w/ Shopify’s Patrick Millegan
Tired of logging into five different portals just to make a return? Shopify says enough. Patrick Millegan joins Kurt Elster to talk about the new customer account extensions, designed to simplify logins, reduce support headaches, and make online shopping enjoyable again. It’s a step forward for UX that proves e-commerce should be easy for everyone.
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Kurt Elster
My friends, we've got new features to discuss. Well, it is additions day, right? Shopify drops many new features on us, dozens to a hundred, right? But we only have so much time to go through them. Today we're going through one. We're going to talk Shopify Customer Account Extensions. And this actually is quite useful. This will make your customers' lives easier. This will make your life as a merchant easier. If you are a developer, it will make your life easier. Because now, similar to our our themes and our apps and how we are able to more easily as time has gone on and Shopify as a platform has evolved. More easily able to integrate those things, we're now seeing the same thing happen across other parts of the platform. And in this case, it's customer accounts. And there's a lot of potential that goes into that. But As usual, I am your useful idiot, my friends. I need someone smarter than me to explain it to me. And who better than the gentleman who helped develop it? Patrick Mulligan, senior product lead at Shopify, who has worked on this. This is his baby. He's going to help walk us through it and explain it to me. I am your host, Kurt Elster. Technasty. And this is the unofficial Shopify Podcast. Mr. Milligan, thank you for joining us. Hyped to be here. Couldn't think of anything better to do than to talk with you about this. So okay. Uh customer account extensions. What's what's the vision here? How long have you been working on this? Why are you excited about it? Oh man.
Patrick Millegan
Okay, so yeah, I've been working on it the whole time I've been at Shopify. I've been Shopify three years. Um I could give you like a the the longer story about it. Um but actually a big part of my story is that Um I've actually been a merchant on Shopify for over 10 years now. So I have a brand. It's called Keep Athletic. Oh wait, what did you sell? Oh, I sell shorts with the best pockets on the planet. Um I'll I'll send you a link maybe after that you can kind of get into. But I've been I've been a solo merchant for a long time, and that's actually what led to my experience of coming to Shopify. And actually in my interview process, um, they were kind of saying, hey, you know, there's a couple opportunities that are there. They said, is there something that you see Um and I said, you know, customer accounts feels like it could be like a a a really big thing. And they said, hey, we actually have this awesome team led by this awesome product director, Egan Chung, who's actually leading an investment here to completely change this. And I was like, oh my God, sign me up for this. Um and I mean there are so many, I think, bottoms up pain points and like o opportunities merchants really wanted us to do with customer accounts when we first started doing like tons of interviews, talking to all of our small merchants, big merchants, large merchants. Um but the thing that I'm just really most excited about is that like when I was a solo merchant, I was sitting there making my site, I was building my products, making my ads, making my stories. is I would get all these, you know, requests from customers that are things that are like highly repetitive that really they should be able to do themselves really intuitively by logging in, seeing their information and you know editing an order, doing a self-serve return, managing a subscription, etc. And I'm just personally excited to um have this feature really make it so that, you know, entrepreneurs that are trying to scale and build from like, you know, 100,000 revenue and get to like 500,000 revenue. that they're able to have all this functionality of their customers, uh, that they can do things themselves so they can stay focused on, you know, the most important things that they're doing. And so it's very personal to me. So I get very excited about it.
Kurt Elster
It sounds like there's there were specific pain points here. I want to agitate the pain. Like you're excited about this because of what it unlocks now, but when you started it, it would have been because of what it could solve. So what were the pains? What were the annoyances? What was it a lot of effort and energy goes into this? What inspired that?
Patrick Millegan
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's many observations, but get into like something specific. I think that like we've all kind of gone across different Shopify brand stores and ultimately like oftentimes you see like one portal for a specific use case. So you might see something like a portal for returns and then a portal for claims and then a portal for managing a subscription. And I think when you talk to merchants, what you hear is they're like Wait, why is this happening? And and let me give you like a specific story. Like when I was uh a building with Keep Athletics, I have this page on my site and I want to add all sorts of self-serve functionality so customer in customers can do things themselves. And like, you know, you might have something for order tracking and you might have like a claims portal. And I remember talking to one of my customers, like directly, you know, with one of my people that purchased my shorts about this. And they were saying that like, hey Patrick, I'm on your site. I want to know where my order is. So I type in my order number and email address into your site and I get, you know, this great order tracking. And as a customer, I looked and saw like, okay, my items delivered. So I went outside, I opened my door, I looked down, and the package wasn't there. So I started to use another feature on your site, which is the claims portal. So I can go file a claim because some porch pirate took my stuff. And I went to it and that claims portal asked me to type in my order number in email again within forty-five seconds of like me just going this other thing. And I think that like, you know, as a customer, the idea of having to log in multiple times within forty-five seconds is just like a huge bust. And then I think from a merger perspective, you're like, oh man, I want to make this unified experience. How can I do that? Right. And how can it work across all my entire buyer experience? And and that was really, I would say, like some of the pain that was like, okay, how do we start from that? experience and that kind of merchant request, that customer pain point. And that really is actually that feedback directly from merchants, directly from customers, you know, uh many talking to many people. I think directly related to like, hey, it's n it's time to retire. the way that we did customer accounts before and let's build something brand new.
Kurt Elster
So the issue we saw in the past was Not that not that customer accounts were broken, but that when we tried to add new features to it, it got messy. And if you're a third party, you're an app like that returns portal, the um Yeah, the the easiest method for everybody involved is like, well, we'll just silo these things, right? Everything becomes its own portal. Well, that also means multiple logins and it means re-entering information and things don't talk to each other. So absolutely I get You have successfully agitated the pain. And I didn't think about it in those terms, but you're right. Um that yeah, you're just it's like just portal after portal. So that overarching goal is is simplify every everything for everyone involved, which I greatly appreciate. Yes. How then so let's walk it back a little bit, you know, to help people understand what's happening here. We have there's classic customer accounts on Shopify and new customer accounts. And this has been around a little while. This is part of that new customer account endeavor, right? Do walk me through that so we've got some of the the high level groundwork here.
Patrick Millegan
Yeah, absolutely. So um Uh new customer accounts uh came on the scene um about two years ago. Okay. And um it was kind of our first version of this thing, and we got it out, and we kind of shared, hey, this is our thing. But a very important thing was that, hey, we've got this other customer account experience. Um, there's lots going on here. We want to have the new thing out, but we want you to still be able to maintain classic, still use that experience. Still onboard there, but if you want to kind of see what we're doing on our green path, give us there and provide us feedback. Um and so that kind of entered in a thing where once we went live, we started getting lots of feedback. Of course, everyone said, hey, we want this to work with apps. Um we started building that developer platform on top of it. And actually what's crazy is about almost exactly one year ago, we launched a developer preview, developer beta for this brand new surface area. And this was, you know, kind of coattailing a little bit off of checkout extensibility, um, which, you know, is this a whole new approach of uh injecting uh experiences directly into the Shopify checkout. And took a very similar approach with new customer accounts where you can do that as a whole site of reasons, but I'm really excited about the unified developer experience for everybody that's building these things. Um and we've been working for the last you know year directly with all sorts of apps and partners in the ecosystem to directly uh create this experience. And so we've been actually like deeply in build with many of our our our Shopify app uh uh friends uh within the ecosystem. And really what's coming out today is um the culmination of that and we're really excited. I mean we've got 40 launch partners across eight different use cases um that are gonna be already that we personally like got into the weeds in UX and like seriously talked to the founders of those UX uh of those apps about the UX reviews that we did with them. We got really into the nitty-gritty with them Um and I'm also excited to share that beyond our 40 launch partners, we're gonna have 300 um other apps in the App Store that are gonna be ready at launch that are building customer account extensions. So We're we're really uh excited about that, but that gives you a sense of this. And I do I do uh love that I do have also a bit of like uh uh news on Um the naming of this. So at first we started, you know, new customer accounts, it's new and classic customer accounts, but to kind of uh go a bit further um with this release, we're actually making a name change here. So we're we're dropping the new. So insert the uh Justin Timberlake, you know, drop the new. It goes better uh here. Um and we're just being customer accounts. Just customer accounts. And then we are getting rid of uh the classic moniker and we're kind of renaming it as legacy. Because we do intend on getting rid of legacy at some point down the down the road. Um and we want to make that clear and obvious. Um, but we still have lots to build. We're really excited to get extensions out there.
Kurt Elster
Classic sounds a little positive, like a classic car. Oh, that's a classic, you know, that's a classic movie. That sound that seems too positive, right? Too too positive. Especially new sounds good, new customer accounts, but all right, if we drop the new We gotta we gotta get rid of classic, go a little more negative with it. Legacy, all right, not not as good. We gotta do worse. How about antique vintage? Right? No, those are two posit Old and busted accounts and new shiny accounts. There. There we go. I have I've handled the branding for you.
Patrick Millegan
It's like you've been in our RD conversations and our branding conversations on this. You got it exactly right.
Kurt Elster
Don't let me in there. Okay, so with these with the the new customer accounts, customer accounts, one of my favorite features is passwordless login. Like the security is important to me, cybersecurity is important in general. And passwordless logins. I feel that this is more convenient. This is more secure. And now with this new system where we're not dealing with multiple portals, it's login once. I don't even need to know a password. It just goes really quickly. And now I'm in and I have access to, presumably, like whatever I need in one place in whichever store I am shopping from. Tell me about passwordless login.
Patrick Millegan
Yeah. Um so this was something that was like a very early decision and kind of really thinking about again, how do we streamline this? How do we reduce friction for customers? How do we m simplify the experience? And there's a really transformative moment in the development process where we actually made a UX diagram. H of ig the exact flow that someone goes through when they're doing like a password block, right? So you have to you go to the site, you can register your experience. You set a password, you have to activate the email that's on the account, then you have to log in. Then of course you forget your password three months later. Then you have to go through a password reset flow. You might reach out to the customer, you might do this thing. And it's this long thing. Actually, we put it in a a blog. Maybe I'll give you a link afterwards. We put it in a blog post that shows like all this. And then password this login is pretty simple. You come to the site, you put an email, you get a code, you type it in, you move forward. And that like simplicity has been, I think, really valuable. Um, I think like we also turned into this, I'd say, like, design principle internally. Which is that like customers, they don't really actually want to log in. They want to get something done. Right? They want to actually start a return. They want to manage a subscription. They want to check their loyalty points. I think what we've actually found and that I would actually urge a lot of people to pay attention to is that like some of the best CTAs to get your customers to log in are going to be around those jobs, right? And saying, hey, like start or return. All right, well of course I need to tell them I'm Patrick Milligan and I need to prove who I am so that I can go do the return. Right. And so it's a kind of a a minor part of the experience. Um and I see I I see like extensions really driving that. You know, all these app developers that are building, you know, all these different use cases, I think are gonna be driving lots of people to log in. Um and passwordless, I think, really simplifies the experience. Um, and um we've also even had moments where we've been on calls, you know, with many merchants. And they've told us that up to ten percent of their pass their their customer support volume is handling password resets at time. And so when you add password lists, that just That just, you know, I mean takes away all this burden of like, you know, makes so many people's lives better. They can focus on the things that matter, more more valuable conversations.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, when you get into the really high volume stores, anything that is all painful about any part of the purchasing process, you're gonna hear about it. Right. And so I I can think of a a few merchant clients we have that it are eight figures and those are the one where it's like, I see the emails where people just like are so annoyed that they have to deal with with stuff as simple as passwords. And so anything that streamlines the process is good for the business and the customer experience. Passwordless login, part of this new system, part of customer account extensions, but not necessarily new to us, not a new thing we're talking about. I think the thing that customer account extensions enables is customization, right? Walk me through the the kind of customization I can expect here. What am I getting for this new feature?
Patrick Millegan
Yeah. As a merchant, one of the things that you'll probably already be familiar with is the checkout and accounts editor. So we made this new editor for kind of adding extensions into the checkout editor. And we made a choice because with customer accounts, we decided to kind of follow along and thought it was a really great place to uh make a unified part of the developer experience. We're extending that editor there. So all your customer account pages are in that editor. You can toggle on features. One of the things that we've done is we've worked actually a lot with partners and app developers directly on what the enablement experience would be. for merchants because there's all these things with, you know, we've got customer accounts and legacy now, right? Um, and uh as an app as a merchant that's kind of figuring out these different apps that you have to add. We added a lot of tools. So things that we added for partners are things like you can query directly what version someone of new c uh if they're on the old customer accounts. with the legacy customer accounts or on regular or new customer accounts right now. That's really helpful because they can ult ultimately tailor the onboarding experience while we're running both systems. The other thing that we built actually is we really thought we wanted to make it super easy. So we actually built this new apps tab directly into the Checkout and Accounts Editor. And within that, it's really easy for uh merchants to be able to look through all the extensions or app blocks that they have available to themselves. And we've even made it so that partners can have uh tools called default extension placements. Which means that when you add a block to your customer account, because there's so many extension targets across all the pages, that it'll actually add it in the direct opinionated place that they are suggesting. Which kind of removes like a lot of you know I mean, it really makes it simplified. And the other thing is we've made it possible for them to merchandise um extension collections. that are around like a particular use case. So let's say like you're a merchant and you're adding a subscription management app. We have many in our launch partner program and many that are going to be ready uh uh uh or are are coming out today. Um and what you'd be doing really there is you're adding an app block of like, hey, I want to manage I want to add like the ability to manage a subscription on my order status page. I want a full page extension where I can kind of have the whole subscription management flow. I want to add something to like the top of my header. Well, we actually make that really easy where uh the partner can say, hey, to add subscription management. Here are the three blocks you need to add. If you click it, it goes straight to the default extension placement. You click it, goes straight to it. So I think you'll be really happy with the amount of thought and care that we put into that. And of course, as always, uh, we love feedback. So just uh hit us with it as as you as you start experiencing it. We're really excited for it. We can't wait.
Kurt Elster
What is the you know For me, I'm in a a privileged position in that I can complain on Twitter and sometimes things happen, right? If you don't have that Twitter audience, what's the best way to give the feedback?
Patrick Millegan
Yeah, so I would say no matter how big you are, uh, we are pretty locked in to posts on Twitter or feedback wherever it comes from. Um other things that exist are so I would say you can always at me. I'm always in on that. The other thing is we actually have a partner Slack directly about customer accounts. where we have 400 devs directly in there and we have about five members of the team directly interacting with them. So I would say like definitely get right in there with us like and give us the feedback, talk with us. Um, we have really great conversations. Um, we also have the new Shopify uh uh developer community forum that I would encourage to use. Um and uh all those things, I would say, yeah, go go there, talk about it. Um partner Slack, great, community forum, great. Um hit people up. We're we're there. We're we're we're always chasing down feedback.
Kurt Elster
Let's recap a little bit here what this is. I switch to the new customer accounts. In doing that, now my customers get this passwordless login system And a uh like a dedicated customer account portal. As the store owner, I can manage that. No code Inside a theme editor experience, right? I can just the same way that I can edit the theme, and now I can edit the checkout. I can also edit my customer account portal. And within that customer account portal, my options are to add features as I need them or they're available to me with an extension, a checkout app or a customer account extension that works similarly to app extensions in a theme or um the checkout. Do I get do I have this right?
Patrick Millegan
Yeah, no, I think I think that you have uh that exactly right. Um and I would just say that like the other option here, of course, that we anticipate um is that uh we've already been actually R and D with many merchants here. But I expect that like, hey, maybe you want to use an extension that an app built. That's great. But there's nothing stopping a merchant from building extensions directly themselves or working with an agency to build something custom for themselves. And we're really excited about that. And I think uh what merchants will enjoy is that you can really focus on just the use case that you want to build instead of having to build the whole experience. Um we actually early on in the R D process when we were coming up with where the extension targets are going to be inside customer accounts We actually just gave many merchants who had UX designers access to, hey, just design the features you want to design. within like, you know, take our existing out-of-the-box flow and design that. And through that, we actually determined the extension targets, which was Uh you know, that was we've been doing that a long time, but I think that like you'll find that like there's a lot of uh customization options through that.
Kurt Elster
That's very clever. All right, hardball question. It can't be limitless customization, right? It's not practical. What What are the limitations here? What do I need to be aware of? Where's the limit? Because it I know it can't be the sky.
Patrick Millegan
Of course. So I think one of the things that we've done is we've made uh customer accounts a very structured space. So there it is limited to move the layout around. Now we really think that that layout's really good and works for most merchants most of the time. Um and so uh I think that that's important to understand. There's benefits in that also as well. Some of the benefits of having a structured space. are that if one app developer builds for one merchant, they can now deploy that extension and make it available to every single store that has that same space and you don't have to spend a time bunch of time in bespoke enablement. I think that probably like every agency or partner has been going through a custom theme file and kind of like fighting for space with different people. That doesn't have to happen with extensions. Um so I think that like there's a positive of this. Um and the other part of it is we still actually do um I think that there could be moments where people might say, hey, I really want to take control of the layout. And that's where we actually have in our headless and hydrogen offering, we actually give the same API that we use to develop the new customer account portal. We give that actually available to merchants to build that themselves. You can have the full, you know, control in that thing, but you lose the kind of structure and scale of working with our app ecosystem in the same way. Right. Um, so I'd say that. And then Another one that um is a feature that's going to be coming out not today, but is going to be coming out very soon, is the ability to um start a login from the online store. And go to your login and redirect the customer back to their shopping experience. That's something that can be really critical in some experiences, right? So imagine like you're doing like a wish list save on a product page. And you know, you have that experience and you're saying, hey, sign in to add this to your wish list. Of course, you want to have the person sign in. You want to save the wish list to the customer account. You want them to view the wish list in the customer account. But right in that moment, you want to log them in, take them back to the PDP and say, hey, this is now saved. Right. And so we have some workarounds and our launch partners have uh implemented a lot of those. So you'll you'll have a good experience there. But I'm excited we have even more robust stuff coming out in the future.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, anything that can take steps out of the process, you know, steps out of the the workflow here makes everybody's life easier, right? We don't don't want to frustrate anyone. I could picture it. I've got the idea. I see the potential. But, you know, I'm I'm just not that creative. I need you need you to paint a picture for me of real world use cases. I bet there's like one or two examples that that you are excited about.
Patrick Millegan
Oh yeah. Um I mean I think one of the first things and you actually go back um so uh I I I post on Twitter quite a bit about customer accounts, so maybe people maybe people have seen this, but I had a thread when we first launched the customer account portal. And the use case that I talked about um was order management or like canceling an order before it's been fulfilled, which I think is like one of like such a great use case. um for customer accounts on our order status page. And so what we've actually seen is there's a couple uh great uh apps in our launch partner program. Uh there's order editing, there's clavarific. Um and what they do is they make it so that, hey, you maybe have been a customer and uh you checked out and then you maybe saw like, you know, like your address was put in incorrectly. So you want to make an edit to that address before the items were filled. So you don't get it shipped to the wrong address. Um we've actually had um all of them build these extensions directly in customer accounts so someone can log in, make that change in the grace period that they have allotted to them and do that. Um that happened to me at Keep Athletics, my my my brand, super often. And like I mean I can tell you like the cost of that for a customer is is unbelievably high. Like in some ways there's the cost of like you know shipping and everything like this. But there's also like the emotional cost. So like one time I had this customer that was like uh reached out to me, called me, because I had my phone number on the site at the at the time. I need you to change the order for me because I didn't have this feature because customer accounts didn't exist. And they said, um, I accidentally just ordered my uh pair of you know, my pair of shorts to my ex-girlfriend's address and it's a recent breakup and I I I can't go back there. I need you to change the address for me. Um and so I quickly changed the address with my with my uh with my uh 3PL that was sending it out. Um and uh they were so happy. But I mean the idea of that the customer being able to do that themselves is so valuable. So Um, I'm just, you know, that's gonna be, I think, an awesome, awesome experience and a huge win for uh merchants that are using this.
Kurt Elster
And you say Cleverific will have that account extension?
Patrick Millegan
Oh yeah. Andrew Lee is a homie. Great founder, awesome builder. I'm really excited for people to see his uh extension.
Kurt Elster
I'm thrilled to hear about it. You know, I I they they sponsor the show. And so how it's serendipitous when we have those things line up. So I I appreciate it. Um the yeah, you would it is especially you know during the holidays, you would be amazed at the number of people who are like, hey, I placed a purchase or I placed an order on your site and I sent it to the wrong address. That is kind of the catch 22 of you know having all these things that can autofill addresses and save addresses is you're just like, yeah, that's what I want, buying it, buy, buy, buy. And then it just after you place the order, you're like, oh man. Oh, that's the worst. That's the worst. And so like that's that's a r a frequent pain for everybody. Yeah, that is That's a real world one. I'm glad to see see that solved. Um so we've got we've got a lot of stores on on plus using B2B. And I like it a lot, and I think Shopify works well for B2B. Does uh certainly these the customer account extensions, any B2B examples that are gonna help us out?
Patrick Millegan
Oh yeah. Um this is something I'm super excited about. I've been talking about a lot like Um, I mean, uh I would put people in two of our launch partners that really stand out to me. Um, there's Sufio. Uh they've gone like really deep. on all sorts of viewing, downloading, invoicing flows, and things like this, which can be super important to certain B2B merchants. There's also UPro, which has gone really deep into the ability for B2B buyers to create like large bulk orders in seconds via CSS CSV uploads, which is I think really important to like some of the really advanced and you know high volume B2B buyers that are out there. Um I'm really excited for people to get that and partially this is kind of, you know, for me, I I I get I'm hyping this up a bit, but like uh This is a historic moment for B2B customers. They've never had the ability to work with our app ecosystem to like turn on lots of functionality. And this is like a blue ocean opportunity for new Shopify app developers. And I think the people that are investing here are gonna win big. Um because I mean if you can look at some of the large uh B2B merchants that are coming on. I mean this last year we launched Carrier, which is like one of the uh largest you know B2B merchants in e-com. They they manufacture a HVAC supplies and they do it across 180 countries. You know what I mean? They have a they have a lot of of scale there and they're gonna be looking for these solutions where they can um uh work with an app ecosystem member to get new functionality that they need. We have tons of other B2B merchants like coming online. Um and so I think this is just like a really yeah exciting just blue ocean opportunity. Um I think both those apps are gonna crush. We have we have a couple other apps in our launch partner program. Um and uh uh I think uh um I'm really yeah very very excited about that. Very bullish.
Kurt Elster
So you've worked on this a while. This is kind of this has been your baby. I want to know for you, what was hard about it? Like what were the the big technical or conceptual challenges to building something like customer account extensions?
Patrick Millegan
Who yeah, I mean I that's a really good question. I think from a technical perspective, one of the biggest things is of course like Shopify Um, we do so much for merchants, right? We've got all sorts of parts of the customer experience and really login and customer accounts They it's a it's a nonlinear flow that kind of integrates into every single part of the customer journey. Right. So and if you look across our stacks, there's the you know Some merchants are on Headless or Hydrogen, you know, building their own online store. Uh we have the online store and all the custom themes. Um we have the order status page, which has kind of like a login experience. If you have checkout, which has the login experience, is very important. There's all the third-party portals. There's our kind of our our sign-in-with shop or our shop pay experience. And these are all sorts of different things that merchants are trying to do with these different things. And being able to like have the login experience and customer accounts work across all of them has definitely been one of those like technical challenges to like pull off and make it work across all those different things. Um and I think that another part of it was just like really, you know, we're now coming at a point where we have customer account extensions, but at one point that was a technical, that was a technical and conceptual challenge, right? Where we were saying Okay, where can we have that place that partners can build from where they can reuse the branding that merchants have already set to like make the experience easier for merchants, make the experience easier for developers? a safe space to host like important sensitive data, which is an important part of the customer account experience. Um, as well as, you know, just yeah, streamline the whole experience. And then I think conceptually You kind of have talked about it on this, but switching people from doing all their customizations within the theme and the online store to this like more structured extension experience. I mean, who we were first starting? I mean, that was one of the biggest risks, you know, everyone was talking about. Like, how do we pull this magic trick off? Like, yes, there's fundamentals here. Yes, there's some really great RD work into this. Um, but that's why uh it's so thrilling to be today with over 300 apps all supporting customer kind extensions. Um people really showed up for this, we're really excited. Um, and I think we've been able to really hone in and build the make the developer experience and the app experience and the enablement experience so good that people are really excited for this to be that solution that a lot of people are looking for, which is that how do we offer merchants this unified account experience for their customers? And um these were, you know, it it these have been so many talented people over so many uh years, so many meetings, flights across the country, talking customer. I mean, these have been monumental challenges that we're just excited to Excited to uh to to get this out today.
Kurt Elster
It sounds like it's it's pretty clear to me here. Merchant feedback shaped this product considerably and uh Shopify has really been very good about soliciting and responding to feedback, especially in online spaces. Is there m more to it? Like how How impactful was merchant feedback in deciding what goes into this? Was it like, yeah, this is their feedback, damn the torpedoes, this is how we build it? Or it was like, this is what they're looking for, so this is what we have to do? Maybe that's too black and white. I mean, I I would start foundationally.
Patrick Millegan
Like, yeah, the answer black and white, yes, is yeah, hi hi yes. That like uh merchant feedback went to this. I would say foundationally the decision to not continue with classic or legacy accounts was directly based on merchant feedback and what they were trying to do. I mean, they wanted a unified account experience. They wanted their customers to have the seamless, consistent experience that kind of helped them do self-serve functionality and collected their preferences so they could personalize the experience. And it just wasn't possible in the way merchants wanted to go. And so without that feedback, you know, that wouldn't that decision to start from scratch would just not have happened. So I would say from the very, very beginning of the first project. Um, I was actually just recently reflecting on this with some of the devs that were like the very first ones that were on this project. And like they were like, Yeah, I remember being in the room with such and such merchant, and you know, this is exactly the issue. Um, just more tactically, I mean, one of the things I mentioned it above, but like we've been very, very like in the weeds with talking to is all of our merchants that are using new customer accounts. Um and actually even from the very beginning, like I said, we invited many merchants into a design partnership with us and asked them to just Blue Ocean design what they wanted their account experience to be. And that what led to some of like our extension targets, like our order management menu, you know, that's something that's super important. We wanted to have like one button on the order status page where all the order actions could go for all the different extensions. So like we talked about editing an order, but there's also maybe like write a review, right? There's also maybe download an invoice. There's all these things. And we wanted the UX to be so considered and what our merchants wanted. And that was like a whole like, okay, I guess we have to, you know, let's design this thing. Let's build this system. Let's think this through. Let's now pitch it to all of our partners and get them on board. Um and so that's like, you know, super uh pivotal Um and uh uh yeah, really happy with a lot of the relationships we've built with merchants along the way on this.
Kurt Elster
And if there's one thing merchants love, it's data, key performance indicators, KPIs. I know this one, it's a little A little squishier, a little software, softer, harder to measure, because it's customer accounts, right? It's more an experience that tries to eliminate frustrations. And so it's tougher to tie it back to like conversion rate, add to cart. But you know, maybe we could tie it back to um customer retention. I don't know. Are there I've heard the word foundational a lot, and so I'm wondering if there's any performance improvements. Yeah, we we can expect or yeah use as a carrot to try and lure people. Come please use the account extensions. It makes life easier, I swear. Yeah. Um
Patrick Millegan
I I think one of the key things we we we kind of talked about early on about these unique portals, right? And having these portals now build their use cases into one account place. One of the things that that does, and we also talked about this concept of like buyers don't want to log in, they want to get something done. What I see with customer account extensions and all this great new you self-service, you know, you have functionality that's coming in is that Um, now all of a sudden, customers that previously weren't having to log in to do that action now are. And that's going to significantly drive login. So, like I'll give you an example of a merchant that we're working with. Um it's an apparel merchant and they kind of report, you know, 20% of their customers regularly engage with like a return to a change feature. Right. That's pretty like normal and kind of within that bounds. And all of these customers aren't logged in. And now by actually working with returns portals that are actually built directly in, they're gonna be now getting those customers to log in. That means 20% of their customers are gonna be logged in. That's a big difference from how it was before. And to me, I see this as ushering in like an era of just personalization, right? Now that all these customers are going to be logged in and we have these real reasons that people are doing this through the self-serve functionality. Through subscription management through checking loyalty through doing referrals. They're doing all these like just base you know, I mean things that like are high value to the customer. That's gonna in turn much increase login and what we've seen and we can see with data logged in customers they you know they and they they spend more money they convert faster Um, they convert better. Uh like this is a thing that I'm really excited about and something I like really just to kind of tease people of the future of this is that like I see like flows like, okay, hey, like I I talk I sell shorts on my store, right? So like when a customer buys a pair of shorts and they uh you know or we find out they're a size large, when they're logged in Every single time they come to the site, we should be like pre-selecting every product page with a size large. That's reducing a click. You know how many clicks that's reducing for commerce across every product variant is a pretty big idea. And I see a lot more people set up to take advantage of that because they're going to see a larger percentage of their customers logged in because these use cases that previously wouldn't drive logins now will. And that's like a pretty big deal, I think, for merchants as they work to just develop, you know, the best uh relationship with our customers at scale.
Kurt Elster
Well man, I love the idea of pre-selecting the size on a product form as a as a conversion rate optimization tactic. That's very clever. The but to your point, you're right. You everything works better on both sides of the table if the customer is logged in because when you know wherever they go, the data is being stored in their account. They can access everything uh quickly in their account portal. When they go to checkout, everything's already pre-filled out. And that makes life easier. But on the merchant side, ah, you know, I'm I'm dealing with potentially fewer customer support requests, but then in my analytics knows, uh in theory knows like uh you know between sessions, this is the same person, right? And so we could do better personalization. There's a whole bunch of benefits to it. And it's so obvious. I completely missed that. Okay, very clever. Um man, I don't need I I don't even look at other e-commerce platforms anymore. What's the point? Yeah, I'm sure as part of this process, you may be familiar with them. Sure. How this is such a softball question, because honestly, I'm like The everything else is a bunch of also rans, but tell me, how does how do you think this feature stacks up against, you know, what's out there now? Yeah, I mean, um obviously like I think I've said before, I'm a Shopify maximalist.
Patrick Millegan
I believe that every store should be a Shopify store. I mean I think that like Uh there's so there's so much uh going on that we do uh well here. But I mean I I don't think it's any secret that a a big secret sauce of of Shopify is the dev ecosystem. and the apps that build and the incredible smart people that we have that like are just super in the weeds on certain use cases. Shout out Henry, the gift card guy that's completely uh uh branded himself uh on like one use case and knows so much about gift cards. Like he really is the gift card guy. We have so many people in our dev ecosystem. And to me, yes, there's so many things that we've done about the performance of this project. Yes, there's a lot of thoughtness. Yes, the developer experience is good. Yes, the merchant experience of enabling it's good. Yes, all that. But I think that just like You know, being able to now have our Shopify, App Dev, and kind of agency ecosystem now building for a platform that when they build functionality, it goes to everyone with this. Um that's exciting. That's super exciting to me and is something that I don't see any competing platform really playing in or doing or moving in that direction. And um yeah, I I think that uh that's how I would think about that. I mean, I I don't know if you could even call it stacking up. I think it's just like foundationally different than any other uh commerce platform
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. Yeah, that that ecosystem and the fact that Shopify continually reinvests in those partners, in their people, is the magic, right? Just Always it has you know, I've been doing this since twenty eleven or twenty twelve. And it is always that was why we signed up. We're like, wow, look at this. You know, they're investing in it. And now many years later, it is still the case, you know, more if anything, more so than ever. But okay, with customer account extensions, if I'm a merchant, I want to adopt this. I'm like, all right, you you sold me, Patrick. I want in. How do I do it? What's the first step?
Patrick Millegan
Yeah, so I would say um go to your checkout accounts editor and you can kind of look at the pages um that are there. So you can see your order status page. you can see your order list page, you can see your profile page, and you can go to the apps tab and see the apps that you're already interacting with, what extensions they've built. You might find that a lot of them have actually already built for this, so you can kind of play with that experience. Um and I would uh go through our styling section that's in there and I would brand it how you like it, kind of get a good feel for it. And I would log in as a customer and I would place an order on your site and I would get a feel for that. And um I would then uh if I feel good about it, I would I would I would turn it on. I would say, go hey, go down this path. Um and if you see feedback, I would I would holler it really loudly. Like I said, at me, at Shopify Dad, at I'm gonna throw them over here, but at Liam, uh, go into our partner Slack, go into the community forum. Like and really help us drive 'cause that's how we all win is when we kind of talk about the feedback and we're, you know, we're we we go build off of it.
Kurt Elster
Is there any other resources or like support available? You you touched on some of it. Well, reiterate for me.
Patrick Millegan
Yeah. So um I said all these kind of like channels are open, but of course we have our help docs that have a lot of different um articles about setting up customer accounts or maybe other considerations or things that you should think about. We also have a great set of like a dev documentation, which really outlines a lot of the kind of app experience. We put a lot of thoughts into the tutorials that we put there. Um and um always, I mean, I uh I think uh talking to your fellow merchants is always great um about uh how their experience has been. Um, there's a lot of uh Shopify merchants using new customer accounts now that it might have experiences with it. Um yeah, talk about it.
Kurt Elster
Talk about it. If you had to summarize the experience, this whole thing in one sentence, the impact, the use case, or why I want to do it, what is it? Yeah, I would say um lower your support cost, uh deepen your relationships with your customers.
Patrick Millegan
Right. Like that's that's the real thing here. I mean, uh, we want as many customers to intuitively know for you how to get service super fast without having to talk to you. um and tell you exactly your their preferences so that you can build them the best possible personalized experience that they've ever seen in your in your in your niche of the internet. That's what we see for.
Kurt Elster
Speaking of ne internet niches, what is your Twitter handle?
Patrick Millegan
I'm at PMilligan.
Kurt Elster
Oh, good. All right. If you have any issues at all with this, Twitter at pmilligan. Yes. There you go. Absolutely. Hit me up. We'll get it sorted. Final question. In spell it out for me. In the Shopify admin, how do I set this up? Bottom left, I click settings. Yes, bottom left.
Patrick Millegan
Or no, it's an online store. No, bottom left, you click settings, correct. You go to customer account settings, and you'll see actually like a really great uh panel that'll say, hey, do you want to use customer accounts or do you want to use legacy customer accounts? If you're using no accounts, what you'll see is a little toggle to turn on the feature itself. So you'll turn that on if it's new to you completely. Or if you're on legacy, you'll switch to new. Um and if you aren't ready to do the switch at first, there's a button that says customize. That'll take you and direct you to the checkout and account setter, which will let you preview the experience. Get the branding how you want it to be, get the extensions on your a uh uh site uh on your customer kind of experience that you want it to be, and can do it all yourself?
Kurt Elster
Uh Patrick, thank you for for sharing this feature, this experience, and uh everything you've learned about it in the last three years. I really appreciate it. It's been It's been insightful. And it's always fun to see both the people and then the thought process that goes into these features, right? Because there's just so much nuance and so many edge cases and so many things to think about. Just my head spins at the the thought of having to deal with such a thing. And it does. It just I it seems tough.
Patrick Millegan
Yeah. I mean it's tough, but I mean I think it's like uh yeah, I think it's a privilege.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. Uh Patrick Milligan, senior product lead at Shopify. Congrats on customer account extensions and getting this feature live and out in the hands of everybody and for sharing it with us.
Patrick Millegan
Cheers. Appreciate you.