All You Need to Know About New Shopify Customer Accounts for B2B & DTC

Classic Shopify customer accounts

Customer accounts are an essential element of your ecommerce store, allowing returning customers the ease and flexibility of managing their relationship with your brand. Once logged in, customers can check or amend their current orders, view their order history, and edit their profile and preferences, all within their customer account page.

Until now, customisations to Shopify customer accounts have been fairly cumbersome to implement, with complex workarounds needed in order to alter functionality. Account extensibility makes it far easier for brands to add unique and powerful functionality to enhance customer account experience. You’ll be able to build extensions directly into new customer accounts, allowing you to add new, unique features to your customer accounts, to wow your loyal customers.

Key differences between classic customer accounts & new customer accounts on Shopify

Let’s take a look at some of the ways the new Shopify customer accounts differ from the current functionality.

Login experience

Shopify customers are able to access their customer account seamlessly across all their devices and apps via a single login, offering a consistent user experience across all their current touch points with your brand.

Traditionally, customers require their email and password every time they log in. With new customer accounts, customers can log in with a one-time code sent to their email address, or by signing into Shop.

If a customer isn’t already logged in, they can access their order status page by clicking on a link in their order confirmation email. Once on this page, if they wish to navigate to other areas of their customer account, they’ll need to log in.

Account creation

Whilst classic accounts require customers to accept an invite or create an account on the login page, new customer accounts are automatically created when a customer logs in using an email address.

Self-service returns

Customers are able to request product returns from their new customer account, rather than needing to contact your team directly. The requests can then be approved or declined in your Shopify admin, and you can send out instructions and return labels via email. This not only provides great user experience, but helps to reduce the load on your customer service team.

Changing view of past orders

In their new customer accounts, customers can to reorder the view of their past orders, sorting past orders by location, order value or order number, as well as sorting newest to oldest.

B2B customers

New customer accounts are being made available to both DTC and B2B customers, with some key differences between the two, which we will explore later in this article.

How to enhance customer experience with new Shopify customer account extensibility

Compared to traditional customer accounts, new extensibility gives you the control to structure your customer accounts in the way that works best for your brand.

With customer account UI extensions, developers can build apps to add additional features or pages to the customer account area. These can be built using either checkout or customer account components. You can choose to either customise the existing pages – order index, order status and profile – or add whole new pages to your customer accounts.

So what might this look like in practice? Here are some examples of how you might choose to enhance your customer account pages:

Personalised product recommendations

The order index page is the default page that customers land on when they log into their customer account. It lists a customer’s order history, including any abandoned orders that they haven’t completed. You can now enhance this page by adding suggested products, based on their order history, to put the best products in front of your customer and boost conversion.

Loyalty program reminders

You could customise your customer profile page to display a customer’s current loyalty point balance. Reminding customers of their loyalty points is a great way to encourage further purchases, as they aim to reach the next tier.

Alternatively, you could add a banner to the order index page offering a discount code or promotion according to their current status in your loyalty program.

You can find more tips like this in our guide to loyalty program strategy.

Customer service options

You’ll be able to add new apps to your order status page that enable your customers to request an exchange on their purchase or report a problem. This will help you to automate your customer service and free up time for your customer service team, all whilst making your customer feel more in control.

Enhanced customer profiles

The more data you capture on your customers, the better you will be able to personalise their shopping experience. Consider expanding your customer profile fields to include even more data, such as their favourite colour, their clothing size or their preferred nickname.

Wishlist

As well as optimising current pages of your Shopify customer accounts, you can also add whole new pages. Why not create a customer wishlist page, where they can save favourites as they browse your site, and access these in their customer account at a later date?

Store custom files or artwork

If you sell customisable products on your Shopify store, you could add a page to your customer accounts that allows shoppers to store any design files or customisation preferences. This will make it easier for them to include the same customisation on future orders.

New B2B customer accounts

As Shopify looks to expand its B2B capabilities, customer accounts are being made available for B2B customers too, with additional UX features built in. This is great news for Shopify brands selling B2B as the new flexibility allows you to create far more customised experiences for your wholesale customers, better suited to your ways of working.

New B2B customer profiles include information on the company and location(s) of the customer, and have additional permissions not available to default customers, such as placing orders for several different company locations, and switching between these locations using a dropdown. With regards to payment, B2B shipping and billing addresses are linked to company location. Companies can assign unique payment and shipping details and staff to each of their locations.

In order history pages, each order displays the details of who placed it and which location it was placed for. Similarly, on order status, the company placing the order and the location it is placed for will be visible for new customer accounts.

B2B customers are able to set their own permissions for each of their company locations. 

For example, certain locations may have order only permissions, and be unable to edit their billing or shipping information, whilst others may only be able to view orders placed by their location on the order history page.

Should you choose classic or new customer accounts?

With both new and classic customer accounts available, which option should you choose for your store? The answer is that each business is unique, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for which type of account to use just yet.

Classic accounts

Despite the advantages that new customer accounts bring, there are still some use cases for remaining with classic accounts.

1. Subscription or translation

If you’re looking to integrate powerful subscription or translation apps for example, you will be better off with the tried and tested classic accounts that (at time of writing) offer a simpler path to integration.

2. Unique brand styling

For brands with a very unique style that needs to extend all the way to customer accounts, classic accounts also offer better styling options at the moment. Eventually, within new customer accounts, we hope to see further styling options, similar to the checkout branding API. This API allows a more custom look and feel to your checkout, to help you stand out from the crowd as well as take advantage of the new features on offer.

3. Single Sign-On

If you’re an enterprise brand, Single Sign-On (SSO), which allows one sign in session across multiple websites, is currently only supported with Shopify’s Multipass on classic accounts.

New accounts

On the other hand, new customer accounts, although in early stages, will offer a robust solution for years to come, with foreseeable updates and greater opportunity for integration on a deeper level.

1. Flexibility

Account extensibility allows developers to tap into powerful APIs to access and sync data that would have been much more difficult prior.

2. Simplified user experience

The new sign-in system offers the same experience for an existing user or a new user, keeping things simple, with no need to remember passwords. In addition, new customer accounts offer great out-of-the-box functionality that classic accounts don’t possess, like one-click reorder buttons tied to a user’s order history.

3. B2B customer accounts

If you have a B2B store, new customer accounts are your only option, since classic accounts do not include B2B functionality.

Hybrid approach

Even if you are on classic customer accounts, it is possible to use both new customer accounts and classic accounts together. You can use your shop’s unique ID to create a link in your store which allows customers to utilise specific new customer account features you might not have currently on classic accounts.

A good use case for this is for self-serve returns, which are available out-of-the-box on new customer accounts. A link such as https://shopify.com/<Your Shop ID Here>/account/orders can be placed on your store’s returns policy page to save customer support time in dealing with return requests.

Timeline for roll-out of customer account extensibility

Customer accounts extensibility was released for developer preview in December 2023.  At the time of writing, new customer account UI extensions are still only available in developer preview, and are yet to be released to retailers.

Shopify plans to make new customer account UI extensions available at some point during 2024. In the meantime, developers can start to create new apps for customer account extensions, ready to be published once the functionality is rolled out.

Customer account UI extensions will only be supported on new customer accounts, with traditional customer accounts not supporting the extensions.

The future of new customer accounts & account extensibility

If customer account extensibility is anything like checkout extensibility, we’ll be seeing a push towards opening up more and more structured ways to customise the account page, with Shopify holding the keys to the core functionality.

Shopify is taking back control of customer accounts, and hosting them on the shopify.com domain. Ultimately, this could indicate a push towards a unified account experience across multiple Shopify stores in the future.

Imagine uploading your photo to a unified account, which allows you to virtually try on clothing across multiple brands. Or uploading your favourite colours or shoe size, and receiving tailored clothing suggestions on whichever store you visit. There are plenty of possibilities on the horizon, and we’re looking forward to seeing what Shopify will cook up in the future with new customer accounts!

Want help personalising your new customer accounts on Shopify?

Swanky’s team of developers have been busy over the last few months exploring the new features in the developer preview, ready to help our clients implement them on their stores.

If you’d like to discuss how you can update your customer accounts and improve your B2B or DTC customer experience, get in touch with our team.