Our view at Stack - Shopify has just about everything you need if you're looking to sell online. It excels with unlimited products, user-friendly setup, and 24/7 support. It offers 6,000+ app integrations, abandoned cart recovery, and shipping discounts up to 88%. Plus, it allows selling both online and in-person, scaling as your business grows.
In a competitive commerce environment, customer experience is everything. It’s the key to building brand loyalty, driving repeat purchases and boosting your bottom line. And one of the most important aspects of a great customer experience is the customer account.
It’s where your customers perform operational tasks like managing orders or subscriptions, triggering returns, updating information, or engaging more deeply with your brand through loyalty and membership programs.
Until now, adding much of this functionality meant sacrificing that all-important customer experience. Your customers could find themselves in a web of forgotten logins, order IDs buried in their email inbox and disparate inconsistently-branded customer account portals—each for a different customer account feature.
In the Winter ‘25 Edition, Shopify introduced Customer Account Extensions. Now, you can give your customers the varied, rich functionality they demand with the smooth experience they expect when buying from a store on Shopify.
What are Customer Account Extensions?
Customer Account Extensions are versatile blocks of functionality that add value to the customer account. You can add these app blocks directly into customer account pages, such as the Order Index and Order Status pages, as well as add brand new pages to the customer account.
Powering a wide range of valuable use cases, these app blocks can be implemented in minutes—no coding required! Also, Customer Account Extensions are visually consistent with your checkout and secured behind a single, passwordless login, ensuring a smooth and secure experience for your customers.
Ready to explore how Customer Account Extensions can streamline your customer experience? Let’s dive in.
Build an industry-leading customer account experience in 8 steps
1. Simplify returns and order management
Unblock customers with self-serve functionality in a single customer account
Returns and order management are the bread and butter of customer accounts. This simple self-serve functionality avoids needless frustration and reduces customer service tickets. Yet, all too often, this essential functionality is scattered across disparate portals, each requiring different information to authenticate, leading to a fragmented and frustrating experience for customers.
With Customer Account Extensions, your customers can seamlessly manage all aspects of their orders and returns within a unified account—one convenient location with all relevant information integrated and secured by a smooth passwordless login. Say goodbye to frustrated customers, overwhelming your support channels with simple requests. Say hello to a customer account experience that increases rather than diminishes customer satisfaction.
Get started with Cleverific Order Editor, OrderEditing | Upsell, Bird Pickup Delivery Date, Insureful: Shipping Protection, and Win-Win Returns to simplify returns and order management for your customers.
2. Collect social proof and build buyer trust
Gain credibility by collecting reviews, testimonials, and affiliate endorsements from verified buyers.
Today’s consumers are more informed and expect social proof, such as verified reviews, testimonials, and affiliate endorsements, before making purchasing decisions—especially when buying from independent brands for the first time.
These trust signals can turn hesitant browsers into confident buyers and often make the difference between converting a first-time customer or losing the sale. The challenge, then, is finding effective ways to collect verified reviews and recruit affiliates at scale.
The customer account is a natural spot to do this. Since these are the pages your customers visit most after a purchase, they can effortlessly leave reviews and engage with affiliate programs without having to login again. As a result, you’ll not only recruit more affiliates and collect more reviews, but they’ll be automatically linked to the specific buyer and order creating trust that they are from a verified source.
Start building your brand credibility today with Simple Affiliate, TrustReviews: Product Reviews, Judge.me Product Reviews App, Okendo: Reviews & Loyalty, and Superdesk Product Reviews App.
3. Get to know your customers
Understand customers’ unique preferences and behavior via surveys, profiles, and more.
Congratulations, you’ve converted a first time customer! But building strong customer relationships goes beyond just transactions. To truly connect you need to learn about their unique preferences. This knowledge empowers you to make personalized recommendations, optimize your marketing and reduce friction.
Immediately post-purchase is a golden opportunity to encourage customers to share additional information. Right within the customer account, you can collect data that fuels personalization, gathers insights, and even enables compliance, such as for GDPR consent or age verification when selling restricted products. Your customers can even return at any time to update their profiles, voluntarily sharing more information with you.
What’s more, with Customer Account Extensions, this data is stored within a single customer record making it available for analysis, segmentation, and personalization across all touchpoints – from your online store to your marketing campaigns.
Collect more customer data with Zigpoll Customer Surveys, Helium Customer Fields, Customer Accounts Pro, Pandectes GDPR Compliance, and Real ID ‑ ID verification.
4. Personalize the customer experience
Tailor post-purchase offers and surface wishlists to drive conversion and average order values
Now is the time to use the data you’ve collected through the customer journey to personalize that customer’s experience and turn that initial purchase into a long-lasting relationship.
Upsell and product bundle apps enable you to use the data you’ve collected to get from first purchase to second in record time. Surface personalized content and product offers directly post-purchase based on customizable triggers, purchasing behavior, or browsing history.
Wishlist apps are a vital tool for unlocking the power of personalization. Collect data on the specific products each customer wants and surface those products strategically. Showcase them alongside personalized offers within their customer account or engage them with targeted messages during sales, price changes, or at other opportune moments. You can even use wishlists to build segments and scale your personalization across channels.
With Customer Account Extensions, this personalization becomes accessible to all. Build personalized experiences directly into customer account pages in minutes with no code. The result: a seamless, branded experience that removes friction and drives sales.
Create engaging, personalized experiences that convert with MW Product Bundles & Add‑ons, Hubble: Target Customers, Stella Wishlist, Wishlist Plus, and Storefront Curator.
5. Keep your customers coming back
Generate predictable, recurring revenue with subscriptions that drive customer lifetime value.
Turning one-time buyers into loyal customers is key to sustainable growth. Subscription models not only provide predictable revenue streams but also offer efficient ways for your customers to reorder products they’ll use regularly.
But many buyers have experienced a subscription management process that leaves a sour taste in their mouth—an experience that feels like it’s harder than it needs to be to manage, cancel or pause their subscription.
The key to a sustainable subscription business is transparency and removing friction in the subscription management process. Customer Account Extensions allow you to put subscription management where customers expect it to be—alongside all other self-serve actions like order management and returns.
As a result, your customers will be more satisfied, easier to reactivate in the future, and crucially, they won’t inundate your customer service inbox with trivial subscription management requests.
Scale your subscription business with apps like Recharge Subscriptions, Stay AI, PayWhirl Subscriptions, and Subi Subscriptions.
6. Build a community of loyal fans
Foster engagement and repeat purchases with loyalty and membership programs.
Creating a strong community of brand advocates is your most powerful marketing tool, helping to increase sales, drive repeat purchases and save on customer acquisition costs. Loyalty, rewards, and membership programs transform casual shoppers into repeat buyers by rewarding purchases, referrals, and even social engagement.
Removing the barriers to engage with these programs can turn even the most fickle customers into committed, loyal fans. Customer Account Extensions do just that. Your customers won’t need to jump through the hoops of multiple stages of authentication or unbranded, disparate membership portals.
Apps embed these programs right into the customer account, making it as easy as possible for customers to sign up, track success, and engage in a gamified, conversion-driven shopping experience.
Build loyalty and membership programs that remove friction and drive sales with LoyaltyLion Rewards & Referral, Lantern Customer Accounts, Smile: Loyalty & Rewards, Rise.ai Gift Cards & Loyalty, Angle: Store Credit Cashback, and Glow: Loyalty Points & Rewards.
7. Customize the B2B buyer experience
Offer self-serve functionality that fulfills the unique needs of digital native B2B customers.
B2B buying is changing. Purchasing decisions are increasingly made by millennials who expect and demand a modern experience that mirrors personal online shopping. Yet, B2B often lags behind with subpar online ordering systems or antiquated processes, such as discussing quotes over the phone or submitting orders by fax.
This friction is only worsened by the fact that B2B buyers often purchase more frequently and in larger quantities than direct-to-consumer (DTC) customers. While Shopify addresses most B2B use cases with out-of-the-box B2B features built into customer accounts, fulfilling the unique and complex requirements of B2B buyers has been a challenge—until now.
With Customer Account Extensions, you can easily create a tailored buying experience for your B2B customers. B2B-specific functionality is automatically hidden for your DTC customers, allowing them to focus on the features that matter to them.
In parallel, your B2B customers can access what they demand: a seamless experience with self-serve functionality for quotes, invoicing, bulk ordering and more. This convenience not only drives customer satisfaction but significantly reduces your overhead for handling orders.
Offer your B2B customers the experience they desire with O: Request a Quote – Hide Price, Upro Order via CSV Upload, Sufio: Professional Invoices, and On The Business Portal.
8. Get creative: The opportunities are endless
Offer creative, unique and valuable experiences that require verified identity.
When you verify a buyer through a login, the opportunities to deliver new experiences and self-serve functionality become endless. Apps can showcase protected or sensitive information, provide post-purchase services, build unique product experiences and more.
Hundreds of apps are already taking advantage of this opportunity, building creative Customer Account Extensions. And with more building every day, you’ll be able to create an increasingly innovative and valuable customer account experience.
Customer Account Extensions empower you to do it all—from scheduling appointments and highlighting your buyers’ sustainability journey to transforming customer accounts into digital download hubs or creating unique gifting experiences.
Apps like GoodAPI Plant Trees Clean Seas, Easy Appointment Booking App, Digital Downloads – Filemonk, Tevello Courses & Communities, and Ribbon | Gifting allow you to provide those experiences and more, all from the customer account.
Maximize logins without compromising on security
The more customers engage with your store, the better. It translates to more purchases, higher spending, and richer buyer data to fuel your growth. But it all starts with a simple login.
Shopify has brought the power of the world’s highest-converting checkout to customer accounts. Logging in is now as smooth as checking out thanks to a passwordless flow already familiar to more than 150 million Shop Pay users.
The flywheel doesn’t end there. The logged-in experience persists from customer accounts to checkout (and vice versa!). When your customers log in to their account, they won’t have to re-enter their information or payment details when checking out. Accelerated checkout becomes even faster.
We’re also reducing your customer service burden. With passwordless login, say goodbye to password reset requests. That means less time on tedious tasks and more time focusing on what truly matters: building relationships and delivering exceptional customer service.
Brand settings now apply to your login page too for end-to-end consistency.
Customize your customer accounts experience in minutes with no code
Once you’ve selected your apps, you can build your experience in the checkout and accounts editor.
For each app, you can go with the app developer’s recommendation of where it should be placed within the customer account, or you can customize its position to better suit your needs.
Ultimately, you remain in control—choose which apps to integrate, where to place app blocks, and where to link to full-page extensions. Your functionality. Your flow.
If Shopify is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.
Credit: Original article published here.