Merge Customers

[makers18]

Has there been any updates or progress on the ability to MERGE CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS that are duplicates?  We have a ton and we basically began online sales in early March.  This is really needed to keep up with past orders and preferences.  We also offer rewards for our repeat customers and this system has really made tracking sales difficult.  

[Rich_Hamilton]

In an exchange with Shopify support a couple of years ago I was told that the only "effective" way to allow your voice to be heard on items such as this was to open up an official support ticket to report the problem or request the feature.  I.E. the development team, or even a manager, can't be bothered to check the community forums for issues like this. So, if you are a customer the best course of action is to open a support ticket on the issue.

[Rich_Hamilton]

Here's the page with contact information:

https://help.shopify.com/en/questions?utm_campaign=Guru+Ask&utm_medium=forum&utm_source=social#/cont...

[James-21]

@Rich_Hamilton 

In addition to raising support tickets perhaps we can also be really clear and specific about what is being asked for i.e.

- a button / functionality for a Shop Owner to manually merge 2 records into a single master record, including all transactions, orders etc 

There might be other ways to get Shopify’s attention on this, such as perhaps reaching out directly to their developers (I think based in Canada) on LinkedIn or raising on Shopify social channels? 

[Matt37]

Yes Please let me Merge Customers!!!!!  

This customer has 5 entries with transactions on each. I can't delete them because I don't want to lose her history.  We often have customers who ask about previous orders.  

WE HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR THIS FOR 4 YEARS.    

[KristyCRA]

Thanks! I just opened a ticket too.

[AmbayaGold]

Indeed this has happened to a number of our customers. They have a problem with their account and sign up with a new one. This is also a problem with order history and applying the same discount to the customer. 

[AlphaWade]

+1 on this. My customers signed up with email then on their next order, they sign up with phone. Now, there are duplicate names.  We need the merge feature ASAP.

[michellegoo]

Trust me, I have opened up a support ticket with them.  I've called on this several times.  The standard response is, "We'll send this information to our developers and see if they can resolve the issue."  That was over a year ago...  But it never hurts to do it again.  Thanks for the reminder!

[RENDermatology]

Would love the ability to merge customers.  

[Jarrod_Sanders]

Same here.  Repeat customers forget their password and just checkout with a phone number.  Boom...two accounts and separate product sales data across everything including all marketing efforts.   

I have been using Shopify for years and still can't see why this basic feature is not available.  Fingers crossed for sooner than later.  

Thanks,

Jarrod

Sunglass Savings

[CDR2]

I would also love to be able to have this feature.  Customers get new emails, forget their passwords, can't log in and need to reset their password, lose their email, whatever.  There are a number of reasons we ALL would like to see this feature.  Please make it an option for us.  

Thanks

CDR

Owner of a large online quiltshop

[Excan-Nick]

Still looking for a way to do this If sqaure space has this down like some of the first comments set I'm just about ready to jump ship due to my frustration. 

[odedesoie]

We have the same problem and I can't believe this isn't a built in feature! Customers subscribe to our mailing list without purchasing, which later locks them out of adding their email at checkout. Also, if someone uses just a phone number on one sale and then an email on another, Shopify doesn't automatically ask to merge. Please fix ASAP!

[AliRae]

+1....

Seems very odd that one of the biggest ecommerce platforms wouldn't have this basic functionality like all of the others do.

Hope to see it implemented soon but maybe we shouldn't hold our breath LOL.

[Nekohama]

Has their been an update on this? We see this all the time and we only have an online store. For some reason we have multiple accounts for customers and we'd like to keep them all together.

[michellegoo]

I wrote a note to the CEO outlining in detail what the issues are and asked for a resolution.  An assistant responded that they are working on it.  That was 3 weeks ago.

[Jarrod_Sanders]

Can you post what you sent to Tobias? Would love to see it!

[Rich_Hamilton]

Would very much like to hear the final response as well. This should be core functionality with Shopify, and should have been addressed before everything else they have been doing these last few years. If we can't satisfactorily manage our existing customers, keeping them will be a challenge...and people have very little patience with these type of issues in the digital age. "I'm sorry, I can't merge your 2 (or 3) customer accounts because our software vendor doesn't see it as a priority and turns a def ear to our requests..." - "no, you can't change your own email on your account (like most other stores on the web)...I have to do that for you, sorry"... etc, etc...

[michellegoo]

This is the email we sent:

Dear Mr. Lutke,

Our store uses Shopify and we are having concerns regarding the ability to merge customers in our data base.  I have contacted Shopify Support several times to address these concerns and each time I am told there is currently no way to fix this.  I've also been told they would bring this issue to the developers to see if anything could be done about the issue.  There has been no follow up regarding this issue.  I went to the Shopify Community page and looked it up there.  It seems this has been an issue with a large number of Shopify users since at least 2017 (that's as far back as I scrolled).  Below are some details about the issue as it applies to our store.

• We have an online and POS presence.  When customers use a different email address online and/or in store, they have 2 different accounts.
  
• If a customer checks out at POS and staff forgets to put in the customer's name and the customer uses a different credit card at check out, it comes up as Visa Cardholder, thus creating a different customer account.  
• When we try to go back and edit the profile, it lets us put the customer's name in, but when we put in the email address, it says that email is already in use so we cannot add that purchase to the customers profile - thus creating two different customer accounts.
• If a name is misspelled on the customer profile, when the customer comes in and staff is looking it up, they end up creating a new profile with the correct spelling, not knowing there is already an existing account.  When we go back to correct the old spelling, we are unable to merge the files due to the 'email already in use' issue.

This is a problem for our store because:

• It makes it difficult to accurately gauge spending thresholds and loyalty rewards for customers (with more than one account).
• It makes it tedious when customers have returns without receipts because we have to look up their receipts under all of their profiles.
• It gives an inaccurate count for number of customers when doing emails and it duplicates emails when a customer has 2 different emails on their accounts.  
  

I personally, am willing to go through every duplicate account in our customer base and edit the names myself to merge the accounts - but while incredibly tedious, it is not even an option within Shopify the way it is currently set up due to the 'email already in use' error. If there could be a way to merge customer accounts without losing any of the purchasing history (from both email accounts), that would be ideal and would get rid of all the issues listed above.

I appreciate your time in reading this letter and thank you for your attention to this matter.

This is the response I got:

Hi Michelle,

My name is Mark and I am a Support Lead at Shopify. I am following up on your email to Tobi regarding merging customer accounts.

I appreciate you so clearly outlining the issues this is causing you and I recognise the difficulties that this feature limitation can have on your business. I also admire your willingness to fix the duplicate accounts manually.

It is never our intention to create more work or challenges for our merchants, and it is conversations like this that have helped shape Shopify into what it is today. We take your feedback seriously and I have already spoken to our developers about looking into this issue for the future.

While I cannot promise this gets fixed soon, we will be investigating it and you can see updates on Shopify Announcements or Shopify News.

Moving forward, I'd recommend looking over the email Michelle sent you yesterday in ticket #24949531 for possible workarounds.

Please let me know if you have any further questions, and I am happy to assist.

Warm regards,

Mark
Shopify Support Lead

***The workarounds he is referring to include tagging every duplicate account so we can weed them out that way.  At this point, that does not seem like a feasible workaround for our issues.  I would encourage everyone who is having issues to open new tickets and write emails.  This needs to be addressed and seems to be sitting on the back burner for some reason.

[BbopnBarb]

Agreed.  We definitely need this feature.  All of the reasons previously stated apply to our business as well. 

1.  Customers use different email addresses during in-store or online.

2.  Significant others purchase for the other using a different email address.