This blog was originally published on Descope.

Shopify Plus empowers fast-growing brands with the digital infrastructure to scale quickly, offering powerful tools for store management, seamless checkout, and extensive customization. Its flexibility and extensibility make it a popular choice for all sizes of organization, including notable brands like Nestlé, Hasbro, and The Economist.

However, while Shopify excels at creating eye-catching storefronts and streamlining ecommerce ops, its limited authentication options force merchants into a difficult choice: accept higher cart abandonment from friction-heavy logins, or risk account takeovers from weaker security measures. By default, Shopify relies on simple email-password logins with limited support for modern features like passwordless login, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and enterprise SSO.

As of February 2026, Shopify Legacy Customer Accounts have been deprecated, further limiting built-in auth options. Now, companies running on Shopify may need to make adjustments to maintain (or add) secure, user-friendly auth functionality.

This blog covers everything you need to know about Shopify Auth in 2026: