How do customer support ticket history and case notes (from the old helpdesk) get linked to migrated customer records in the new Gorgias/Zendesk-Shopify setup?
Helpdesk history links to migrated Shopify customers by email address, with phone as a fallback. Gorgias matches incoming contacts against the Shopify customer record on email, and can also match on the phone number from the default shipping address (per Gorgias docs, September 2026). A Zendesk import carries up to two years of data.
The join key is the email address, which is also the thing most likely to change
Helpdesks do not store Shopify customer IDs. They store email addresses and match on them. Gorgias documents email as the default matching method for connecting contacts to Shopify profiles, and documents phone matching against "the phone number from a customer's default Shopify shipping address" as an aid "for customers who contact you from a different email address than the one on their Shopify account" (per Gorgias docs, September 2026).
That makes the link fragile in exactly one place: any migration step that changes a customer's email address breaks it silently. Deduplication that merges two accounts onto one address, domain changes, normalization of plus-addressing, case changes handled inconsistently. Each of those quietly orphans a slice of ticket history, and nothing raises an error. An agent simply opens a ticket and sees no order history.
What a helpdesk-to-helpdesk import actually carries
If you are also switching helpdesks, the import has its own documented limits, and they are more restrictive than most teams assume. Gorgias's Zendesk import documentation states:
- You can import "tickets, macros, users, tags and ticket fields from Zendesk into Gorgias"
- "Up to two years of your most recent data can be imported," with the most recent 14 days prioritized
- "Deleted and blank tickets from Zendesk won't be imported"
- "Any ticket with more than 250 comments will be split into multiple, closed tickets"
- "Only open or closed ticket statuses will be retained. Pending and solved tickets from Zendesk will be imported as closed"
- "Users in Zendesk without any ticket activity won't be imported"
- "Zendesk tags will be imported as long as they appear on a ticket that's included in the import"
- "If you have more than 500 ticket fields in Zendesk, ticket fields will not be imported"
(per Gorgias docs, September 2026.)
Read the status line again. Every pending and solved ticket arrives closed. Any reporting or automation your team built on status distinctions does not survive the move, and neither does anything older than two years.
The two migrations are independent, and teams keep conflating them
| Scenario | What has to happen |
|---|---|
| New platform, same helpdesk | Nothing imports. The helpdesk reconnects to the new Shopify store and re-matches on email. Risk is entirely in email-address stability |
| Same platform, new helpdesk | Tickets import under the vendor's documented limits. Shopify link re-establishes on email |
| Both change at once | Sequence them. Do not run both cutovers in the same weekend |
That last row is the recommendation that saves the most pain and gets ignored the most often, usually because both contracts renew in the same quarter.
The sequence we insist on
- Freeze email-address changes before the helpdesk cutover. If dedupe is going to merge accounts, it happens first, completely, and then nothing moves.
- Export a legacy map of email to legacy customer ID, and archive it. When an orphaned ticket turns up in month four, this file is the only way home.
- Normalize email case and whitespace on both sides using the same rule. Trivially cheap, and it prevents a long tail of misses.
- Populate the phone number on the default shipping address where you have it, so the fallback match has something to work with.
- Sample-test the link before go-live. Pick fifty customers across new, long-standing and high-ticket-count, and confirm each one shows order history in the ticket view.
- Accept the two-year horizon and archive the rest. Export the full legacy ticket history to storage before you cancel the old tool, because the import will not take it and the tool will not be there later.
When NOT to import ticket history
- When your agents do not look back beyond ninety days. Most do not. An archive and a search tool serves the rare case at a fraction of the cost and risk.
- When the import would collapse statuses your workflows depend on. Better to keep the old tool read-only for a quarter than to import a corrupted status model into the system your team uses daily.
- When the two cutovers would land in the same week. Reschedule one.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: The email address is the join key for everything downstream of a customer migration, and it deserves to be treated as a primary key rather than a contact detail. Freeze it, normalize it, and map it before anything else moves.
- What we’ve seen: Orphaned ticket history is almost never caused by the helpdesk. It is caused by a customer-deduplication step earlier in the same programme that nobody thought of as a support-facing change.
- Where we disagree: Helpdesk migration is usually scoped by the CS team alone, as a tooling swap. It is a data-integrity dependency on the commerce migration, and it belongs on the same critical path with the same owner, because the failure is invisible until an agent hits it in front of a customer.
- What this page adds: that the helpdesk-to-Shopify link is rebuilt by email matching rather than migrated, and that a Zendesk-to-Gorgias import caps at two years, collapses pending and solved into closed, and drops ticket fields entirely above 500 of them.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records