Over this Labor Day weekend I got an email that I had open the Shopify account, which was incorrect as I have nothing to do with this website. I went through the emails and they looked legit so I went to shopify.com and “logged in” by recovering my email address and changing the password. I live in a different state than what was represented in the fraudulent profile, although somebody did find a picture online that was connected to my email address at some point. I went through and deleted everything I could do the Shopify account but I can’t find any way to completely delete the account and I remove my email address from Shopify entirely. There’s no easy way on the website or in the help feature that allows me to do this. This is almost as bad as PayPal, Shopify is not authenticating email addresses when people use them. Anybody can use an email address as a Shopify account but they don’t have to verify that it’s their address. I know that my email address is not compromised, I check it regularly for security and I change the password frequently. Shopify needs to be able to have the feature to prove that somebody actually owns an email address when they’re signing up for an account, they also need to make it easy for people to completely shut down the account not just the store.
That sounds like a frustrating situation. To provide some insight, emails require authentication after a set period of time before the user loses access to the store. If you haven’t closed the store already, then you’ll want to do so by going to Settings/Plans and Permissions. From there, select “Close Store” at the bottom of the page to fully close the account. Your personal information will be removed within 6 months once the store remains inactive; however, if you’d like to speed up this process then you’ll need to contact Shopify Support.
Support can mark the store as dead which will tell the system to remove personal information within 90 days. You can contact support by login into the help centre, searching your question/issue, then selecting “continue” on the bottom of the page that displays the search results.