Hi all. We have a heavily modified customer accounts area for order management, order changes, upgrades, and a bunch of fun stuff. We are using the “legacy” customer accounts area with the usual /account, /account/orders, /account/order paths.
The UX there is quite old, and now that we are past the 2025 BFCM chaos we are looking forward. We are thinking about rearchitecting/redesigning this experience. The GIANT question on my plate is whether or not to build the new experience using the new Customer Accounts UI Extensions or just revamp this still using the legacy customer accounts liquid/theme environment.
Does anybody know of any planned/scheduled deprecation, end-of-life’ing, of the legacy customer accounts. I’m still determining if the customer account extensions can support all that I need but I definitely do not want to be building something in the theme and I get a notification that it will all be closed out in a year or something.
Thoughts? Anybody hear any juicy gossip on this? Thanks all and have a great holiday season.
I have not seen an official timeline announced yet, but in a changelog entry from December of 2024 Shopify did mention their intention to eventually deprecate legacy customer accounts
This change reflects Shopify’s commitment to the future of new customer accounts and although we have not yet announced a timeline, classic customer accounts will eventually be retired.
Also this year they’ve taken a few steps indicating that this is the direction they aim to move forward such as not supporting legacy customer accounts in the new theme they launched, Horizon.
There is no legacy account end of life announced yet, but the flow is definitely towards extensions for customer accounts. If you’re a long-term investor, build on extensions where you can, and bridge holes with apps or APIs, keeping legacy around just for features that extensions still can’t handle today, right around the corner.
in the before times this would have been better for the partner-slack but they nuked that.
This is software, it will be end-of-life when your not ready for it whether you prepared for it or not.
It’s a billion dollar publicly traded company avoid building plans around what they “might” do in thing you have no say in.
Will multipass or B2B be a requirement, then you should already be testing/building with new-customer-accounts as the target.
If still using classic customer accounts then build for those and plan to rebuild.
This is software, just build the things that are actually needed as they are needed.
You will end up rebuilding it anyway if it needs to be good.
And then on top of that it’s always double the cost or more to play in someone else sandbox.
Just heavily document the high level view of what was built so your ready when you need to rebuild it; especially with ai tooling.
The classic accounts have a different type of flexibility so when it comes time to switch over you’ll have the pre-knowledge to identify the things shopify has taken from you/your-clients and what’s sacrificial or priority and needs research to migrate it.
The actual rule of thumb for shopify’s behavior in sunsetting features merchants don’t want sunset is like most big platforms behaving facelessly.
Shopify is unlikely to give a firm date yet on stuff like this for as long as possible as it helps soften the blow breaking up complaints into a diaspora because it’s “been common knowledge for some time”|“we gave advanced warning” etc etc ; so complaints are more easily ignored, merchant dissatisfaction can be avoided or dismissed and lower chance of pushback being consolidated etc etc etc.
At some point a year might be giving, maybe with a season(e.g. Fall 2028), then down the road a specific quarter, then maybe a month; either for the whole feature or parts of it. If you really must extrapolate: go look back at timeline of new-customer accounts being announced, being generally available , then making them rename accounts to “classic” accounts then retitle them again to “legacy” accounts
Nor can you ever expect a 1:1 parity from what the old system offered in openness & flexibility vs the new systems locked down capture effects and additional development friction. And there is very unlikely to be any type of feature freeze letting some merchants keep a deprecated feature.
Agree 100%. Shopify has grown too big to care about merchants anymore. They’ll happily deprecate core features like checkout.liquid and (eventually) Multipass with zero regard for the real-world impact, then hide behind the usual “we have alternatives” talking point.
The problem is those “alternatives” are not 1:1 replacements. They rarely offer feature parity, often make the developer and user experience objectively worse, and in some cases there is no viable workaround at all.
If you’re a merchant already locked into Shopify, you’re basically forced to swallow these regressions and move on. But if you’re a vendor, agency, or service provider building solutions for external businesses, these breaking changes can literally make you fail client requirements through no fault of your own.
This isn’t innovation — it’s platform negligence. Shopify optimizes for its own roadmap and enterprise optics, not long-term stability for the ecosystem. I would absolutely not recommend Shopify to anyone who needs a predictable, stable platform for a serious long-term business.
We are using the “legacy” customer accounts area with the usual /account, /account/orders, /account/order paths.
At some point a year might be giving, maybe with a season(e.g. Fall 2028), then down the road a specific quarter, then maybe a month; either for the whole feature or parts of it.