How Do I Add Customers with My Import?
When importing your orders, you may want to import customer data as well. This way you can import all of your customers at the same time as your order. To add customers to your order you'll want to go to the Customer tab of the Data Mapping.
From here, you'll be able to add the customer's email, first name, last name, phone, and note. The only field required when importing customer data is the email address. Shopify uses the email address to determine if the customer already exists. When importing orders, if the email address is found, Shopify will update the customer information and associate the imported orders with that customer. Shopify will create a new customer record if the email address is not found.
Customer Accounts & Passwords
EZ Importer does not support importing your customer passwords. This would be considered a security vulnerability, as migrating your customers' passwords would mean you have access to their plain text passwords. If you are migrating your customer data and want your customers to be able to log into your store, you will need to force them to do a password reset.
If you would like your customers to log into your store, you need to set up Customer Accounts in Shopify. This is not something EZ Importer does for you. You can read more about it in Shopify's documentation: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/customers/customer-accounts.
EZ Importer was not designed to migrate your customer accounts. The customer data that is imported is specifically designed to support your Orders. This allows you to associate order data with a customer so you can keep track of customer spending, etc.
Email Address and Phone Number
It's recommended that you provide an email address when working with customer data on your order. This is used by Shopify to identify the customer and associate orders to a specific customer. Shopify will check if the email address exists on their platform when creating your order. If the email address already exists, the order will be associated with the customer. If it does not exist, a new customer will be created.
Because of this recommendation we require you to provide an email address when mapping customer data, however Shopify does allow you to provide an empty email address when creating orders. If you provide a phone number with a blank email address Shopify will try and create a new customer instead of associating the order with the customer. In these cases you will get an error message saying has already been taken. This error is returned from Shopify and means the phone number is already associated with a customer. Since Shopify does not associate the order by the phone number, they prevent the customer from being created which will prevent the order from being created as well.
There isn't a way to disable this validation as it's something that happens on Shopify's platform. Since Shopify does not associate the order with a customer by the phone number you can either add an email address to the order or remove the phone number from your file. If you do not provide an email address and/or a unique phone number on the order it will import successfully but will not associate to a customer.
Shipping and Billing Address
When adding or associating customers with your imports you can also provide their billing and shipping address. When you do this, the billing and shipping address will be associated with that customer. This means, when you go to the customer profile page you'll see the customers Shipping and billing address associated with them.
From the Shopify admin you can edit or delete any of the address information that you've imported. This will help you keep a complete set of customer details.
App: EZ Importer
Tags: faq, customers, getting started