Yes these new features are great, but PLEASE can we have the ability to merge customer accounts. It causes massive grief for many many merchants and has been repeatedly asked for for OVER SEVEN YEARS. Here are some of the threads - the first from 2013!
Agreed, these promises are just false one’s. In most of these posts listed above, a staff member has said that they will look into it and it just gets dismissed.. THATS WHY it’s been pushed back for 7 YEARS!
There are dozens of features that have been asked for extended periods of time and we will do our best to implement as much as possible but we cannot provide commitment, or timelines.
We always capture feedback provided and ensure as much supporting detail is included so keep the feedback coming as it only helps highlight the value of a feature request.
I understand your desire to have this feature but avoid assumptions as requests like this may seem simple but require significant development planning and work to implement.
The problem is not simple, peoples identities, payment info, purchase behavior, etc are all involved.
Let alone having a clear identification of how to even do the merge.
If you go through those threads you’ll see problem is the lack of 100% clear examples because stores cannot give out data on customers so even third party developers haven’t been able to make a good app to solve the problem.
The merge feature should allow both customer and customer registered (ie with customer login/password) accounts to be merged,
The merge feature should ask the merchant which of the two existing email addresses they want the new merged account to use,
The merge feature should ask the merchant which of the two existing email addresses they want all the orders to be updated to OR leave all orders under their existing email addresses.
The merge feature should warn the merchant if they choose to merge the two customer records under the email of the non-registered customer account. (IE that they will have to send out an invitation to the customer to make the new merged customer account a registered customer account.
PLEASE shopify read all the the posts on the 11 threads I posted and look at your feature request log. This recent post summarises some of the pain:
05-17-2020 11:37 AM
I have a need for this too. There are 10 pages of comments. I was hoping that at the end of the thread, I’d find a link to the solution. Unfortunately this is not the case. This thread was started in 2018. And others as early as 2013. Our businesses depend on having clean organized data to create the best customer experiences. The ability to merge duplicate customer accounts should be a top priority of the product road map. Shopify, if you’re listening/watching, 3rd party apps shouldn’t be your response (or crutch) to build this feature that is so fundamental to your e-commerce platform.
The lack of this feature limits our ability to do the following:
accurately assess our customer’s lifetime value
create effective loyalty programs
Establish accurate customer profiles based on spend, product interest, loyalty
Gain a true view of our customers. Customers who spend/order more from my shop will receive different grades of VIP treatment. I cannot easily determine that when they have multiple accounts in my system
When we have to go through the painful process of manually consolidating disparate customer data, we’re pulled away from other important business tasks. Right now, more than ever, we depend on digital platforms to have functionality as basic as merging customer accounts to help us win back time and focus on strategic efforts to survive the pandemic.
I have just flowed in my customer lists from other places, and I already see duplicates that I can’t fix. Why can’t the system see that there are duplicates and then merge them? Or at least show them to me, and I’ll merge them. I can’t even delete a duplicate customer profile right now, because they bought something using a different email, I suspect because at the time the Shopify system failed them when they tried to log in as a customer and the Shopify system didn’t recognize them. That’s the reason why I have many duplicates anyway, which is a particularly big flaw.
It’s clear that Shopify’s core database was badly designed from the outset and is completely reliant on the consumers email address at it’s core. They have fobbed PAYING CUSTOMERS off for at least 7 YEARSwith this “Make a suggestion to our developers” twaddle.
At best they are simply ignoring us as customers and at worst they are flat out lying. But they will have to do something as by now there must be at least several million “duplicate” accounts with the wrong emails etc. It will slowly but eventually kill their own system…
Much needed feature! When they use their credit card and it has one phone number and then we have entered them previously with another phone number this creates a mess we definitely need a feature to merge two or more customers into one account please please please shopify!
I just found out this weekend I can now go in a clean up my customers recent transactions and “merge them” in a sense.
While there is no simple merge feature and the work around is a process it is at least possible now and insanely helpful. My process has been:
Search for customers name in our database (I started with ones I knew were particularly bad) so that I saw all the duplicate accounts.
Find the account I want to now use as the primary account (basing off which had most sales, email subscribe status, phone number, etc) and my trick was adding an asterisk to the end of the customer name so it differentiated itself from duplicates.
Next, search the customer name in orders so pull up all order history.
Now inside of the order you can remove and replace the customer attached to the transaction. So remove the incorrect duplicated accounts, and then re add the correct profile for the customers.
Now back in the customers tab when you search the name it should show all the of the duplicated accounts now have 0 orders and one account holds all the transactions.
Delete the unnecessary 0 order accounts and that leaves with you one neat and clean customer with all of their order history.
It’s a trip for sure, but insanely worth it for me where keeping in touch customers personally and knowing who my most valuable clients are and what they are purchasing. Ridiculous it took this long but I am very happy that I can finally get it cleaned up this week.
You can now merge customer profiles. Thanks to your advocacy and feedback - you can merge customer profiles to ensure you have the most accurate view of your customers.
Identify duplicated customer profiles with the same name, phone number, email address, or another overlapping attribute then merge customers to make sure you maintain quality customer data.
To merge customer profiles:
Search for a duplicate customer in the Customers page of your Shopify admin
Click on the customer’s name and review their customer profile data to identify what data needs to be kept or removed.
Click into one of the duplicate profiles
On the bottom right of the profile you will see a heading called, Customer Data
Click the button in that section that says Merge customer
Search for the customer profile you intend to merge.
Complete the merge steps.
Keep in mind, not every customer profile can be merged. There are some limitations for merging profiles that you can review in the Shopify Help Center.
We know this has taken time, and we appreciate your patience. We are excited to be launching this improvement for you today and look forward to hearing your feedback so we can keep improving your experience maintaining customer data in Shopify.