A Shopify support agent told our customer that our app didn't migrate customers properly. Without any investigation..
The exact words to the merchant:
"The migration only linked customers to Orders, but did not create Customer Profiles. Because of this, your 8,000 customers cannot log in. This is an incomplete migration"
Then encouraged them to ask for a refund:
"You have every right to ask for your money back. Most app developers will offer a refund if you show them that the 'successful' migration actually broke your customer experience"
The customer came to us furious. Threatening legal action. Demanding a full refund
So we contacted Shopify's technical team directly and investigated together
What we actually found:
Customers not showing in search? Shopify's search index was out of sync. They reindexed on their end. Fixed instantly
Login not working? Store was on deprecated legacy customer accounts. A store-level setting, nothing to do with migration
Apostrophe in customer IDs? Shopify's own team initially suspected we were injecting it. Turns out the Customer ID is a read-only field, apps cannot set or modify it. It's auto-generated by Shopify when we send the customer payload via API. Their team confirmed: "we were incorrect on the apostrophe, it is something that happens internally"
Every single customer record was there the entire time. Migrated correctly with
@store_migration app!
The support agent diagnosed the problem incorrectly, gave the merchant wrong steps to follow, and pointed the finger at us, all without a single check
One message like this can damage an app developer's reputation, cost hours of investigation, and nearly destroy a customer relationship
@ShopifyDevs we love building on Shopify and we're committed partners who already migrated 100M records to Shopify. But front-line support needs to verify before blaming third-party apps
@tobi @harleyf