Merge Customers - Feedback and questions

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Shopify introduced a customer profile merge feature, allowing merchants to consolidate duplicate accounts by matching attributes like name, email, or phone number. The merge process is accessed through the Customers page under “Customer Data” section.

Initial Reception & Basic Functionality:

  • Users successfully merged profiles with typos or duplicate emails
  • Orders and information transfer to the merged profile
  • One caveat: the email from the “wrong” profile sometimes becomes the default, requiring manual correction

Major Limitations Reported:

  • Cannot merge customers with:
    • Gift cards (active, inactive, or expired) — later resolved
    • Discounts applied (including third-party reward/loyalty apps) — being addressed
    • B2B customer profiles
    • Subscription contracts
    • Metafields (including those from partner apps)
    • Data redaction requests in progress

Technical Issues:

  • Some merged profiles show zero statistics (order count, average value) despite orders appearing in timeline
  • Metafield errors occur even when merchants claim not to use them (often from hidden app-generated fields)
  • Generic “Customer merge failed” errors without explanation

Feature Requests:

  • Automated duplicate detection tool to identify potential matches
  • Ability to sort customers by last/first name
  • Better handling of discount-related blocks

Access Note:
Requires specific “Merge customers” permission enabled by store administrator for staff accounts.

Summarized with AI on October 28. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
40

There are so many limitations to this that it is absolutely useless! Many of these customers are B2B as businesses often have multiple email addresses.

  • Profiles can’t be merged in the following cases:
    • either of the customer profiles has a subscription contract
    • either of the customer profiles is a B2B customer
    • either of the customer profiles has active or inactive gift cards
    • either of the customer profiles has discounts applied
    • either of the customer profiles has metafields applied
    • either of the customer profiles has been redacted or a data redaction request is in progress
    • a customer profile merge is in progress
    • a customer data request is in progress
1 Like