin API → redirect to shop.shopify.com with an active login.

Explored options: customerAccessTokenCreate (seen as creating an access token but not establishing a storefront session), and Customer API (suited for headless implementations; the poster notes the Shopify storefront is passwordless in their case).

Key questions: Is there any API-supported way to initiate a Shopify-hosted storefront login session without Multipass? Can a token or API endpoint create a browser-authenticated session for the storefront?

Status: No solution or definitive guidance provided. A second participant asks if a workaround was found, indicating the thread remains open and unresolved.

Summarized with AI on December 27. AI used: gpt-5.
1

I’ve read the documentation and the following situation is not clear to me:

A user creates an account in my non-shopify site. We create a shopify customer based on their credentials (admin API).

We want then to redirect the user to my shop.shopify.com and log them in based on those credentials.

Is that posible without multipass?

The closest things I’ve seen:

  • customerAccessTokenCreate but that would not log in the customer, most likely just help me update it.

  • Customer API helps with headless stores, but this case is the storefront, and is passwordless

Thank you

2

I have the same question. Curious if you’ve figured out a solution here.