When using account approval for your form's account creation, you will inevitably be asked to merge customer records during the approval process. Since approving an account creates the account in Shopify, and since Shopify does not allow more than one customer to have the same default email or phone, the app will sometimes ask you to merge customer records if it detects more than one record with the same email or phone.

Sometimes a merge can cause a "Failed to merge customers" error to appear, so this article will share some more details on what this error means and why it usually happens.

Sometimes when the "Failed to merge customers" error occurs, it's because the app prompted you to merge two records with the same email or phone, but when trying to merge the records, discovered an additional record with conflicting email or phone data.

For example, you go to approve a pending customer and the "merge" modal appears. You may see a message like "There's another customer record with the same phone number. Before approving this account, you must verify and merge the two accounts." See below for an example:

When clicking Merge customers, you may see the "Failed" error appear with an additional message explaining why the error occurred. In this case, the email in question has already been taken by an active account in Shopify. See below:

So now our merge conflict is twofold; not only does a customer record already exist in Shopify with the same default phone, but there is also a separate customer record with the same email.

Solution A (recommended): perform a search in the Shopify admin to identify the two existing customer records causing the conflict, merge the two existing records in Shopify so that there is now only one conflict.

Solution B: perform a search in Customer Fields (or Shopify) to find the record that already has the same email, and change or delete the email data from that record.

Solution C: edit the original conflicting record to change or delete the phone data so that the pending record can merge with the new conflicting record.

Please contact us via chat or email and we'll be happy to assist 👍