What is a Duplicate Production Linked Account?
Any time the same instance of a 3rd party platform is connected to two or more Merge linked accounts, they are considered duplicates.
Why are these bad?
There are two primary impacts of connecting duplicate accounts:
Higher costs are incurred as Merge bills on a per-linked account basis.
One or both of the accounts could encounter issues with 3rd party rate limits.
How does Merge know if an account is a duplicate?
Duplicates are detected based on the credentials used to create them. For example, if the same API key used on two separate Merge linked account, we will flag them as duplicates of each other.
Preventing Duplicate Production Linked Accounts
Merge offers options that enable you to decide how you would like Merge Link to behave when we detect an end user attempting to integrate a third-party account that has already been integrated.
To view and configure your desired behavior, navigate to Advanced > Link > Authentication in your Dashboard, where you will find the below screen.
From this screen, there are three options you can choose from:
"Create a new linked account with the previously used credentials"
This is the default option.
The duplicate account will be created, and Merge will flag it as a duplicate on the dashboard.
"Show a success message in Link to the end user but do not create a new Linked Account with the previously used credentials"
This option is used when you want to create the illusion of a successful integration to your end user, and handle the association of your end user and the pre-existing linked account within your product.
The duplicate account will not be created.
Merge Link will return a
public_tokenthat can be used to retrieve the account token of the detected duplicate linked account when passed to the GET /account-token endpoint.
Merge Link success screen that will be surfaced to your end user
"Show an error message in Link to the end user and do not create a new Linked Account with the previously used credentials"
This option is used to proactively prevent duplicate production linked accounts from being created.
Merge Link will show an error message telling the end user that the account they are trying to connect already has an existing connection. The duplicate account will not be created.
Merge Link error screen that will be surfaced to your end user
Managing Production Linked Accounts
When Merge detects duplicate Linked Accounts, we will flag those accounts in the Dashboard so that you can take action on them. The icon below will appear next to the account.
On the Linked Account detail page, you will see the below banner:
Clicking Review Duplicates will take you to a filtered view of the Linked Accounts page, where you will see Linked Accounts that are duplicates of each other.
From this view, you can either:
Delete any duplicate Linked Accounts
Click “Ignore” in the banner to dismiss warnings