Shopify Account Extensibility: how to improve your Shopify customer accounts by Linda Bleijenberg

Following the implementation of the new, customizable Shopify checkout (read more about Shopify Checkout Extensibility here), Shopify account pages have recently been opened up to easy customization as well. Merchants can now customize their customer accounts without code, using apps. What is more, they can add whole pages to their customer accounts. Last but not least: Account Extensibility makes single sign-on accessible to both merchants and customers, and paves the way towards giving customers a single Shopify account for all Shopify stores.  

Customer Account Extensibility was introduced as part of Shopify Editions Winter 2024, still in developer preview. Since December 2024 the new customer account is available to merchants on all plans, with the exception of the new B2B accounts. B2B features are available to Shopify Plus merchants only. 

Now that Shopify customer accounts can be adjusted, merchants have a lot of options to tailor their customer accounts to both their audience and brand. The option to add whole new pages opens up interesting opportunities: now merchants can give customers easy access to loyalty programs, subscriptions and return management, all within their personal account.

→ Read Shopify’s app recommendations here

Here’s a selection of use cases for improving the experience of your Customer Accounts that our team recommends exploring: 

1. Embed your loyalty program
Customize the Profile page by displaying a customer’s current loyalty points balance, or add a banner with a loyalty promotion to the Order Index page (the first page customers see when they open their account). LoyaltyLion is one of Shopify’s partners for Account Extensibility and published a blog about how to use their app in combination with the new customer accounts.

2. Bring your customer service closer
You can use the new account extensions to automate your customer service further and give your customers lots of options to share crucial information. Have them report a problem, for instance, or register returns and exchanges within their account.

3. Offer wishlists
The best way to know what your customer wants is to have them save their favourite products. Offer them a separate page where they can easily review their preferences and add new ones. 

One of our Coders already experimented with Account Extensions and was able to build a test-wishlist within 10 minutes, which goes to show how quick and accessible implementing this feature can be. 

4. Offer invoices
Allow your customers to view and download invoices directly from their customer account page with Sufio, one of Shopify’s launch partners for Account Extensibility.

5. Enrich your customer profiles
Add more fields to the Profile page for the customer to fill out, so you can really get to know their preferences. What is their clothing size, their favourite colour, their preferred delivery method? How often do they wish to receive emails from you? Use the data to personalize your customer’s experience ever further. 

Show customers who shared their birthday your congrats in a banner, for instance, and give them an automatic discount. You can also combine this with a birthday flow in Klaviyo. If you organise exclusive sales or give early access to products, you can allow customers to subscribe for those in their account as well.

At Code we already experimented with integrating customer accounts with Klaviyo. This makes it possible to segment customers based on the personal data shared in their account.

6. Offer personalised product recommendations 
Show the customer personalized product recommendations on the Order Index page. Interesting use cases for this feature would be to pre-select sizing for clothes, based on customers’ profiles, or to notify them during checkout of products that are incompatible with a customer’s food allergies.

7. Custom file storage
Do you give customers the opportunity to customize their products? Consider adding a page to their profile where they can upload their designs, and store them for future reference. Keep in mind that this kind of feature goes beyond a mere UI extension and will require some custom work from your development partner. 

8. B2B customer profiles (Shopify Plus only)
As part of Shopify’s continued efforts to improve their B2B functionality, the new customer accounts also include a range of features aimed at merchants who sell both B2C and B2B. These are only available to Shopify Plus merchants at the moment.

B2B customers can now manage multiple business locations from the same account. For every location companies can assign staff members, permissions, and payment- and shipping details. The order history shows details on who placed an order from which location, and switching between locations while placing an order is easy.

→ Read more about Code’s Shopify B2B services here

Apart from the customization options we discussed above, there are some other notable differences between the classic and the new customer accounts:

• Login: Instead of a username and password, customers use a one-time verification code sent to their email. Alternatively, they can sign in using Shop.

• Account creation: Instead of manually creating an account, customers automatically get an account as soon as they login using their email.

• Saving payment methods: In the new customer account customers can save their payment details for faster checkouts.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Shopify is still working on a few features that are part of the old customer accounts, but not yet fully available with the new accounts:

• Branding: broadly follows the settings of the checkout. Since December 6th 2024 new branding options are available, also for the login page.

• Third-party app support: integration with third party apps is live since December 2024.

• Customization with Liquid: not available (yet).