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Create a Shopify customer from an email

Open this in Talisk HQ

Somebody emails asking about a product, and their name, phone number and address are sitting right there in the message. TALISK_HQ can read those details and offer to add the person to your Shopify store, so you do not retype them into two screens.

Where the offer appears

  1. Open the email in Mail.
  2. Look at the line with the sender's address on it, just under the subject. Next to + Contacts you will see + Shopify.
  3. Click it.

That button is there when your current book has a connected Shopify store and that email address is not a customer in it yet.

The same offer also sits inside the contact card, which is the person icon in the message header, for anyone who prefers working from there.

If they are already in your store

You get a Shopify customer link on the same line instead of the offer. Click it to open their record in your store's admin. There is nothing to create, because they are already there.

If TALISK_HQ shows neither, it means one of three things: your current book has no Shopify store connected, the message has no address to look up, or creating customers is not switched on for your account yet. Silence never means TALISK_HQ found something and did not mention it.

Checking the details before you create anything

Pressing Create customer opens a form. It never creates anything on its own: the form is the confirmation, and nothing reaches your store until you press the button on it.

TALISK_HQ fills the form in two ways, and says which is which:

  • read from the email: TALISK_HQ read this out of the conversation. Treat it the way you would treat a note somebody scribbled for you. It is a machine reading a stranger's words, and it can put the unit number in the street or read a name that belongs to someone else in the thread.

  • from the sender: this came from the message's own headers rather than from anybody's prose, so no machine had to interpret it.

    Where a message carries a Reply-To address, that is the one TALISK_HQ uses, because it is the address a reply to that message goes to. This matters more than it sounds: a contact form or a help desk sends the notification from its own address and puts the real person in Reply-To, so a Shopify contact form arrives from Shopify's mailer while the customer's own address rides in the reply line. Taking the From line there would fill the form in with the robot that delivered the message instead of the person who wrote it.

It reads the whole conversation, not one message

People rarely put everything in one email. The phone number turns up in the first message and the address arrives in a reply three days later, so TALISK_HQ reads the recent messages of the thread rather than only the one on screen. There is no button for this and nothing to switch on: it is simply what happens when you open the form.

Two things follow, and both are worth knowing:

  • It looks for one person. TALISK_HQ is told which address it is filling the form in for, and to ignore details belonging to anybody else in the thread: your own signature, a colleague copied in, another customer somebody mentioned. It is careful about this because a customer created carrying somebody else's street address is a real record in your real store, and neither you nor TALISK_HQ can undo it from here. It is careful, not perfect. Check the marked fields.
  • A later message wins. If somebody gives you an address and then corrects it further down the thread, the correction is the one that gets filled in.

TALISK_HQ never reads drafts you have not sent, or messages you have thrown away. It reads the messages the thread itself shows you.

It is still working for a few seconds after the form opens

Reading a conversation takes a moment, so the form opens with the sender's own address already in it and the rest arrives shortly after. While that is happening the form says Still reading the conversation across the top, and every box it is still hoping to fill is marked looking. Those marks disappear as the details land, and the ones that never land are simply empty boxes you can fill in yourself.

You do not have to wait. Type into any field as soon as the form opens. Anything you enter is yours: TALISK_HQ will not replace it when it finishes reading, and the field stops being marked as its reading the moment you touch it.

Edit anything that looks wrong. The mark disappears from a field the moment you change it, so whatever is still marked when you press the button is the part nobody has checked by hand.

The email address is the only field you have to fill in. Everything else is optional, and a blank one is left blank in Shopify rather than sent as empty.

Country and province

Country is a list you choose from, not a box you type in. Shopify checks a province or state against its country, so a typed country can quietly disagree with the province beside it, and that would be a wrong record in your real store.

For the United States and Canada, the province or state is a list too, and it is that country's own list. Pick the United States and you get the states; pick Canada and you get the provinces and territories. Everywhere else the box takes free text, because Shopify accepts it there.

Two things follow from that:

  • Changing the country clears a province that does not belong to it. If a form is showing Washington and you change the country to Canada, the province empties, because Washington is not a Canadian province. Pick the right one from the new list.
  • TALISK_HQ says when it could not place what it read. If the email named a country or a province TALISK_HQ cannot match, it does not guess. It leaves the box unset and tells you underneath exactly what the email said, so you can pick the right one yourself.

Most people never write their own country down

A signature that ends "211 Polo Park Drive, Bellingham, WA 98229" does not say United States, because to the person who wrote it that was obvious. TALISK_HQ works it out from the postal code, and the field says from the postal code so you know the email did not actually state it. Check it like any other detail TALISK_HQ filled in; editing it clears the mark.

It is the postal code that decides, not the state, and that is deliberate. WA is Washington in the United States and it is also Western Australia. Bellingham is a city in Washington State and a district of London. A five-digit ZIP beside a real US state can only be American; a Western Australian address has a four-digit postcode, so it matches nothing and TALISK_HQ leaves the country for you to pick. It works out the United States and Canada this way and nowhere else.

If the email did name a country, that is what TALISK_HQ uses, even where the postal code suggests otherwise. What somebody actually wrote beats what a pattern implies, and if the province then does not fit that country, TALISK_HQ tells you.

What gets created

A customer record with the name, email, phone, company and address you confirmed. That is all.

  • No marketing consent. Somebody who sent you a question has not joined your mailing list, so nothing about email marketing is sent to Shopify. Ask them, and set it in Shopify yourself if they say yes.
  • Nothing in your books. No invoice, no bill, no journal entry. This is a contact record in your store, not a sale.

When it is done the dialog names the person and offers View in Shopify, which opens their record in your store's admin.

If it says they are already a customer

TALISK_HQ checks three ways before writing anything: its own copy of your customer list, then a search of your store, and finally Shopify's own rule that one email address is one customer. If any of those finds them, nothing is created and the dialog says so, with a link through to the person who already holds that address.

This is worth knowing because TALISK_HQ's copy of your customer list is only as current as its last sync. Somebody who bought from you before you connected the store is a real customer your copy has not caught up with, and the search is what catches them.

If it says the store has not approved this

Creating customers needs a permission your store grants to TALISK_HQ, separate from the one that reads your orders. If your store has not granted it, the dialog says so and a banner appears at the top of the page. Close the dialog, use the banner to reconnect the store, and approve the request. Then try again.

Sometimes that banner offers no Reconnect button and says instead that the store is connected through a different TALISK_HQ app. That happens when the store was connected with an earlier version of our Shopify app. Reconnecting from there would replace the working connection rather than add the missing permission, so the banner does not offer it. Nothing else about the store changes, and your sales keep syncing as before. Email support@taliskhq.com and we will move the connection across.

If Shopify rejects the details

Shopify does its own checking, and it will refuse a phone number or a postal code it cannot make sense of. When that happens the dialog stays open with everything you typed still in it and lists what Shopify objected to, so you can correct that one field and try again.

If Shopify cannot be reached

Nothing is created and the dialog says to try again shortly. Your details are still on screen. A failed attempt never leaves half a customer behind: either the record is created in full or it is not created at all.

Good to know: This writes a new customer into your live Shopify store, and neither you nor Talisk can undo it from here. Nothing is ever created automatically: the dialog is the confirmation, and the customer is written only when you press Create customer. The details are filled in for you by reading the email, so they are a machine's reading of what somebody else wrote and can be wrong. Each one says where it came from, and the mark clears once you edit it. To fill the form in, Talisk reads the recent messages of the conversation, not only the one on screen, and it is told to look for the details of the person you are adding and to leave everyone else's alone. Reading takes a few seconds and the form is usable the whole time; anything you type is yours and is never replaced by what Talisk goes on to read. The country is picked from a list rather than typed, and for the United States and Canada the province or state is picked from that country's own list, so the two can never disagree. When the email never names a country, Talisk works it out from the postal code and says that is where it came from; where the postal code proves nothing it leaves the country for you to pick rather than guessing. The offer appears only on a book with a connected Shopify store, and only when that email address is not already a customer there. It never adds anyone to a mailing list: somebody who sent you a question has not agreed to marketing, so no consent of any kind is sent. Only the name, contact details and address are created. Orders, notes and tags are not, and nothing about your books changes: this creates no invoice, no bill and no journal entry.

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