Overview

First and foremost, it's important to keep in mind that Customer Fields is a tool that is designed to create (or update) customer records in Shopify. At the moment there is no way to turn this off; the entire app has been built around our integration with the Customers in Shopify, hence the name Customer Fields 😁

Since Shopify requires a unique email address for each customer record, and email addresses are commonly used on contact forms, some extra tinkering needs to be done if you want to create a contact form using the Customer Fields app.

Otherwise, there are a couple of problems you might run into:

Existing customers may get Shopify errors saying "Email/Phone already exists" or "Email needs to be verified" when filling out the contact form if they are not logged into their account prior to filling out the form.
Existing customers who have already filled out a Customer Fields contact form will see their previous entry when filling out the form again. Rather than it being considered a new submission each time, the customer would be updating their existing 'data' on their account each time they fill out the contact form.
Users may not be able to submit the form at all, due to a lack of the proper fields.

Simply put, a workaround is needed to ensure that the contact form can be submitted 100% of the time, regardless of the customer's status or any previous form submissions. We've outlined a method below that shows you how to create a contact form using Customer Fields, but please understand that this is a bit "hacky" of a solution, since a basic contact form is really not how Customer Fields is intended to be used.

If you're okay with a hacky solution, read on!

Things to note before getting started:

This article mentions features only available on the Pro plan and above. If you're on the Lite plan, click here to upgrade your account.
You will see a yellow warning banner in the form builder that mentions "New customers won't be able to create accounts with this form." You can ignore this warning since the purpose of this form is to receive contact form submissions, not create customer accounts.
New customer records will be created in Shopify with every submission, and this is unavoidable. If you follow our instructions below, the customer record in Shopify should include only the customer's name, along with a tag for Contact form submission so that you can easily clean up any innocuous customer records if needed.
The contact form must contain either the first_name or last_name fields. Since the app will be creating customer records in Shopify, and Shopify requires at least a first name or a last name for a customer record, you must include at least one of these fields on your form. Otherwise, the form will not be functional.
The customer will not get any type of email confirmation when they submit the contact form. Customer Fields does not include any customer-facing email notifications at the moment, so you will need to manually follow up with each customer who fills out the form. If you've enabled the app's email notifications, then you and your staff will be notified each time the contact form is submitted.

Steps to create a contact form

No standard email, phone, or password fields!

To create a contact form in Customer Fields, the most important piece is the 'email' and 'phone' fields. Instead of using the standard Shopify email or phone fields & data columns, you should use custom email or phone fields & data columns. This ensures that the email address the customer supplies does not get saved into Shopify's normal 'email' field for customers.

For the steps below, we're going to be using the form template named "Default registration form". You can find this template by clicking the 'Add form' button on the Forms page in the app.

1. Delete the standard Shopify email field:

2. Add a new email field using the 'Custom input fields' section of the form builder. Make sure to use a unique data column such as contact_email:

3. Delete the password field from the form

Extra fields

Now you can add any additional fields you would like to be included on your contact form. We typically suggest using a text-area field to allow customers to type in their inquiry, but of course you are welcome to customize the form to meet your specific needs with all sorts of fields!

Settings and Rules

There are a couple of settings and rules that should be configured to ensure the best experience for customers filling out the form. We've provided some suggestions below:

1. On the 'Settings' tab in the form builder, make the following changes:

Change the form's Submission redirect URL. You could enter / to redirect to your home page, or use a Page URL that has a simple "thank you" message that you've created in the Shopify admin (IE /pages/contact-thank-you)
Ensure the box labeled "Display cancel button" is not checked.
In the 'Language' section, you'll want to edit the labels for "Create account" and "Creating account" to something like "Submit" and "Sending...", as shown below:

2. On the 'Rules' tab of the form builder, create a form rule like the following:

The rule shown above will automatically add a tag of Contact form submission to each customer record that is created. You can use this tag to easily distinguish the "contact form" records in Shopify from your normal customers. If needed, you can delete these customer records from the app (and/or Shopify) whenever you'd like.

Questions or concerns?

Reach out to our support team via chat or email and we'll be happy to help!