How to disable a customer in Shopify

Managing customers is a crucial part of running any store. And sometimes it involves making the difficult decision to disable a customer's account to limit the customer's interactions with your business. This could be due to various reasons, including fraudulent activity, frequent chargebacks or abusive behavior. Before you disable a customer's account, it's important to prioritize your communication with the customer and weigh all evidence collected.

Customers with disabled accounts can't create or log into an account in Shopify. Disabling a customer's account does not delete their data from your Shopify store. You can still view their order history and other information. If a customer later resolves the issue that led to their account being disabled, you can reactivate their account.

If you also require customers to log-in before checkout, customers with disabled accounts won't be able to complete a purchase. Although bypassing this protection in Shopify is possible too. Learn all about these features in the next article.

How to disable a customer account in Shopify

1. Log in to your Shopify admin panel and click on Customers from the left-hand menu.
2. Search for the customer you want to disable and click on the customer's name
3. Click the More actions dropdown on the top right corner, and select Disable account
4. Confirm your decision by clicking Disable account again.

How to restrict purchases to customers with disabled accounts

There's a Shopify optional setting to require customers to log-in before being able to complete a purchase. You can find this setting in the Shopify Admin > Settings > Checkout section. If you want it enabled, just tick the checkbox and Save.

Please note that requiring a login may discourage some other customers from checking out and reduce your store's total orders. But it will also prevent those customers with disabled accounts to log in and complete the purchase.

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How to delete customers on Shopify

To delete a customer on Shopify, repeat the steps detailed above, but choose Delete Customer instead of Disable Accounts, in the More Actions dropdown. Please note that Shopify will only allow you to delete customers that have no orders or subscriptions.

To delete customers with orders you may try to delete all of customer's orders first in your Shopify Admin > Orders. If all Orders for that Customer have been deleted then you should be able to delete that Customer.

To apply a bulk delete customers from Shopify you can select different customers with cells on the left side hand in the Customers panel, and Delete Customers on the bottom More Options dropdown.

How to enable customer's account again

To enable a disable account, the customer must accept an invitation from the admin to enable the account and create the password. To send the invitation, go to the Customers panel, click on the customer, then on More Options > Send Account Invite.

If you are interested in sending a Bulk Invite for different disabled accounts, you can use a third-party app like Froonze.

How can a customer with a disabled account complete a purchase?

Unfortunately in Shopify the accounts are associated with emails, so a customer with a disabled account could still choose to complete a purchase under a different email address. Besides, an account invitation to enable the account can be possibly triggered via API or the registration form.

If you want to have more control over who will be able to log into your site you could choose to use more restricted registration actions with the help of third-party apps.

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