There is a widely known and documented bug within Shopify that has been around for several years, and despite dozens of merchants on the platform asking Shopify to fix it, there has been no change.
The problem I'm referring to is that Shopify uses the shipping address as the new default address every time a customer places an order. In short, when an order is placed on a store using Shopify, the shipping address used for the order will be used as the customers default address going forward. Shopify would refer to this as "a feature, not a bug". And that's because for them, it is the most accurate way to keep customer address information up to date without asking the customer to manually update their information all the time. In most cases, this probably makes a ton of sense and works 75% of the time.
It's that 25% though that can really screw up your Customer contact information.
The problem is when sending to an address that isn't your own, especially in the case of online gifting. Given how popular online gifting has become ( we see at least 20-25% of all orders on our app are gift orders), this starts to become a painful problem for merchants. They will be tasked with constantly having incorrect customer information and having to manually update the customer's address in the store admin.
Furthermore, it can lead to a loss of trust and source of frustration for customers of a store when a future marketing email is sent to an address that isn't theirs, or displaying someone else's address in a marketing email.
To quickly summarize the current challenges faced by merchants:
- Data Inaccuracy: Shopify's default behavior leads to inaccurate customer address information.
- Manual Data Management: To overcome this issue, merchants often resort to manual data management, spending valuable time and effort updating customer information in Shopify and their CRM. This process is prone to human error and can be time-consuming.
- Source of confusion for Customers/ Merchants when marketing materials are sent to the wrong address or display inaccurate information in marketing emails
Surprisingly, Merchants have very few reasonable options for managing these challenges. Most of the time, it is a manual process by which Merchants spend valuable time manually changing addresses in the Shopify admin where they can add/edit addresses. Even worse, if you have customer contact information connected to a CRM like Hubspot, they will need to manually update the information there as well.
Gifted is already the best Shopify App for sending a gift. It integrates seamlessly with little to no setup required, and automatically handles the gifting process for merchants while allowing their customers to send a gift with a personalized gift message as a beautiful e-card straight to the recipients inbox.
Since the shipping address bug most frequently occurs when a customer is buying a product as a gift, it only seemed natural for us to build a solution for our merchants that would allow them to override this default behavior in Shopify and prevent gift orders from incorrectly changing a customers address when purchasing the gift.
When a store installs our app, they will have the option to enable this feature. Our address sync feature ensures that the original customer information and default addresses remain intact, preventing any unwanted changes triggered by Shopify's order processes.
When a customer places a gift order, our app will check if the shipping address being used is a different address than their own and if it is will automatically use the original address as their default address, preserving the accuracy and currency of your customer data in Shopify and your CRM.
Along with the rest of our features, we are dedicated to maintaining the privacy and security of your customer data and make sure to NEVER store customer information.
If you are interested in learning more about how to keep your Customers data from changing every time they send a gift, or how Gifted can do it automatically for you make sure to check us out on the App Store or email us directly info@givewithgifted.com
I hope this article has helped you! There’s some other stuff I want to show you.
Check out this blog post covering how to automate gift messages on shopify
Or this one, which covers e-commerce trends in online gifting
If this blog post helps you solved the customer default address problem, share it with your friends!
