Migrating Orders & Customers to Shopify without triggering emails

Retired Boards Appdev Store Design

Topic summary

A developer is migrating customers and orders to Shopify via API but faces unwanted automated emails being sent to customers during the process. Sending thousands of migration-related emails would be problematic.

Solution provided:

  • For customer creation: Use the send_email_welcome parameter set to false to prevent welcome emails
  • For orders: Use send_receipt and send_fulfillment_receipt attributes to disable order confirmation and fulfillment emails

Code examples were shared showing how to implement these parameters in API calls. The responder referenced official Shopify REST Admin API documentation for orders (2023-04 version) as additional reference.

Status: Solution appears complete with working implementation details provided.

Summarized with AI on November 17. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I have a client who is migrating some stores to Shopify. They would like to migrate their orders and customers. so I have written a php script which creates the customers and orders in the new Shopify store via the api. However, this process triggers the “Welcome account” and “order confirmation” emails and there is no way to turn those off without subscribing to Shopify Plus and requesting Shopify support to turn them off. Sending 1000s of customers emails related to this migration isn’t going to work. Before they jump ship I thought I would ask if anyone knows of any way to migrate those customers and orders without triggering those emails.

I apologize of this is in the wrong location. I did not see one that fit better.

Thanks,

Michael

2

Hey @MichaelBrock

There’s a send_email_welcome parameter you can use to prevent emails being sent when creating customer accounts. E.g.

curl -d '{"customer":{"first_name":"Steve","last_name":"Lastnameson","email":"steve.lastnameson@test.com","verified_email":true,"addresses":[{"address1":"123 Oak St","city":"Ottawa","province":"ON","phone":"555-1212","zip":"123 ABC","last_name":"Lastnameson","first_name":"Mother","country":"CA"}],"password":"newpass","password_confirmation":"newpass","send_email_welcome":false}}' \
-X POST "https://your-store.myshopify.com/admin/api/2023-04/customers.json" \
-H "X-Shopify-Access-Token: abc123" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json"

For orders, there are send_receipt and send_fulfillment_receipt attributes to disable order confirmation / fulfillment emails (docs).