Moving Your Online Store to Shopify? Here’s What Won’t Come With You

If you’re moving your online store to a new platform, someone has probably told you that everything will come across. Most of it will. Your products, customers, and past orders can all be moved, and on a good migration they’ll arrive intact.

But a handful of things never transfer, or only transfer with extra work. Owners usually discover them after launch, when a regular customer can’t log in, a gift card is rejected at checkout, or traffic from Google quietly drops by a third.

Here’s a plain-English checklist of what moves, what doesn’t, and what needs special handling, based on the store migrations my team has run from Squarespace, Wix, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and older point-of-sale systems.

What Moves Across Cleanly

These are the parts you can expect to arrive in good shape:

• Products: titles, descriptions, prices, variants (sizes, colors), SKUs, images, and stock levels.
• Customers: names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and marketing consent.
• Order history: past orders, linked to the right customers and products, so your sales reports and customer records stay complete.
• Content: blog posts and standard pages such as About, Shipping and Returns.

The order matters. Products go in first, then customers, then orders, so each old order can be matched to a customer and to the items in it. Skip that sequence, and you end up with orders that point at nothing.

What Never Transfers

Customer passwords. Every platform scrambles passwords in its own way, and no platform can unscramble another’s. That’s a good thing for security, but it means customers can’t sign in with their old password on day one.

The good news is that many platforms now avoid the problem. On Shopify, for example, current customer accounts don’t use passwords at all: Customers enter their email address and receive a one-time code. If your new platform still uses passwords, plan a short, friendly email explaining that customers will need to set a new one.

Your design. Themes, page layouts, and custom sections are built for one platform and don’t carry over. Your new store needs a new theme, even if you rebuild it to look the same. Budget for this, and use it as a chance to fix anything customers complained about.

Apps and integrations. Your email marketing, reviews, loyalty program, and shipping tools are connected to the old platform. Each needs to be reconnected or replaced. Make a list of every app you pay for before you start, and check that each has a version for your new platform.

What Needs Special Handling

Gift cards and store credit. This is the one owners most often forget, and it’s the one customers notice most. Outstanding gift card and store credit balances are money you owe. They usually need a dedicated migration app or a manual reissue, and depending on the tools involved, customers may receive new codes. Export a list of every open balance before you switch, and don’t close the old system until every balance has a home.

Product reviews. Reviews usually live inside a reviews app, not your store itself. Most review apps can export and import, but check that star ratings, dates, and photos come across, and that each review lands on the right product.

Subscriptions. If customers pay you on a schedule, their saved payment details are held by your payment provider, not your store. Moving them is possible but involves the payment provider directly, so start that conversation early.

Protecting Your Google Rankings

This is where most of the lasting damage happens, and it’s the easiest part to prevent.

Every page Google has indexed has an address. A product might live at yourstore.com/shop/lavender-oil today and at yourstore.com/products/lavender-oil on your new platform. Unless you tell Google the page has moved, anyone who searches and clicks the old result lands on an error page, and Google gradually drops the page from its results.

The fix is a redirect: a permanent forwarding instruction from each old address to its new one. Google’s own guidance on moving a site with URL changes recommends exactly this. In practice:

1. Export every old URL before you switch. Your current sitemap is a good start. Add any pages that get traffic or links from other sites.
2. Map each old URL to its closest new page. A discontinued product should point to its category, not your home page.
3. Import the redirects in bulk. Most platforms accept a spreadsheet. Shopify, for example, lets you import URL redirects from a CSV file.
4. Test a sample after launch. Click 20 or 30 old addresses from Google and make sure each lands on a real page.

Also keep your page titles and descriptions for your best-performing pages. If a page ranks well today, its wording is part of the reason.

How To Switch Without Closing For a Day

You don’t need a “closed for maintenance” sign. A well-run migration keeps your current store trading until the moment the new one takes over:

1. Build the new store in the background. It has its own temporary address while you set it up, so customers never see it half-finished.
2. Do a trial import, then check it. Compare product counts, customer counts and a handful of orders against the old store.
3. Test like a customer. Place real orders, use a discount code, and check shipping rates and tax for a few addresses.
4. Run a final top-up import. Right before launch, bring across any orders and customers added since the trial import.
5. Switch your domain. Point your domain at the new store, ideally at your quietest time of the week. The change usually takes effect within hours.
6. Watch the first week closely. Check orders, emails, and your Google Search Console account for spikes in errors.

A Short Pre-Launch Checklist

Before you point your domain at the new store, make sure you can answer yes to each of these:

• Do product, customer, and order counts match the old store?
• Is every open gift card and store credit balance accounted for?
• Is there a redirect for every old page that gets traffic?
• Do customers know how they’ll sign in to the new store?
• Is every app you rely on connected, or replaced?
• Have you placed at least one real test order from start to finish?

Switching platforms is one of the bigger decisions a growing business makes, and it’s usually the right one when your current system is holding you back. The move itself doesn’t have to be the risky part. Most of the problems owners hit are known in advance, which means they can be planned for.

Planning a move of your own? Tripster Developers’ Shopify migration service covers everything on this checklist, from redirects to gift card balances, while your current store keeps trading.

Pratham Jani is the founder of Tripster Developers, a Shopify agency founded in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2016, with offices in Sydney and Atlanta, and of Miko, its range of Shopify apps for B2B wholesale, loyalty and customer insights. His team builds and migrates online stores for businesses from small independent retailers to enterprise brands.