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?

How does helpdesk history find a migrated Shopify customer?

Helpdesk history finds a migrated Shopify customer by matching an email address, not by carrying a customer ID across. Gorgias says tickets in a customer timeline "are linked by the contact email address provided by your customer" (Gorgias Help Center, October 2026). Zendesk's Shopify integration matches "the ticket requester's email address or phone number" to the Shopify account, and only on saved tickets (Zendesk Help, October 2026).

Gorgias's default-address phone match is narrower. It reads the phone on a customer's default Shopify shipping address and stays off until an admin turns it on. "Existing profiles will not retroactively match" (Gorgias Help Center, October 2026).

Customer-level case notes ride the same link: Gorgias keeps its customer note in sync with the Shopify customer note (Gorgias Help Center, October 2026). The sync skips customers with profiles in more than one Shopify store.

So the link is fragile in one place: any step in migrating customer records and their metadata that changes an email address breaks it silently. Deduplication that merges two accounts onto one address, domain changes, plus-address normalization and inconsistent case each orphan a slice of ticket history. Nothing raises an error. An agent opens a ticket and sees no order history.

What does a Zendesk-to-Gorgias import carry?

A Zendesk-to-Gorgias import carries tickets, macros, users, tags and ticket fields, on every Gorgias Helpdesk plan (Gorgias Help Center, October 2026). Its limits are tighter than most teams assume:

• "Up to two years of your most recent data can be imported," with the latest 14 days first.
• Deleted and blank tickets stay behind, and a ticket with more than 250 comments splits into several closed tickets.
• "Pending and solved tickets from Zendesk will be imported as closed, and all other statuses will be imported as open."
• Users with no ticket activity, and tags on no imported ticket, stay behind.
• Above 500 ticket fields, no ticket fields import at all.

Gorgias's migration guide adds that it doesn't import "attachments on tickets nor rating information" (Gorgias Help Center, October 2026). It moves about 720 tickets an hour. Gorgias tags imported pending tickets so a view can find them, but reports built on Zendesk's other statuses don't survive.

How do tickets get into Zendesk, or out of it?

Tickets get into Zendesk through its Ticket Import application programming interface (API), because Zendesk says you "can't migrate everything into Zendesk through the user interface" (Zendesk Help, October 2026). An import can set each ticket's original created, updated and solved timestamps. Triggers don't run on it unless it's updated later, and Zendesk says its metrics and service level agreements (SLAs) "are not supported for imported tickets" (Zendesk Developer Docs, October 2026). Closed tickets can go straight to the archive.

Getting history out of Zendesk has its own gate. Zendesk's export tools need a Suite Growth or Support Professional plan or higher, and "data exports are not enabled by default in Zendesk accounts" (Zendesk Help, October 2026). The account owner asks Zendesk Customer Support to turn them on, and Team plans export only through the API. So ask before the renewal date, not after it.

Do the store migration and the helpdesk migration have to happen together?

The store migration and the helpdesk migration don't have to happen together, and in our experience running them in the same weekend is the most common mistake. They change different systems, so each has its own risk.

That last row is the advice that saves the most pain and, in our experience, the one teams skip most, usually because both contracts renew in the same quarter. If you're choosing the destination too, the Gorgias vs. Zendesk decision comes first.

In what order should you protect the ticket-to-customer link?

Protect the ticket-to-customer link in six steps, deduplication first, because every later step depends on email addresses that no longer change.

1. Freeze email-address changes before the helpdesk cutover. Shopify's customer import keeps only the last profile that shares an email address or phone number (Shopify Help Center, October 2026), so merge accounts first. Gorgias says to merge in Shopify first, then in Gorgias (Gorgias Help Center).
2. Export a 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.
3. Normalize email case and whitespace on both sides with the same rule.
4. Put each phone number on the Shopify customer record. By default Gorgias reads a Shopify phone from the customer overview, not the address (Gorgias Help Center). Its opt-in address match merges every profile sharing a phone, so skip it if your own number sits on addresses (Gorgias Help Center).
5. Sample-test fifty customers across new, long-standing and high-ticket-count accounts, and confirm each shows order history in the ticket view.
6. Archive what the import won't carry before you cancel the old tool, because the tool won't be there later.

When should you not import ticket history?

Don't import ticket history when agents never look that far back, or when the import would break statuses your workflows need. Don't run it in the same week as the store cutover either, because two cutovers hide each other's failures.