Customer identity and data quality on Shopify

Every report, segment and email list in your store starts with the same question: who is this customer? On Shopify, the answer is a customer profile. Most of the time one profile is one person. When it isn’t, the effects spread into support, reporting, loyalty and marketing.

Shopify’s Help Center says a profile “is created in your Shopify admin when a customer interacts with your business”, and that “Each profile can have only one email address” (Managing customers). A shopper who types a work email one day and a phone number the next can become two profiles, and Shopify counts them as two customers.

In MergeGuard’s demo store: Amelia Hughes: 3 profiles with 4, 3 and 2 orders → one customer with 9 orders Demo store (Northsail Supply). Before a merge she looks like three ordinary customers. A customer merge puts her whole history in one place, and Shopify says “After the profiles are merged, you can’t reverse the process.”

Partners, flatmates and gift buyers share addresses and sometimes phones. They are different people and stay separate customers. In MergeGuard, you can mark relatives as family members. A mistyped email is a different cause, and a contact fix corrects it at the source.