What you lose migrating off Shopify

Your products, customers and orders come out as CSV files, and that is genuinely most of what matters. What stays behind is your theme, your app configuration, your product images (not in the product export), and every web address you have. And two things surprise people after launch rather than before: reviews, and anything living inside an app rather than in the platform.

Our interest, stated up front: StoreLenz makes competitor-research tools that only work on Shopify stores, so this article helps you do something that costs us a customer. Declaring an interest is worthless if we only apply it when convenient.

What comes with youLink to this section

Products. Export to CSV. Shopify's own documentation offers both a spreadsheet-friendly and a plain CSV format.

Customers. Names, emails, addresses, phone numbers.

Orders. Your historical order data.

Your domain. Yours, and it keeps renewing — Shopify's billing documentation notes that "Your domain renewals aren't canceled when canceling your store", so you keep it whether or not you meant to.

Your brand, your mailing list and your customer relationships. The most valuable things you have, and none of them belong to a platform. The ownership question in full.

What stays behindLink to this section

Product images. Shopify's export documentation is explicit: "When you export your products, the images associated with each product aren't included in the CSV file." So your photography — often the most expensive asset in the shop — has to be downloaded separately. Plan this rather than discovering it.

SEO fields, mostly. The same page notes that "The SEO Title and SEO Description fields in exported CSV files are only populated when you've manually customized them." So anything auto-generated does not come out, and will need regenerating.

Customer passwords. Not exportable anywhere. Every customer with an account re-authenticates on the new platform. Tell them before they find out at checkout.

Your theme. Any customisation is specific to the platform. The new shop is designed again.

App configuration. This is the one people underestimate. An app is not just a feature — it holds settings, content and sometimes data. Your reviews, your loyalty balances, your subscription schedules, your bundle rules all live inside apps rather than in the platform's own export.

Every web address. Products are under /products/ and groups under /collections/; whatever you move to will structure them differently. That is the expensive part.

The two that only appear after launchLink to this section

1. Reviews. Worth dwelling on because it is symmetrical and instructive. Shopify's guide for the opposite journey states: "You can't export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce to Shopify." The same difficulty applies leaving — not because of either platform, but because reviews usually live inside a reviews app, and getting them out is a question for that app's makers.

Ask your reviews app whether it can export, and in what format, before you commit to moving. If the answer is no, you are choosing between losing your social proof and staying — and for a shop in a trust-driven category that may decide the whole question.

2. Loyalty balances and subscriptions. Same reason, higher stakes. A subscription is a live payment authorisation on a schedule; a loyalty balance is a promise you have made to a customer. Neither is in a product CSV. Assume they do not move and verify otherwise before you plan anything.

Before you move anythingLink to this section

1. Export everything and keep it. Products, customers, orders — and images separately. Before you touch the new platform.

2. Inventory your apps. List each one, what it does, and what data it holds. For each, ask the maker: can I export this, and in what format? The answers decide how feasible this is.

3. Build the redirect map. Old address to new, every page. This is the whole job.

4. Decide about reviews. Before launch, because product pages look bare without them and that affects conversion immediately.

5. Do not close the old shop immediately. Shopify's documentation says a deactivated store's information is kept for a stated period and that resuming means choosing a new plan at current pricing, so there is no going back to old terms. The detail is here. Keep it alive, paused if possible, until the new one is genuinely working.

What to tell customers, and whenLink to this section

The part that gets left to launch day and should not be.

Before you switch: one email saying the shop is moving, roughly when, and that they may need to set a new password next time they sign in. Short, no apology, no detail about platforms — customers do not care which software you use.

On the day: make sure the password-reset path is obvious and works. Test it yourself with a real account. This is where most launch-day support messages come from, and it is entirely preventable.

For the first fortnight: expect messages from people who bookmarked an old page or kept an old link. Those should be landing on redirects rather than errors, and if they are not, you have found a gap in the map.

What not to do: announce it as an upgrade. If anything goes wrong you have promised an improvement and delivered a disruption. Describing it as a move, plainly, costs you nothing and sets no expectation you then have to meet.

The asymmetry worth understandingLink to this section

Joining a platform is easy and leaving is not. That is true of all of them, and it is not a conspiracy — it is what happens when software holds your data in its own shape.

The practical consequence: the things that make you portable are things you do continuously, not at the end.

• Export regularly, images included.
• Keep your mailing list somewhere you control.
• Hold your own domain.
• Prefer, where you have a choice, tools that can export.

Do those and any future move is a project rather than a crisis — on any platform.

What this does not tell youLink to this section

Whether to leave. When not to migrate and how to decide come first.

Whether a specific app can export. Ask them; the answers vary enormously.

What third-party migration tools can do. Some do considerably more than native exports. We have tested none.

How much traffic a move costs. Unknowable in advance, and dependent almost entirely on the redirects.

Related readingLink to this section

• Who actually owns your store on each platform
• The SEO cost of changing platforms, and how to limit it
• What happens to your store if you stop paying for Shopify

SourcesLink to this section

• Shopify Help Center, Exporting products — products export to CSV in two formats; "When you export your products, the images associated with each product aren't included in the CSV file"; "The SEO Title and SEO Description fields in exported CSV files are only populated when you've manually customized them" — https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/export-products — read 2026-10-02
• Shopify Help Center, Billing considerations before pausing or deactivating your store — "Your domain renewals aren't canceled when canceling your store"; a deactivated store's information is retained for a stated period and resuming requires selecting a new plan — https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/manage-billing/billing-considerations-pause-deactivate-store — read 2026-10-02
• Shopify Help Center, Migrating from WooCommerce — "You can't export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce to Shopify", quoted here as evidence that reviews are difficult to move in either direction because they live in apps — https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/migrating-to-shopify/migrating-from-woocommerce — read 2026-10-02
• We have not performed this migration. This describes what the documentation says comes out and what the structures imply, and no figure is given for cost or duration