Legacy accounts are deprecated. Build the login you always wanted.

Where things stand

Shopify's changelog entry in February 2026 was short: legacy customer accounts are deprecated. They no longer receive feature updates or technical support, new stores cannot choose them, and a final sunset date will be announced later in 2026, after which the legacy templates are locked and eventually removed. Every store still on legacy accounts is going to move. The only decision left is whether you schedule it or Shopify does.

The new system dropped the "new" from its name in the same period and is now just customer accounts. If a help article or an app listing says "new customer accounts", it means this.

What the customer gets

• No password. The customer enters an email and receives a six-digit code. Forgotten-password flows, which are where a large share of login abandonment happens on mobile, go away.
• Sign in with Shop for anyone with a Shop account, using saved passkeys, which on a phone means face or fingerprint. Google and Facebook sign-in can be enabled alongside. Plus stores can add their own identity provider.
• Long sessions. Once signed in, the session persists for months, so the second visit starts logged in rather than at a form.
• A real account area: order history, reorder, saved addresses, self-serve returns and cancellations, store credit balance, subscription management, and whatever your apps add through extensions.

For Indian D2C brands the passwordless part matters more than it sounds. Most of your traffic is on a phone, most of it arrives from Instagram or WhatsApp, and a login that needs a remembered password loses a meaningful fraction of returning customers at the door.

What the upgrade breaks

The accounts live on Shopify's hosted pages, not in your theme. That is the source of every migration issue.

• Liquid account templates (customers/account, customers/login, customers/order and friends) are no longer rendered. Any customisation in them, from a wishlist tab to a custom order-tracking block, has to be rebuilt as a customer account extension.
• Hard-coded links. Themes and apps that link to /account or /account/login directly need to use customer_login_link and the routes object instead, so they follow the new URL. Search your theme for the literal strings.
• Apps that rendered into the old templates. Loyalty widgets, wishlists, order tracking, subscription portals. Each needs to support account extensions; most major ones do now, and an app that does not is on borrowed time.
• The domain. The account pages are served from a Shopify domain by default. You can put them on a subdomain of your own store domain, and you should, both for trust and for the OTP email not looking like phishing.
• Email deliverability. The six-digit code arrives by email. If your sending domain is not authenticated, the code is late or in spam and the login fails. The deliverability guide covers what to fix.

The upgrade, in order

• Inventory. List every app that touches the account area and every theme customisation in the customer templates. Check each app's listing for customer account extension support.
• Set up the new accounts on a duplicate theme. Enable them in settings, brand the pages in the checkout and accounts editor (the styling is shared with checkout, so it should already look right), add your subdomain, and turn on Sign in with Shop.
• Move the customisations. Rebuild what the templates did as extensions, or accept that some of it was never used. Order tracking, in particular, is usually better handled by the order status page than by a custom account tab.
• Fix the links. Header, footer, mobile menu, post-purchase emails and any app blocks. Test with a logged-out customer on a phone.
• Decide the checkout prompt. The new accounts let you require login at checkout, prompt for it, or hide it. Prompt, not require; a required login at checkout is a conversion tax.
• Switch, then watch login success for a week. Failed codes point at email deliverability. A drop in repeat purchase points at broken links.

Loyalty on the new accounts

The account area is where a loyalty programme either lives or dies, because it is the one page a returning customer visits on purpose.

• Store credit is native. Issue it as a refund method, as a goodwill gesture, or as the reward itself, with an expiry. For a lot of brands a simple cashback-as-credit programme built on this beats a points app with tiers nobody understands.
• Points and tiers apps plug in through account extensions and show balance, history and redemption inside the account. Pick one that supports the extension model; anything still relying on a theme snippet will not render.
• Design the programme around repeat rate, not sign-ups. The number to move is the share of customers who order a second time within 90 days. A programme that produces sign-ups and no second orders is a discount with extra steps.
• Do not gate the store. Loyalty is a reason to log in, not a condition of buying. Guest checkout stays.
• Subscriptions belong here too. If you run them, the account is where customers skip, swap and pause, and the subscriptions guide explains why making those actions easy lowers churn rather than raising it.

Common mistakes

• Waiting for the sunset date. Then the upgrade happens in a hurry, during a season, with an app that turns out not to support extensions.
• Upgrading without searching the theme for /account. The login link in the header quietly 404s for a month.
• Requiring login at checkout. The passwordless flow is good, but "good" is still a step between a customer and paying.
• Skipping the custom subdomain. A login page on an unfamiliar domain, sending a code from an unfamiliar sender, is exactly what a phishing warning looks like to a careful customer.

FAQ