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.  

[PrecedenceDev]

I was just checking a client's service who has us as a customer. It seems that my initial personal orders linked/saved my Paypal email address (which, by the way, is extremely NOT ok) and then one order I made was a quick "oops I forgot these items" and that order did not save an email address at all, so for my personal account with them there are three customer records. I have tried to update all customers to the same email address, but this does not work either.

Then a new employee has been ordering from the business with her own email address instead of the business email address for business purchases, so if we'd made previous business purchases, this also would have created a new account that our business would have wanted to merge.

I hope this helps you resolve the issue and understand the requirement to be able to merge customers.

Editing existing customers does not "ensure that new orders are placed under the active account only" when there is ability to create MORE records.

Even the ability to allocate an order to another customer would sort some of these troubles.

JS

[hacketyapps]

We've also been dealing with this issue for our app Engagely. That's why we started on building a prototype to try and fix this issue. The biggest issue with our solution is how to transfer loyalty points or other app related data.

We'll update this thread once we have an mvp that merchants can try out.

[Discoverytrek]

This is an important feature for us. Duplicate accounts are often created when a customer uses more than one email address or changes email addresses, or if they forget a password, they just create a new account.

[eatpye]

I feel like it would be less of a problem if Shopify references the phone number as opposed to email.

[OptiShotGolf]

Please make this an option.

[dprose]

I would love to see this feature as well!

We recently integrated Shopify with HubSpot. It pulled in all of our Shopify customers and for the first time, I could actually see accounts that HubSpot flagged as possible duplicates. Out of 40k total customer accounts in Shopify, there are 1,500 probable duplicates. That's a lot! Many of these are legitimate secondary email addresses/accounts that people use to differentiate between personal and work accounts, or between different family members. But I would say at least 10% of them are just email address typos. For instance the user typed "@gmil.com" instead of "@gmail.com". Then when they realized they weren't getting any email notifications for their orders, they went back and created another user account with the correct email address. So we probably have at least 150 duplicate accounts that are the result of typos and we don't have a good way to correct those accounts in Shopify.

The ability to surface possible duplicate accounts and provide an option to merge accounts would be incredibly helpful!

[BYSAlways]

Hi,

We have this issue as well. The way it happens with us is we do an in person/ pos sale and the customer chooses to enter their phone number for the receipt. Later the customer signs up for text marketing and a second profile is created. I try to edit the original profile by entering their phone number, this is when I'm met by the error that "the number is already taken". I do not have an email for the customer because they've chosen only to provide their number. 

Then when I look in Klaviyo the customer shows up as a new customer, with no purchases, but in shopify they have multiple POS purchases. This becomes an issue when I'm segmenting and trying to email those "without purchases". 

Thank you.

[CrissChaney]

I would also like to have the ability to merge customer accounts- for us the problem is, if a customer puts in the wrong email address when ordering online, they don't receive their email notifications, but if they are a repeat customer- I can't put their correct email address in so that they can receive their order notifications, because it won't let me have two different customer accounts with the same email address, but then it won't let me merge the accounts- so now we're stuck going in circles....

[mnearents]

I wonder if someone could develop an app that allows you to associate
customer accounts together artificially. So that when an order
confirmation goes out, for example, the app could see whether there’s an
associated “parent” account and send a notification there too. Or when
you’re viewing orders, you could view them across the associated
accounts.  Obviously I don’t want to pay for another app, but it could
be a temporary solution. It would be doubly cool if someone developed it
as an open source app we could all self-host, thus preventing shopify
from making money on a public app. 

But also if we just keep responding to this thread it shows that it’s a
feature that needs consideration. That is if their UX designers follow
these threads. 

[CDRess]

Honestly, how is this not a feature? I have worked with several email, shipping, and POS systems in the past and I cannot think of one that didn't have this functionality. It is desperately needed for creating an accurate customer profile. Please consider implementing this ASAP.

[AlexanderKunz]

Hi Rae (Shopify),

I had brought this issue up a few years ago with the Dev team on what's causing the issue but it doesn't seem to be a priority with Shopify.  One of my Board Members is a co-founder of Shopify (no longer involved).  This issue is caused by a process flaw/bug in Shopify.  What I mean by that is that the issue is the result of the "optional account" setting.  The recommendation is to disable that feature but we have done a lot of testing and mandatory accounts result in a significant downturn in conversions.

The issue is that even though Shopify says "optional accounts" this is not in fact true.  The account is created by its just not active (no password).  What happens is the customer gets an email to activate their account (one email from Shopify).  We additionally send 3 others but the reality is that customers do not hit the activate button which results in a fatal flaw.  The next time the customer attempts to log in using their email, the system tells them they do not have an account.  When they attempt a password reset, they are told they do not have an account.  When they try and set up a new account and use the same email address, the system tells them the account exists (yet that cannot access it).  So, naturally, the customer either leaves and orders on another channel or uses another email address.  We have over 3600 customers with multiple duplicate accounts because of this issue.  If Shopify can fix this one issue, the duplicate accounts would be a moot point.  The account should be automatically enabled with a random strong password.  If the customer never wants to log in again then it doesn't matter.  If they do, they simply just need to request a password change.  This is a process flaw because it results in cart abandonment (untraceable on the Shopify customer side because the customer cannot log in) but in reality, we performed AB testing and baseline with "accounts mandatory".   When then turned back on accounts optional and the impact was obvious.

[templeflakes]

Adding another voice to the "how is this not available yet" crowd.  Really curious how shopify prioritizes features when a request with 16 pages of comments apparently isn't something worth implementing. Sure would love to see a uservoice-like let me vote for features I need and let shopify identify things they are working on type clarity of user requests and company efforts.

[Kevin_Hartman]

We all need to hit up their support lines and request this over and over, via phone, email and chat. 

[mrkasmith]

Such a clear topic worthy of a "we hear you and a solution is near response"

[george_d]

We should, but I am not sure how much good it will do.

[Lawson_Thalmann]

@SpencerCran Good point on the household issue. This should be talked about more in retail. If the husband shops and creates an account and then the wife later shops and creates another account, we think we just acquired a new customer when really this is the same household with joint buying decisions. 

[Lawson_Thalmann]

At this point, it's all been said, but to pile on, it's a massive thorn in our side daily. Many customers' experiences suffer daily because of this. We lose competitiveness with other businesses using software that can do this. Our customer metrics aren't trustable to make decisions off of due to this. It's not a sustainable way to run a customer-centric business. Especially with Shopify's perceived advantage over Amazon of owning the customer relationship, this puts a hug wedge in that in practice. 

[Lawson_Thalmann]

@Rich_Hamilton  Let me know if you're able to have a developer build a custom app. Definitely doesn't seem like Shopify is doing anything soon with this... 

[petgrocer]

We need this feature. Shopify is BIG. This isn't a little player with a foothold in the market.

The only changes in the changelog in POS since March of 2021 are them rolling it out to other countries. Imagine the surprise for those countries when they hit these forums and see the challenges and that you can't even do a return because you can't find the customer and their order. I have a feeling that Europe won't stand for this.

Shopify let's get you even with the other players out there in functionality. Please get your devs to work on this, enough with rolling out POS to every country and playing with the edit fields in the admin product page. Real users are begging you for help.

[Kevin_Hartman]

I am about ready to buy some shopify stock so I can go to the share holder meeting and address this issue there.