Workaround: Searching in POS and Admin by both customer and product

Previously, (up until a couple months ago), if you were trying to locate a customer’s purchase of a specific product, you could just type in “CUSTOMER NAME (or email)” and also type in “PRODUCT DETAIL”. It would show you all the purchases from that customer which include a match on that product detail. Very useful because you wouldn’t have to look through every sale from that customer.

Recently that functionality was changed in both admin and POS so that if you type in

  • “CUSTOMER NAME (or email)” you get a list of all orders from that customer
  • “PRODUCT DETAIL” you get a list of orders from all customers containing that product detail
  • Both together it shows ZERO orders because you’re trying to search on both fields/data entities and it seems to limit the search to either Customer or Products/Variants but not both.

This has really increased the amount of time it takes to look up what size, colors, details etc. of a customer’s previous purchases. We have to look through every single purchase for that customer until we find the correct order.

The hack is this: Add a label to an order with the customer’s name. For example label the order with “Customer Label - John Doe”. Now, when you type in both the customer AND the product details, it will show all the orders from that customer but only with that product. In other words, it brings back the original search functionality.

To do so requires an app to auto-label each order. I already pay for an app that automatically applies labels so I just created a new workflow. I haven’t checked but I imagine it can also be done with Shopify Flow.

Anyway, that’s my hack. Hopefully it helps you.

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I’m sad to read this because 1) no one at Shopify when we asked many many times knew your original work around to find a particular sale attributed to a customer, and 2) to read that the function is now gone. I’m glad in a way that we didn’t know, so we aren’t suffering loss of yet another function from the POS that we are still paying the same price for, but losing functionality. Hopefully they put that function back in and then EMAIL THE USERS to let us know.