How to issue store credit to many customers on Shopify

Shopify's store credit is real money customers spend at checkout, but the admin adds it one customer at a time, and the customer CSV import has no store credit column. Here are the three ways to credit a list of customers, and what to check first.

Before you start

• Store credit needs new customer accounts (Settings, then Customer accounts). Customers see their balance in their account and spend it at checkout.
• Credit is held per currency: a customer can have a USD balance and a EUR balance.
• Credit can expire on a date you set. Unspent credit is money you owe until then, so decide on an expiry before you issue.
• For B2B, store credit sits on the company location, and every buyer at that location can use it.

1. One customer at a time, in the admin

Fine for a handful of customers. Go to Customers, open the customer, and in the Store credit section click Edit. Add the amount and, if you want, select Set expiry date. Repeat for each customer.

2. From a CSV, with an app

For tens to thousands of customers, put them in a spreadsheet and let an app issue the credit row by row. The usual columns are email, amount, currency, and optionally expires_at and note. Check the file first with the free store credit CSV checker: it finds bad emails, amounts and dates, and customers who appear twice.

With CreditKit (our app), the steps are:

1. Upload the CSV in Bulk issue. Columns named like the ones above are matched automatically.
2. Read the preview: every row is matched to a customer, and rows that can't be (an unknown email, a bad amount) are listed with the reason. Nothing has been issued yet.
3. Choose whether Shopify should email each customer that their credit is ready. Credit customers don't know about rarely gets spent.
4. Issue. If something was wrong, undo the whole batch in one click; each credit is debited back and logged.

For a few customers there's no file at all: paste their emails on the Dashboard, set an amount and an expiry, and you get the same preview. General import apps such as Matrixify can also set store credit balances from a spreadsheet.

3. With the Admin API

If you have a developer, store credit is issued with the storeCreditAccountCredit mutation, once per customer: there is no bulk operation for it. What makes a script safe to rerun:

• Look up each customer by email first and treat no match, or more than one, as an error instead of guessing.
• Keep your own record of each row and the transaction id Shopify returns, so a retry after a timeout can't credit someone twice.
• Pace the calls to the API's cost limits rather than a fixed delay.
• From API version 2026-01, notify: true asks Shopify to email the customer about the credit.

Common jobs

Moving balances from another app

Export each customer's balance from the old app, check the file, and issue it as native store credit. Keep the old app's expiry dates if it had them, and switch it off once the balances match.

Goodwill credit after a delay or an outage

Export the affected orders' customer emails, give everyone the same amount with a 30 to 90 day expiry, and let Shopify email them. A note such as "Shipping delay, March" makes the credit easy to explain later.

A monthly perk for staff or members

Tag the customers, make a segment from the tag, and credit the segment each month with a short expiry so unused perks don't pile up. CreditKit runs this as a monthly campaign on the Pro plan.

Refunds as store credit

Shopify can refund an order to store credit instead of the card. If you want customers to choose credit, a small bonus on top helps; CreditKit can add it automatically and only ever adds the bonus.

Shopify features described as of October 2026. CreditKit is made by Peerware Ltd and isn't affiliated with Shopify.