Moving a Shopify store across
Bringing products, collections, customers, order history, content and URL redirects over — and what does not come with them.
If you already run a Shopify store, do this before you spend an evening typing products in by hand. It is at Settings → Import.
What comes across
- Products, with their images, options and variants
- Collections
- Customers
- Order history
- Discounts and gift cards
- Inventory levels and locations
- Pages, blog posts and menus
- Your files
- Your brand — logo, colours, type
- Your old URLs, as redirects, so links people already have keep working
What does not
- Your Shopify apps. Anything a third-party app was doing does not come with it. If an app was doing something important, work out what replaces it before you switch over.
- Your theme's code. Your storefront is rebuilt from your brand and content in eCrate's editor — it will not be a pixel copy of your Shopify theme. See Your storefront.
- Live payment details. Cards are held by the payment processor, never by the store. Your customers' saved cards do not move, and subscriptions billed through a Shopify app do not either.
Connecting
The quickest way is to sign in to Shopify and approve eCrate — no keys, no copying. If that is not available to you, you can create a custom app in your Shopify admin and paste its access token instead. The Import screen walks you through whichever you use.
Running it
The import runs in the background and shows its progress. It can take a while for a large catalog; you can leave the page.
When it finishes you get a report: what came across, what was skipped, and why. Read it. It is the honest account of the run, and anything that did not make it is named there rather than quietly missing.
Your imported order history
Old orders come across as history and are marked as imported. They are yours to look at, and they deliberately do not count as sales eCrate took — so your first-run setup checklist does not vanish on the day you import, and your analytics do not credit eCrate with revenue it had nothing to do with.
The order to switch over in
- Import.
- Read the report, and fix anything named in it.
- Connect Stripe and get charges enabled — this is the long pole, so start it early. See Getting paid.
- Set up shipping and taxes.
- Place a real order on your own store, then refund it.
- Move your domain across last. See Using your own domain.
Point the domain last and there is never a moment where customers can reach a store that cannot sell to them.