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 customer record with the same email.

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

Sometimes when merging customer records, you may see the "Failed to merge customers" error accompanied with a more specific error explaining why the merge failed. In some corner cases you may see this "Base customer addresses must be unique" error. This error tends to occur if the record you are trying to merge with has placed an order and their address was duplicated.

Solution: to solve this issue you will need to open the existing record in Shopify and delete any duplicate addresses. These addresses will look almost exactly like the Default address.

While many measures have been put into place to prevent session timeouts in Customer Fields, the "Failed to merge customers" error could be related to your browser session timing out. You can try logging out of app.customerfields.com by going to this link. Then, log back into the app and try again.

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