"i only speak liquid" #92: Customer Account Experience

Hey everyone,

Bittersweet moment as it is Georgie’s 4th and final edit of “i_only_speak_liquid”.

Georgie is a developer based between Lisbon and NY. She’s contributed to projects for leading brands including John Frieda, Bioré and Bio Oil. Her expertise spans front-end development, Shopify e-commerce, EDM creation, and digital consulting.

She’s an expert on Storetasker 😉 (apply here) and you can stay in touch with her here.

Let’s dive in 🤿

—

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What I’ve been thinking about:

DI’ve had a lot of clients lately who hate the default customer account experience especially with the new shopify account updates. Specifically: a customer logs in for the first time and gets sent to a pretty bare, unhelpful orders page just “here are your orders” or an empty state if the customer is new.

The frustrating part is how little flexibility Shopify now gives you to customise that initial account landing page. You can tweak styling, but you can’t really change the experience or add meaningful content.

What I only recently realised is that you don’t actually have to send customers there first at all.

The workaround that changed everything

Instead of sending users straight to /account, you can redirect them after login to a custom page and only on that first login.

That page can be anything:

• A branded “Welcome back” landing page

• Shopping instructions for wholesale customers

• FAQs, contact info etc

• B2B-specific instructions on pricing, MOQs, or net terms etc

Once the customer is logged in, future clicks on the account icon behave normally and take them to their account dashboard.

How the it works

• Logged-out users click Login

• Logged-in users click Account

• After login, Shopify redirects once, then behaves normally

Here’s the pattern I now use in headers:

{%- if shop.customer_accounts_enabled -%}
  <a 
    href="{%- if customer -%}
      {{ routes.account_url }}
    {%- else -%}
      {{ routes.storefront_login_url }}?return_url=/pages/welcome
    {%- endif -%}"
    class="header__icon header__icon--account"
    rel="nofollow">
  </a>
{%- endif -%}

That return_url does the heavy lifting.

• Logged out → login → redirected to /pages/welcome

• Logged in → straight to /account

• Next time they click the icon → /account again

Why this is especially useful for B2B

This has been really great for B2B stores.

Instead of sending wholesale customers to a blank orders page, I can send them to:

• “How to shop wholesale” instructions

• MOQ reminders

• Contact details for sales reps ect

Pros and cons

Pros

• Much better first impression

• Works for both D2C and B2B

• Easy to maintain

Cons

• Still limited by Shopify’s account system

• Not obvious unless you know it exists

Still very worth it.

1 app I like:

Checkout Blocks makes it much easier to customise the checkout experience. I’ve been using it recently to show different shipping options for B2B customers versus D2C customers, things like hiding consumer shipping methods for wholesale orders and different free shipping thresholds

3 links you can’t miss:

Swipe Js - For all your carousel needs.

GSAP - Great, super robust and easy to use animation library. Great for anything from subtle UI motion to full-on scroll-based animations.

Cursor - Your coding AI best friend. Especially useful for understanding existing code and making confident changes faster.

One learning as a freelancer:

I’ve learned that a lot of “Shopify limitations” are really just defaults, not dead ends. Small tweaks like this can dramatically improve UX without heavy custom work. Knowing where you can update the platform a little often matters more than building something entirely new.

-Georgie