A Long-Awaited Update: Customers Can Now Edit Their Shopify Account Emails

It’s a small change that solves a major merchant headache: Shopify has just announced that customers can now securely update the email addresses tied to their store accounts.

For years, this has been a common and frustrating situation. A customer uses the wrong email at signup, or they need to change it years later, and you’re left to handle it with a manual workaround.

This news was especially exciting for our team at Helium. Why? Because 10 years ago, we built a free app called “Customr” to solve this exact problem. It had only one function: let customers edit their email addresses.

Our mission has always been to listen to merchants, find the gaps in the platform, and build clean, reliable solutions. We’re thrilled to see this functionality finally become a core part of the Shopify platform.

How the new feature works

This update is a seamless part of Shopify’s new customer accounts. Here’s a quick look at how it works:

1. Customer-initiated: When logged in, a customer can navigate to their account profile section and request an email change.
2. Secure verification: To protect their account, Shopify automatically sends a secure one-time password (OTP) to their new email address.
3. Automatic update: Once they enter the code to verify ownership, their email is updated, and they stay logged in.

That’s it. No more support tickets for simple emails changes. No more manual updates in the admin.

Important limitations to consider

While this is a great update, there are two key limitations all merchants need to be aware of.

First, this feature is only available for shops using Shopify’s new customer accounts. If your store is still on legacy customer accounts, this self-serve functionality will not be available. Your customers will still need to contact you manually to request an email change or you can use an app to provide this functionality.

Second, this feature is automatically enabled and cannot be disabled. For most stores, this is a welcome, hands-off improvement. However, if you run a private, members-only, or B2B site where access is strictly controlled by email, this could cause issues. Allowing self-service email changes might interfere with how you verify or manage your restricted-access customer list, as you cannot turn the setting off.

Beyond the email: The story of Customer Fields

Our experience with Customr taught us a valuable lesson: merchants were frustrated by the limitations of Shopify’s customer accounts. Fixing the email field was just the tip of the iceberg.

We heard from you constantly: “Okay, they can edit their email, but how do I collect their birthday for a loyalty discount?” “I need to know their company name for my B2B portal.” “How can I ask for their interests to personalize my marketing?”

We realized the core problem wasn’t just one field. It was the inability to customize customer accounts at all.

Customr quickly evolved, becoming the powerful Helium Customer Fields app available today. We took that original idea—giving you control over customer data—and expanded it from a single field to fully customizable registration and account forms.

With Customer Fields, you can easily add fields to your registration form to collect:

• Birthdays for loyalty programs
• Company names and VAT IDs for B2B
• File uploads for artwork or prescriptions
• Checkboxes for marketing preferences
• …and anything else you can think of.

It turns the simple signup form into your most powerful data collection tool. You’re not just creating an account; you’re building a detailed customer profile that can be used for segmentation, marketing, and creating detailed customer groups right in your Shopify admin.

Looking ahead

We’re happy to see Shopify adopt a feature we pioneered with Customr a decade ago. It makes the platform stronger for everyone.

And as the platform evolves, we’ll continue to be right here, building the next generation of tools you need. Our journey from solving one field with Customr to enabling full customization with Customer Fields shows our commitment to this mission: to listen to merchants and build app that just work.