August 14, 2026. Shopify began surfacing personalized checkout field recommendations to eligible stores on August 13, inside Settings and then Checkout in the admin. After a decade of advice to strip checkout down to as few fields as possible, Shopify's recommendation runs the other way, and the reason it gives is not conversion. It is that more complete customer details let you reconnect with past shoppers and personalize marketing.
What Shopify is recommending
- Three example changes. Per the August 13 changelog entry, recommendations may include setting the customer contact method to email only, requiring first and last name, and optionally collecting a shipping address phone number.
- Nothing changes on its own. Existing store settings stay exactly as they are unless you review and apply the recommendations.
- New stores already have them. Shopify says newly created stores use these settings by default, which makes this a backfill aimed at older shops rather than a new capability.
Why email only is the recommendation
The mechanism sits in Shopify's own checkout form options documentation, and it explains the recommendation better than the changelog does. The customer contact method has two settings, Phone number or email, or Email. When Phone number or email is selected, the customer chooses, and requiring both at once is not supported on standard plans.
So on the Phone number or email setting, some share of your orders arrive with a phone number and no email address. Those buyers are customers you cannot email, cannot add to a flow, and cannot include in a lookalike audience. Email only closes that gap, and the shipping address phone number field, which is a separate setting entirely, is the documented way to still collect a phone. That is the actual shape of the recommendation: take the contact identifier you can market to, and get the phone from the address form instead of the contact step.
The phone field that is not always required
One trap is worth knowing before you set that phone field to Required and assume it is done. Shopify's troubleshooting section states that the shipping address phone number requirement is enforced only when checkout includes a shipping address step, and checkout includes that step only when at least one item in the cart requires shipping. Sell a digital product, a gift card, a course or a service booking and the shipping step never appears, so the required phone number is silently not required. Requiring a phone on orders with no shipping address is not supported at all.
There is also a real cost to collecting more, and it is documented in the same place. Setting Company name to Required removes accelerated checkout options such as Apple Pay, and so does requiring customers to sign in before checkout. A field added for marketing convenience can quietly remove the fastest payment path on mobile.
What it means for operators
Open the recommendations, because they are free to read and nothing applies without your click. Then treat them as two separate decisions rather than one. Switching the contact method to email only is usually correct for a store whose repeat business runs on email, and it is worth checking how many of your last thousand orders currently carry no email address before you decide, since that number is the entire value of the change. Requiring first and last name is close to free. The phone field is the one to think about, because on a mixed catalogue it will apply to some orders and not others.
Whatever you apply, place an annotation on the day you apply it. Checkout field changes move conversion rate and email capture rate in opposite directions, and in six weeks nobody remembers which Tuesday the setting changed. If you want the trade quantified against your own order data rather than guessed at, that is the kind of work our ecommerce team does, and you can hire a Shopify expert to make the change and measure it properly.
Frequently Asked Questions
From August 13, 2026 eligible stores see personalized recommendations in Settings and then Checkout in the Shopify admin. They may include setting the customer contact method to email only, requiring first and last name, and optionally collecting a shipping address phone number.
No. Shopify states that existing store settings will not change unless you review and apply the recommendations yourself. Newly created stores already use the recommended settings by default, which is why this appears mainly as a prompt for older stores.
Because requiring both an email address and a phone number at once is not supported on standard plans. On the Phone number or email setting the customer chooses, so some orders arrive with a phone and no email, and those buyers cannot be reached by email marketing afterwards.
No. Shopify's documentation says the requirement applies only when checkout includes a shipping address step, and that step appears only when at least one cart item requires shipping. On digital products, gift cards or services the phone requirement is not applied.