Legacy customer accounts: Availability update

Announcements
1

Hey everyone! Ryan here from the Customer Accounts team.

Today, legacy customer accounts are deprecated. Here’s what you need to know and I am here to answer any questions you might have.

What’s changing:

  • Starting February 2026, legacy customer accounts are no longer available to new stores and existing stores not using it. Shopify will stop providing feature updates and technical support for this older version.

  • New stores can only use the latest version of customer accounts.

What’s to expect:

  • In the coming months, we will inform merchants comms and improve self-serve tools to encourage merchants to upgrade their customer accounts :backhand_index_pointing_right:View the upgrade guide.

  • A sunset date for legacy customer accounts will be announced later in 2026.

  • Legacy customer account liquid templates (customers/account.liquid, customers/login.liquid, customers/register.liquid) will eventually be locked from editing, then removed.

  • The Customer Account API is the only primary source for customer-scoped data and authenticated customer actions. The Storefront API customer mutations will be deprecated, with more details coming soon.

What this means for you:

If you build themes

Theme developers are no longer required to include legacy customer account liquid files. Any store that is on legacy customer accounts, that upgrades to a theme without the legacy files, will automatically be upgraded to the latest version of customer accounts.

If you update current themes or submit new themes, we recommend using our new Shopify-account web component that automatically redirects to the latest version of customer accounts. This component will soon become a theme requirement for all themes in the Shopify Theme Store, as part of the steps to finally sunset legacy customer accounts.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: shopify-account component documentation

If you build apps

Customer accounts are powered by our extensibility platform that does not require customizing liquid templates. If your app relies on legacy customer account liquid pages, it won’t work for merchants on the latest version of customer accounts.

With customer account UI extensions, you can enhance native pages like order status and profile and build unique full-page experiences. 800+ apps have already made the switch.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Build your first customer account extension now and put your app in front of hundreds of thousands of merchants already using customer accounts.

If you build custom storefronts

Use the Customer Account API as your source for customer-scoped data and authenticated customer actions in order to create the most secure customer experiences.

If you build custom storefronts or apps that currently use Storefront API customer-scoped mutations, we recommend switching to the Customer Account API as soon as possible.

Questions?

Drop them in this thread—our team will be checking in regularly to answer. We’re actively improving the upgrade experience for our merchants and partners, and your feedback helps.

Cheers,
Ryan, Product Manager

3 Likes
Wholesale-only access with new Customer Accounts (non-B2B) — recommended approach?
2

I have 1 client still on legacy customer accounts. I’d love to move them to new customer accounts, but they use Multipass as they have an iOS and Android app and want to have that shared login for both the app and the store. Is there an alternative?

4

Hey Jason!! The way to do this with the new version of customer accounts is to connect your own identity provider

1 Like
5

Hey Ryan,
So, only Shopify Plus stores can add their own Identity Providers?

Do you have any plans to allow apps to add authentication methods to new Customer Accounts?
Instead of having only Google and Facebook, we are providing authentication with SMS OTPs and we have no way to continue offering that service to our merchants.

1 Like
7

Amazing, thank you Ryan! I’ll get this in front of the mobile app developer and make the plan!

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8

Hi Ryan,

With this deprecation of the legacy accounts, what does that mean for the accounts that are using it right now. Will they have to switch over to the new customer accounts soon and is there a way to prepare for that. Right now, our store has a lot of code for the login page to match our brand’s design and with the new customer accounts, there isn’t an option for coding in the login page correct?

9

Our app is a third-party embedded Shopify app (not a separate sales channel, and not extending customer accounts). We render product information on the Liquid storefront and fetch prices via the Storefront API.

To show personalized prices for the currently logged-in customer, we need to pass a customerAccessToken using the @inContext directive:

query GetProduct @inContext(buyer: { customerAccessToken: "..." }) {
  product(id: "...") {
    variants(first: 10) {
      nodes {
        price { amount }
      }
    }
  }
}

With legacy customer accounts being deprecated, the path forward seems to be the Customer Account API’s OAuth flow to obtain this token. But the Getting Started guide only describes obtaining client_id / client_secret through the Headless or Hydrogen sales channel - there’s no documented path for third-party embedded apps.

My questions:

  1. Is there a way for a third-party embedded app to obtain Customer Account API credentials (client_id, client_secret) to run the OAuth flow and get a customerAccessToken?
  2. If not, what is the recommended approach for embedded apps that need buyer-contextualized Storefront API queries after the legacy customerAccessTokenCreate mutation is removed?
  3. Is there an alternative mechanism to get a customer access token that works with @inContext without going through the Customer Account API?

Any guidance appreciated.

11

How is getting a text message to auth more effective than a keychain touchID or faceID login? Why when I am browsing on desktop or tablet do I now need to go and find my phone to input the text I just got - where the old process was just tapping my finger or looking at the webcam!

We cannot recreate niche vertical customer portals using any of the new components available. This is an absolute engineering step backwards and I have merchants GMV in the hundreds of millions using my app that are not happy with the change. Please explain how this is better?

12

Same. We are in the wine and spirits sector and some of the transaction types are super specialised and just not serviced by Shopify native accounts. This is a really poorly considered change and will remain so until they add deep customisation to the new accounts.

13

While this may not the the right forum for ‘feature requests’ - I’m all for new customer accounts in theory; but they’re not at feature parity with checkout, particularly when it comes to branding and design.

Shopify Plus stores who get lots of great checkout customisation fail to see it applied to customer accounts; heck we can’t even add a background image/colour to the header for brand consistency.

1 Like
15

Hey Goran,

Good question! Yes, connecting a third-party identity provider is Plus and above. That’s not new though — same was true with Multipass.

If your merchants are on Plus, they can connect a third-party provider that supports SMS.

Also worth knowing: Shop sign-in already supports phone number login, and millions of buyers use it today. Depending on what your merchants’ customers look like, that might already have you covered.

16

Hey PaymentMaker,

Thanks for the feedback! We’re here to chat this through.

You don’t need to go find your phone. iOS autofills one-time passwords automatically, it’s one tap. And on recognized devices, Shop sign-in lets buyers log in with a single click, no code at all. Millions of buyers are already signed in through Shop.

The bigger thing though: sessions on new customer accounts last months, not days. So buyers are hitting that login screen way less often than they were on legacy.

On the components piece, DM me. I’d love to hear more about your use cases so we can make sure you’re unblocked.

18

This is only true if you have your phone connected to your ecosystem. Huge swathes of older consumers do not have this - and you’ve alienated their access with the change. You could make this change in 10-15 years, but it is not inclusive at this current time junction.

19

Please let me know where I can reach you directly and I will do that.

20

Sent you a DM on the forum

21

@Ryan_Snape We have an enterprise client that is in the process of launching a new store tonight. Their new store relies on legacy customer accounts integrations with Salesforce and other tools to facilitate warranty and repairs flows that are critical to the business. However, we were all taken by surprise to discover that you can no longer toggle back to legacy accounts on new Shopify stores as of Thursday, and their new store was still set to new accounts at that time. Is there a way to allow temporary access to legacy accounts for a specific store while we work with them to develop a solution using new accounts?

1 Like
22

So what is an ACTUAL replacement for Multipass? where we don’t have access to the third party login process? We just want a link in the other thing that logs the person into Shopify.

thus far, nothing else actually works to support this.

23

Hey Nic – Will send you a dm

24

One concern I have with the long-term sunset of legacy customer accounts is the removal of the traditional email + password login flow, which is still very common and expected by users in many storefronts.

In particular for headless storefronts built with Hydrogen, the legacy flow using the Storefront API (customerCreate, customerAccessTokenCreate, etc.) has been a straightforward and flexible way to implement authentication. The newer Customer Account API introduces a passwordless login model (email verification codes / OAuth-style flow), which can be harder to integrate seamlessly into fully custom storefront experiences.

From a UX perspective, many customers are still more comfortable with a standard email + password login, especially in B2B environments

Because of that, I’m wondering:

Will there be any supported way to continue using legacy customer accounts with Hydrogen, or an alternative that still allows email + password authentication in a headless storefront?

Thanks for any answers

1 Like
25

@Ryan_Snape would you be able to take a look at my questions above when you have a chance?