In short: Questions about adding a sign-up form to new customer accounts fall into four groups: how the form appears, themes and login methods, handling the information you collect, and troubleshooting. This article answers 14 questions and tells you where to find each setting.
Key points
- You can switch the display timing (Before Login / After Login) and New Customer Detection (whether the customer has a name / customer tag) in General Settings
- As of September 8, 2026, all themes are supported, and the sign-up form appears once you enable the app block
- To use the form alongside Shop login, choose After Login and customer tag detection
- You can fix errors at sign-up with the Unique values only (「一意の値のみ」) setting and the Customer account access setting of your customer metafields
How the form appears
We answer four questions: when the sign-up form appears, showing it to existing customers, the popup text, and character limits on fields. You set all of these in the app's admin.
Q1. Can you change when the sign-up form appears?
Yes. In Howdy's General Settings, choose Before Login or After Login. With Before Login, customers go to the sign-up form after entering their email address. With After Login, they go to the sign-up form after logging in.
Source: Howdy Help: "When the sign-up form appears" (Japanese)
Q2. Can you show the form to existing customers too?
Yes. Set New Customer Detection to customer tag, and set it to show the form to customers without the tag member and to add member after they submit it. Existing customers who haven't filled in the form yet will see it at their next login. Once they finish, the tag is added and the form doesn't appear again.
Q3. Can you add guidance text to the popup?
Yes. When the display timing is Before Login, a popup appears at sign-up. In the app's admin, you can add text to three fields, Popup title, Popup description, and Popup help text, and each one appears in a set place in the popup.
Source: Howdy Help: "How to add text to the sign-up popup" (Japanese)
Q4. Can you set character limits on fields?
Yes. This applies to the Shopify fields Name, Phone number, Postal code, Prefecture, City, Street address and building name, and Room number, etc., and to custom fields with the input type Text (single line) or Text area (multiple lines). Check Limit the number of characters and enter the maximum number of characters.
Source: Howdy Help: "How to set character limits on sign-up form fields" (Japanese)
Themes and login methods
We answer five questions: adding the form to your theme, using it alongside Shop login, sign-up before checkout, the login link on the checkout page, and your own CSS and JavaScript.
Q5. Does it work with any theme?
Yes. As of September 8, 2026, all themes are supported. In the theme editor, enable the Howdy app block and save. When the display timing is Before Login, clicking the login button opens the sign-up popup. If the popup doesn't open after you enable the app block, add the class specified by Howdy to the <a> tags of the login buttons in your header (for desktop and for mobile). Duplicate your theme before editing the code so you can restore it.
Sources: Howdy Help: "② [Initial Setup] Embed the form in your theme" / "How to install the Howdy sign-up app on unsupported themes" (Japanese)
Q6. Can you use it alongside Shop login?
Yes. Set the display timing to After Login, set New Customer Detection to the customer tag method, and set a tag to be added when customers sign up through the form. Among customers who log in with Shop, those who haven't signed up see the sign-up form, and those who have signed up continue without seeing it.
Source: Howdy Help: "How to use it alongside Shop account login" (Japanese)
Q7. Can you require customers to sign up before checkout?
Yes. Add a class, with a condition for customers who aren't logged in, to buttons such as the Check out button on the cart page (and the cart drawer button in the Horizon theme) and the Buy it now button on product pages. Customers who aren't logged in see the sign-up form before checkout. This requires editing your theme code.
Source: Howdy Help: "How to always collect member details before purchase" (Japanese)
Q8. Can the login link on the checkout page open the sign-up form?
The login button on the checkout page isn't supported at the moment. If you require sign-up, you can hide the login link on the checkout page. This also removes the login link in your store's header, so create your own login link in your store with the howdy-register-original-trigger-btn class.
Source: Howdy Help: "Can I link to the form from the login link on the checkout page?" (Japanese)
Q9. Can you apply your own CSS and JavaScript?
Yes. This works when the sign-up form is set to Before Login, and not when it's set to After Login. Create files in your theme code and load them in theme.liquid only on Howdy's app pages.
Source: Howdy Help: "How to apply your own CSS and JavaScript" (Japanese)
Handling the information you collect
We answer three questions: address autofill, where customers go after sign-up, and company details.
Q10. Can addresses be filled in automatically from the postal code?
Yes. Turn on Address autofill in General Settings, and Japanese addresses are filled in automatically from the Japanese postal code.
Source: Howdy Help: "How to set up address autofill" (Japanese)
Q11. Can you send customers to a specific page after sign-up?
Yes. In General Settings, you can set Redirect after login and Redirect after sign-up. To use a different destination for each button, choose Specify in code in General Settings and set the destination in the button's code.
Source: Howdy Help: "How to set the redirect after form submission in code" (Japanese)
Q12. Can you collect company details (B2B) too?
You can add company names and department names to the sign-up form as custom fields by creating customer metafields. Howdy also has a company metafield block that shows company metafields on the profile page and lets customers edit them. If you create multiple sign-up forms, you can use the form ID to choose which form opens.
Sources: Howdy Help: "① [Preparation] How to set up customer metafields" / "How to set company metafields on the profile page" (Japanese) / "Adding multiple forms" (Japanese)
Troubleshooting
We explain how to fix two errors that appear at sign-up.
Q13. Customers can't sign up and see "Value is already assigned to another metafield".
Unique values only (「一意の値のみ」) is checked in the customer metafield definition. Go to Settings > Metafields and metaobjects > Customers, open the definition, uncheck it, and save. This happens with fields where several customers share the same value, such as birth month or prefecture. If the first few customers could sign up but later customers couldn't, this setting is also the cause.
Q14. The app's admin shows "Customer Account access is not enabled for this metafield".
Customer account access in the customer metafield definition is set to Read only (「読み取り専用」). On the definition's edit page, change it to Allow read and write (「読み取りと書き込みの許可」) and save.
Sources: Howdy Help: "What to do when customers can't sign up / the 'Value is already assigned to another metafield' error appears" (Japanese) / Enable Metafield's "Read and Write" access
Related articles
- What are Shopify's new customer accounts? Differences from legacy accounts and what to do in 2026
- How to add a sign-up form to new customer accounts (Howdy)
- 5 things to check before migrating from legacy customer accounts
- How to migrate to Howdy from another sign-up form app
- 7 ways to use birthdays, addresses, and consent collected at sign-up (Shopify new customer accounts)
Questions about new customer accounts? Ask us anytime.
Ask us about questions not covered here, migrating from another sign-up form app, or running post-sign-up tasks with Shopify Flow. With our free setup service, our dedicated team creates your customer metafields, sets up your sign-up form fields, and places the blocks on your profile page.
