Moving to Shopify? Check these seven things first

Moving an online store is a bit like moving house. The new place is better, and the move itself is where things get lost. Almost every problem we see after a migration could have been caught with a list made two weeks earlier.

This is that list. It applies whether you are coming from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce or something built just for you.

1. Take a full export before anyone touches anything

Products, customers, orders, discount codes, blog posts, pages. Export all of it and keep the files somewhere safe that is not the old store.

It sounds obvious. It is also the step people skip when the old platform’s subscription is about to renew and everyone is in a hurry. Do it first.

2. Write down every URL that gets traffic

This is the one that costs people their rankings. Your product and category pages have addresses Google already knows. Shopify will give them new ones, because its URL structure is fixed: products live under /products/, collections under /collections/.

So before the move, pull a list of your pages from Google Search Console (Performance → Pages) and from your sitemap. After the move, every old address needs a 301 redirect to its new one. Shopify lets you upload these in bulk as a CSV, so the work is in building the list, not in entering it.

Miss this step and visitors from Google land on a “page not found” screen. Rankings follow them out the door within weeks.

3. Decide what happens to customer accounts

Passwords cannot be moved between platforms. They are stored encrypted, and that is how it should be. Your customers will need to activate their accounts on the new store.

Shopify can send an account invite email to do this. Plan when it goes out and what it says. A short, friendly note explaining the store has a new home works better than a bare system email arriving out of nowhere.

4. List every app and plugin you depend on

Go through the old store and write down everything that does a job: reviews, shipping rates, invoices, loyalty points, WhatsApp notifications, the lot.

Then sort the list into three piles.

• Built into Shopify already. Discounts, abandoned cart emails and basic reports usually land here.
• Needs a Shopify app. Check the monthly price now, not after launch.
• Not needed any more. There are always a few.

The surprise is usually in the second pile. Three or four paid apps add up, and it is better to know the monthly bill before you commit.

5. Check your product data fits

Shopify allows three options per product (say size, colour and material). It has a limit on variants per product too, and that limit has changed over time, so check Shopify’s current documentation rather than trusting an old blog post.

If you sell something with many combinations, find out early whether it fits. Sometimes the answer is to split one product into two. Sometimes it needs an app. Either way you want to know before the import, not during it.

6. Test payments and shipping with real orders

Place a real order with a real card and refund it. Then do it again with UPI, with cash on delivery if you offer it, and with a discount code. Check that the shipping rate is right for a near pincode and a far one, and that the order confirmation email looks the way you want.

Checkout is the one place where “it looked fine” is not good enough.

7. Pick a quiet day and keep the old store for a while

Do not switch over during a sale or the week before a festival. Pick your slowest day. Keep the old store running in the background, closed to the public, for at least a month, so that anything missed can still be looked up.

For the first two weeks after launch, check Search Console every few days for “not found” errors and add redirects for whatever turns up.

The short version

Back up everything. Map the old URLs to the new ones. Warn your customers. Cost out the apps. Test the checkout with real money. Launch on a quiet day.

None of it is difficult. It just has to be done in order, and before the move rather than after. If you would rather hand the list to someone, that is what our Shopify migration service is for.