Shopify Customer Accounts: Legacy, Current, and What the Upgrade Breaks

The naming has changed twice, which is why so much of the advice online contradicts itself.

The old version is now called legacy customer accounts. You will still see it called classic in places, including the URL of Shopify's own help page for it.

The current version is just customer accounts. It used to be new customer accounts, and plenty of third-party guides still call it that.

So when you read that something works with "new customer accounts", that is the current one. When you read that your store is on "classic", that is legacy. Same two things, four names.

The practical difference is where they live. Legacy accounts are part of your theme — they are Liquid templates sitting in templates > customers, and in the theme editor they appear under the Home page dropdown as "Legacy customer accounts". The current version is managed separately from the theme, so theme updates do not touch it.

That single architectural change is the reason most of the rest of this article exists.

Shopify deprecated legacy customer accounts on 26 February 2026. Three things took effect immediately:

• They are no longer available to new stores, or to existing stores not already using them.
• Shopify has stopped shipping feature updates for them.
• Shopify has stopped providing technical support for them.

Shopify said a final sunset date would be announced later in 2026. At the time of writing it had not published one, so check the developer changelog before you plan around a specific deadline rather than trusting any date you read second-hand.

Two further changes are confirmed but undated:

• The legacy account Liquid templates — customers/account.liquid, login.liquid and register.liquid — will be locked from editing, then removed.
• The Storefront API customer mutations will be deprecated. The Customer Account API becomes the source for customer-scoped data and authenticated actions.

If you run a headless or custom storefront on those Storefront API mutations, Shopify's advice is to move as soon as possible rather than wait for a date. See Shopify headless commerce for how that layer fits together.

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the one that catches people who were not planning an upgrade at all.

A store on legacy accounts that moves to a theme without the legacy account Liquid files is upgraded automatically.

Theme developers have been told to stop including those files. The shopify-account web component, which redirects to the current version, is set to become a requirement for Theme Store themes. So the modern theme you buy next year will very likely not carry legacy templates — and installing it will move your accounts for you.

If your store has custom work on legacy account pages, that is the moment it stops existing. Not with a warning dialog, just a theme change.

What this means in practice:

• Treat a theme swap on a legacy-accounts store as an accounts migration, and plan it as one.
• Audit your legacy customizations before you shop for a theme, not after you have published it.
• If you are mid-redesign right now, this belongs on the project plan today.

The upgrade is reversible for 30 days, which is a real safety net but a short one. These are the things that do not come across.

Flow automations built on legacy accounts. Workflow triggers and automations based on legacy customer accounts cannot be migrated. You will be rebuilding them. Inventory what you have in Shopify Flow before you start, because this is the loss most stores discover late.

The customer_account_status segment filter. It works only with legacy accounts, and the current version has no equivalent. Any segment built on it — and anything downstream of that segment, such as an email flow — needs a new definition.

Theme customizations you do not rebuild. Customizations that are not recreated are simply not carried over. Legacy accounts were customized through Liquid edits; the current version is customized with apps and customer account UI extensions instead. That is a different skill set, not a different setting.

Custom sign-in and registration experiences. If you built sign-in into a modal or a separate page, that may need removing from the theme before you can upgrade at all.

Two things that do survive, worth knowing: on Shopify Plus an existing Multipass integration keeps working, and legacy URLs such as /account/login redirect automatically after the upgrade.

Set against those losses, the current version is a genuinely better product for most stores.

Sign-in without passwords. Customers enter an email and receive a one-time 6-digit code. No password to forget, no reset emails to deliver. Sign-in sessions persist for up to 365 days.

More ways in. Sign in with Shop, which requires Shop Pay and supports Shop credentials and saved passkeys. Social sign-in with Google and Facebook. On Shopify Plus you can connect your own identity provider, which replaces the default sign-in experience entirely.

Self-serve actions. Customers can view and manage orders, edit profile details, and do things that would otherwise reach your inbox — buy again, start a return, leave a review. Saved details auto-fill at checkout.

It is no longer theme-coupled. Accounts are managed separately, so theme updates do not break them. Given how legacy accounts behave during a theme swap, this is the fix for the problem described above.

Two features worth naming because they are hard requirements rather than nice-to-haves: store credit is unavailable on legacy accounts, and B2B integration belongs to the current version. If either is on your roadmap, the upgrade is not optional.

One limit to know: customers cannot merge their own profiles by changing their email. Merging happens in the admin. And customers signing in through an external identity provider cannot change their email from the account at all.

Shopify's documented path runs in this order:

1. Review your legacy customizations, in the theme editor and in the code.
2. Duplicate the checkout configuration in Settings > Checkout.
3. Replace customizations with apps or built-in features, or build them with a developer or a custom app.
4. Verify brand settings.
5. Optionally connect a subdomain for customer accounts.
6. Confirm the sender email address.
7. Publish the configuration.
8. Test, including every sign-in option you plan to offer.
9. Click Upgrade in the banner at the top of Settings > Customer accounts.

Your store also has to pass an upgrade check before the upgrade completes.

Shopify's Sidekick can help plan the upgrade, with one caveat stated plainly in the documentation: it does not check Shopify Flow workflows or customer segments. Those are exactly the two things that cannot be migrated. Do not let an automated plan stand in for that audit.

The 30-day revert window is your test period. Use it deliberately: agree in advance what "working" means, and who is checking it, rather than discovering in week five that a segment has been quietly empty.

A small store with an unmodified theme and no Flow automations can do this alone in an afternoon. The work worth paying for is proportional to how much you built on top of legacy accounts.

• Rebuilding customizations as extensions. Liquid edits become apps and customer account UI extensions. Different architecture, different skills.
• Flow and segments. Auditing what breaks, then rebuilding triggers and segment definitions that no longer have an equivalent.
• Custom storefronts. Moving from Storefront API customer mutations to the Customer Account API.
• A theme change on a legacy store. Treating the swap as the migration it actually is.

Real figures from the shopexperts directory, pulled 19 October 2026:

• Theme customization and updates: 18 fixed-price packages from 13 experts, median $548, middle 50% $238 to $798, range $100 to $3,900.
• Custom development and apps: 41 packages from 24 experts, median $1,000, middle 50% $390 to $2,499, range $150 to $8,000. Extension work and API migration sit here.

A packaged price is what an expert publishes for a defined scope, not a quote for your store. For wider ranges see Shopify custom development cost.

One of our directory's experts documented a custom accounts build — setting up a custom customer accounts page — which is a useful read before scoping.

For the theme side, browse Shopify theme customization experts. For extensions and API work, Shopify app development experts or Shopify custom development experts. For the settings and configuration pass, Shopify store configuration experts. Not sure which? Read what kind of Shopify expert do I need.