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Upgrading to customer accounts from legacy customer accounts

Upgrade to the latest version of customer accounts to access the following features and give your customers the best account experience available on Shopify.

Frictionless sign-in

  • One sign-in powers everything: Customers sign in once and get access to all customer accounts features and app customizations.
  • Passwordless authentication: Customers can sign in with email and a one-time passcode, which means no password resets.
  • Social sign-in: Offer customers the option to sign in with Facebook or Google.

Built-in features

  • Returns: Customers can start a return from their account.
  • Store credit: Customers can view their store credit balance in their account and spend it at checkout.
  • Subscriptions: Customers can resume, skip, or cancel subscriptions, and update their payment methods, directly in their account.
  • More self-serve features: Order tracking, reordering, and profile management are supported with customer accounts.
  • Pixels for analytics: Track customer events and gain insights into customers’ post-purchase behavior to optimize account experiences with Shopify web pixels.
  • Managed independently from your theme: Customer accounts are managed separately from your theme, so theme updates don't impact your account experience. You’ll continue to get access to new customer account features without requiring theme changes.

Modern, mobile-first design

The refreshed layout features intuitive navigation, branded sign-in, curated product recommendations for first-time shoppers, and more visible order management and app features, all optimized for a mobile-first experience.

Customization options

  • A robust variety of customer account apps: Customize your customer account experience with app blocks. For example, you can add loyalty, subscriptions, and wishlist features to customer accounts with no code required. App blocks use colors, fonts, and styling that you've set up in the checkout and accounts editor, so every feature you add is consistent with your brand.
  • Connect your own identity provider: Replace the default sign-in experience with your own identity provider for a completely custom authentication flow.
  • Customer Account API: Build a bespoke customer accounts experience with the Customer Account API, designed to work with Hydrogen and the Storefront API.

If you’re still using legacy customer accounts, then follow this guide to prepare for your upgrade and prevent disruptions to your customer experience.

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Limitations

Before upgrading from legacy customer accounts to customer accounts, review these limitations:

  • Custom sign-in or registration experiences: After you upgrade, Shopify automatically redirects all legacy customer account URLs (such as /account/login) to the new customer accounts. This includes any hard-coded links in your theme. However, if you have built a custom sign-in or registration experience, for example, in a modal or on a different page separate from legacy account templates, then you might need to edit your theme to remove those customizations before upgrading.
  • Workflow triggers and automations: Workflow triggers or automations based on legacy customer accounts aren't supported in customer accounts. If you have existing workflows or automations configured using legacy customer accounts, then they can't be migrated to customer accounts.
  • Customer segments: Customer segments that include the customer_account_status filter won't work as expected after you upgrade, because customer_account_status is exclusively for legacy customer accounts. There are no filters available for the new version of customer accounts.
  • Custom domains per market: You can't set a custom domain per market for your customer accounts pages. This means that even if your store has multiple international domains set up, you can use only one domain for customer accounts across all markets.
  • Multipass: Multipass isn't supported on customer accounts. If you need to use your own identity provider, then you can connect it to customer accounts.
  • Sign-in page customization: You can't add customization blocks to the sign-in page. You can customize the logo, colors, fonts, and a brand image for the sign-in page in the checkout and accounts editor.

Step 1: Review your legacy customizations and decide what to keep

Review any customizations you’ve made to legacy customer accounts, such as links for subscription management or loyalty programs, and take note of which customizations are important to you. You should recreate each of these before upgrading to ensure a smooth transition. Customizations can include changes made to customer account templates in the theme editor, or changes to .liquid code.

You might find old customizations that are no longer important to you. You can safely ignore these, as they won't transfer over during the upgrade process.

Review customizations in the theme editor:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes.

  2. Next to your current theme, click Edit theme.

  3. Click the Home page drop-down menu.

  4. Click Legacy customer accounts.

  5. Review each legacy customer account template to find any customizations:

    • Customer account
    • Customer activate account
    • Customer addresses
    • Customer login
    • Customer order
    • Customer register
    • Customer reset password

Review customizations in .liquid code:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes.

  2. Next to your current theme, click … > Edit code.

  3. In the left sidebar, click templates > customers. These are the templates for legacy customer accounts. Your file structure can vary if you’ve made changes to it.

  4. Review the code in each customer template to find any customizations.

Step 2: Duplicate your existing configuration

Duplicate your existing configuration to give you a place to work on your new customizations, save in-progress changes, and preview them before you're ready to make them visible to customers.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.

  2. In the Configurations section, click Duplicate next to the configuration that you want to duplicate. This creates a copy of your configuration.

  3. Optional: Rename the configuration so it’s easier to find later.

Step 3: Replace your legacy customizations with apps for customer accounts

Find apps to replace each of the legacy customizations that you identified in Step 1. There are apps for customer accounts with features such as loyalty programs, upsells and cross-sells, order editing, wishlists, reviews, returns, subscriptions, forms and surveys, digital downloads, and more.

Browse all apps that work with customer accounts:

Add app blocks from your installed apps

If you used an app to customize legacy customer accounts, then the app developer might have updated that app to work with customer accounts. You can add app blocks from these apps from the checkout and accounts editor.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.

  2. Next to the copy of the configuration that you created, click Customize to open the checkout and accounts editor.

  3. In the left sidebar, click Apps. You’ll see all of your installed apps that work with checkout or customer accounts.

  4. Under the All tab, find the app you used to customize legacy customer accounts. You can search for the specific app name to narrow down the list.

  5. Click + next to the app blocks under that app. If there's the option to add the app block to Orders, Order status, Profile, or Accounts, then it means the app works with customer accounts.

  6. Add the app blocks that you want and configure the app block settings. Learn more about using apps in the checkout and accounts editor.

  7. Optional: Preview the changes on your pages on different screen sizes by clicking the desktop button for desktop, mobile button for mobile, or fullscreen button for fullscreen to view how the page displays to customers.

  8. Click Save.

Find a new app

For some customizations, you might need to find and install a new app to recreate the same functionality you had in legacy customer accounts.

Steps:

  1. Go to the Shopify App Store.
  2. Search for the feature that you need.
  3. Click Refine.
  4. Under Works with, select Customer accounts. This limits your search to apps that work with customer accounts.
  5. Once you install the app, follow the steps to add app blocks from your installed apps.

If you have external links in your legacy customer accounts (for example, a link to a separate subscriptions or returns portal), then check if there are any Shopify features or apps that you can use to offer that feature instead.

The benefit of using Shopify features and apps is that customers can access all of these features by signing in only one time, whereas linking to an external portal often requires additional verification steps.

If you still need to add an external link, then you can add the link to your customer account main menu or use an app to add a link in the body of a page. Shopify Checkout Blocks lets you add content blocks, including links, to the order status page in customer accounts. There are also several public apps that let you add links to the other pages in customer accounts. Follow the steps to find a new app to find an app that works for you.

Step 4: Make sure your brand settings are up to date

Checkout and customer accounts share the same brand settings. Make sure your brand and logo display as expected across all pages.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.

  2. Next to the copy of the configuration that you created, click Customize to open the checkout and accounts editor.

  3. In the left sidebar, click Settings and review your current brand settings.

  4. In the top bar of the editor, click Checkout to open the page selector menu.

  5. Navigate to different checkout and customer account pages to make sure your brand and logo appears as expected across the entire experience.

  6. Adjust settings as needed.

  7. Click Save.

Step 5: Connect a subdomain for customer accounts

By default, your customer accounts pages, such as the sign-in page, the orders page, and the profile page, use a shopify.com URL format as their base domain, similar to shopify.com/1234567890/account with a unique ID number for your store. You can select and connect a subdomain for customer accounts based on your online store's primary domain name instead to match your customer accounts to your brand. For example: account.your-store.com.

This subdomain displays to customers when they visit their account, including the order status page.

Step 6: Check that your sender email is up to date

Review your sender email address and make sure you have access to it. Customers sign in with a verification code sent to their email, and those emails are sent from your sender email address.

Step 7: Publish your configuration

When you’re done setting up apps and brand settings, publish your configuration. This will make your changes live in checkout and customer accounts.

Your online store and checkout still link to legacy customer accounts until you complete Step 9.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.

  2. Next to the copy of the configuration that you created, do the following actions:

    1. Optional: Click Customize to preview your changes.
    2. Click Publish.

Step 8: Preview and test your new customer accounts configuration

Your new configuration is now published, but your online store and checkout still link to legacy customer accounts until you complete the upgrade.

To test the new customer accounts experience before completing the upgrade, copy your new customer accounts URL and open it in a new browser tab. If you set up a customer accounts subdomain, then the URL is formatted similar to account.{your-store-domain}.com. If you didn't set up a subdomain, then the default format is https://shopify.com/{your-store-ID}/account.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Customer accounts.

  2. In the Customer accounts section, copy the web address in the URL field.

  3. In your web browser, open a new tab and paste the URL into the address field, and then press Enter to load the page.

  4. Sign in to your test customer account to preview the new customer accounts experience using your published checkout and accounts configuration.

Step 9: Upgrade

Upgrade when you’re ready to give customers access to customer accounts from the online store and checkout.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Customer accounts.

  2. Click Upgrade in the banner at the top of the page.

Legacy customer account resources