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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. Click the contact icon in the message header to open the contact card.
  3. If TALISK_HQ can see that this address is not a customer in your store yet, the card shows a Shopify block saying so, with a Create customer button.

The offer is only there when your current book has a connected Shopify store. If you have no store connected, or the person is already a customer, there is nothing to offer and the button does not appear.

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 message. 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 email's own From line, which is the address the message actually arrived from.

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.

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.

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. 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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