# Shopify Migration: What Gets Lost, and How to Prevent It > What a Shopify migration can lose: redirects, passwords, order history, reviews, subscriptions, custom fields, apps, integrations. #10 on preventing each one. Human version: https://nr10.com/shopify-migration-what-gets-lost/ Published: November 4, 2026 --- Reading Time: 8 min. A Shopify migration can lose eight kinds of things. The visible ones are URLs and the rankings attached to them, customer passwords, order history and reviews. The quieter ones are subscriptions and saved cards, custom product data, whatever your old extensions did, and the connections to other systems. Every one of them is preventable if it’s listed before the build starts. At #10, we plan every move from another platform to Shopify and Shopify Plus around that list, and we’ve run the result for years afterward, so we see what slipped through. Moving a store is a lot like moving house. The boxes you packed arrive. What goes missing is what was wired into the walls: the custom rule in checkout, the field the old theme displayed, the redirect someone added in 2019. Nobody packs those because nobody thinks of them as belongings. This migration guide is the loss inventory, for any ecommerce platform you’re leaving. For the platform-specific migration process, see [WooCommerce to Shopify: migrating without losing rankings](https://nr10.com/woocommerce-to-shopify-migration/) or [Magento to Shopify migration: the complete process](https://nr10.com/magento-to-shopify-migration/). ## What a Shopify migration moves without trouble Most of the store data moves cleanly, and it’s worth saying so before the list of risks. Products and their variants, collections, customer data, order history and content all have a place in a new Shopify store. Shopify’s own Store Migration app and bulk tools from the Shopify App Store handle the data transfer for most catalogs. Downtime isn’t one of the risks either. The new store is built and tested while the old ecommerce store keeps selling, and the switch is a domain change scheduled for a quiet hour. What a migration app can’t do is decide. It doesn’t know which custom field your theme depends on, which redirect matters or which extension was quietly enforcing a wholesale rule. Data migration is the easy half of a store migration. The losses come from the half that needs a person to notice. ## Check what your store would lose Tick what your current store has. The list shows what each item risks in a Shopify migration, how we prevent it and when it needs planning. The earlier the planning point, the more expensive it is to discover late.
| If your store has | What can be lost | Plan it | | --- | --- | --- | | Pages that rank or get linked to | Rankings and links, when URLs change without a redirect | Before the build | | Custom titles and meta descriptions | The SEO fields, when the export skips them | Before the data moves | | Custom product fields | Data with no matching field on Shopify | Before the build | | Customer accounts with passwords | The old sign-in; passwords can’t move | Before launch day | | Order history | Past orders, which don’t import like products | Before the data moves | | Product reviews | Reviews tied to old product IDs | Before the data moves | | Subscriptions or saved cards | Renewals, if cards don’t move with the processor | Before the data moves | | Wholesale or group pricing | Customer-specific prices | Before the build | | Extensions doing custom work | Whatever they did, silently | Before the build | | Connected systems | Order and inventory feeds | Before launch day | | Discounts, coupons, gift cards | Active promotions and balances | Before launch day | | Several languages or regions | Localized URLs and hreflang | Before the build |
## Redirects and rankings This is the loss that costs a store owner the most, and it shows up last. Shopify uses fixed URL prefixes (/products/, /collections/, /pages/, /blogs/), so nearly every URL on your old store changes. A page without a permanent 301 redirect to its new address drops out of search over the following weeks, and every link pointing at it breaks. The fix is a redirect map built from data: the sitemap, Search Console’s page and performance reports, backlink targets and a year or more of analytics landing pages. Old redirects get flattened so each URL reaches Shopify in one hop. Shopify imports redirects from a CSV, and a redirect [only fires when nothing live exists at the old path](https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/menus-and-links/url-redirect). Redirects are half of it. The pages also need to arrive intact: custom titles and meta descriptions, product and category copy, image alt text and structured data. On many platforms the SEO fields sit in a plugin or extension table, outside the standard product export. If the import misses them, Shopify falls back to the product name, and a title someone tuned for years is gone. After launch, crawl the old URL list, watch Search Console’s 404 and indexing reports, and compare traffic on key pages to the weeks before. Some movement is normal. A drop that doesn’t recover usually leads back to one specific gap. Our [technical SEO audit](https://nr10.com/what-we-do/technical-seo-audit/) covers the same ground for a store already on Shopify. ## Customer passwords and accounts Customer data moves: names, addresses, tags, marketing consent and order history. Passwords never do, from any platform to any other. They are stored as one-way hashes, so even the old platform can’t read them. What you lose is the customer’s familiar sign-in. How you handle it decides whether anyone notices. Shopify’s newer customer accounts [sign in with a one-time code sent by email](https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/customers/customer-accounts/new-customer-accounts), so there’s no password to reset. Either way, plan a short launch email. When we moved a premium California olive oil and wine brand from Magento to Shopify Plus, activation emails went to existing customers and club members at launch, so members weren’t surprised the first time they signed in. ## Order history Customers expect to see their past orders after a migration to Shopify. Your team expects reports and lifetime value to stay whole. Shopify’s admin imports products and customers from a spreadsheet, but orders don’t come across the same way. They move through the API or a bulk import tool. The risk is partial history: orders that imported without line items, refunds that didn’t come across, or orders attached to the wrong customer because emails didn’t match. We check record counts first, then sample by hand, including a customer with a long history and an order with a partial refund. ## Reviews Reviews belong to products, and the link between them is usually a product ID that changes in the move. Import the reviews without remapping and they land on the wrong product, or on nothing. On the olive oil and wine brand’s move, we built a lookup table between old and new product IDs from both exports, then imported the reviews into the same reviews app on Shopify. Check reviews on discontinued products too. If the product didn’t move, its reviews need a decision: attach them to the replacement product, or let them go. ## Subscriptions and saved cards This is the loss customers feel first. A subscription renews on a saved card, and saved cards don’t live in your store. They live with the payment processor. Moving subscribers means a processor-to-processor transfer of payment details, mapped back to each customer and timed with the new subscription app. Done badly, renewals fail on the first billing date, or a customer gets charged by both systems. On our Magento to Shopify Plus project, stored cards moved from [Authorize.net](http://Authorize.net) to Stripe with a mapping file linking each old card to its customer, so the club’s recurring orders kept running. Since then we’ve handled subscription product swaps and price changes for that brand on its subscription app, which is a smaller version of the same care. ## Custom product data and metafields Every platform lets you add fields to products, and they are easy to lose when you migrate product data: specs, ingredients, a wine’s vintage, an oil’s harvest date, a care guide. On the Shopify platform those fields become metafields, and they need to be defined before the import. A field with no destination is dropped without an error. Then the Shopify theme has to show them, or the Shopify data is there and the page still looks empty. If those details carried search value on the old site, the page now ranks with less to say. ## Extensions and the jobs they did Extensions are where behavior hides. A Magento module adjusting shipping for a region. A WooCommerce plugin adding a gift message. A rule that hides a payment option for wholesale buyers. None of it is data, so no export carries it. Before a migration to Shopify, we list every installed extension and plugin, then give each one an outcome: Shopify does it natively, an app does it, theme code does it, or it stops. The last one is fine when it’s a decision. It isn’t fine when nobody noticed. On Shopify Plus, many checkout rules are rebuilt with Shopify Functions or checkout extensions rather than edited directly, which takes planning. Shopify apps and the platform itself won’t do everything an old custom build did. For the olive oil and wine brand, our Shopify developers later built three small internal apps for gaps in the platform, such as letting staff set tax exemption on wholesale orders. That’s normal. Better to know the gaps before launch than to find them on the first wholesale order. ## Integrations with other systems ERP, warehouse or 3PL, tax, email, reviews, search, analytics. Each had a connection to the old store, and each needs a new one. The risks are feeds that stop, feeds that run twice during the switch, and data that maps differently (a tax code, a location, an order type). Rewire them one at a time and push a real test order through each before launch. A move to Shopify is the one time every connection gets retested at once. Email platforms have a subtle version of this: flows keep sending after the move, but templates may still reference the old platform’s coupon variables. We updated those in Klaviyo after the brand’s launch. Our [Shopify ERP and inventory integration](https://nr10.com/what-we-do/shopify-erp-integration/) work and [Fishbowl and Shopify guide](https://nr10.com/fishbowl-inventory-shopify-for-multi-channel-brands/) cover what happens to these connections after the move. ## Promotions, gift cards and pricing Discount rules don’t migrate from any platform to Shopify. Active promotions need rebuilding on Shopify, starting with the ones customers will hit in launch week. Outstanding gift card balances need carrying across and testing. Wholesale and customer-group pricing needs mapping to Shopify’s B2B price lists on Plus, or to an app. Analytics deserves a line here too. Install tracking on Shopify before launch, confirm purchase events fire, and note the launch date in your reports. Otherwise a tracking gap looks like a sales drop. ## Who owns each item in a Shopify migration Losses happen when an item has no owner. We assign each one before work starts: | Item | Who confirms it moved | How | | --- | --- | --- | | Redirects and SEO fields | Agency, then marketing | Crawl the old URL list; check Search Console | | Customers and orders | Agency, then customer service | Counts, then samples a person checks | | Reviews | Agency | Review counts per product match | | Subscriptions and cards | Agency, processor, subscription app | A test renewal before the first real one | | Integrations | Agency and the system’s owner | A real order through each feed | | Promotions and pricing | Marketing, wholesale team | Test each active code and price list | ## Questions brands ask about Shopify migration ### What doesn’t transfer when you migrate to Shopify? Customer passwords never transfer. Discount rules, extension behavior and integrations don’t transfer as data either; they get rebuilt. With the right mapping, nearly everything else can move: products, customers, order history, reviews, content, redirects. Saved cards move through the payment processors, not through the store. ### Will customers have to reset their passwords after a Shopify migration? Their records move, their passwords don’t. With Shopify’s newer customer accounts, customers sign in with a one-time code emailed to them, so there’s nothing to reset. Send a short launch email either way. ### Can subscriptions move to Shopify without customers re-entering cards? Usually, yes. Any migration service you hire should plan for it. The payment details move between payment processors and are matched to customers on the new subscription app. Timing matters, so renewals don’t fail or run twice around the switch. ### Do we lose SEO when moving to Shopify? Some movement is normal while search engines recrawl. Lasting losses come from missed redirects, dropped titles and descriptions, or content that didn’t come across. All of those are preventable. We can’t promise rankings. We can promise a redirect map with no missing pages. ### How do we know nothing was lost in the data migration? Counts first, then samples a person checks, then a crawl of the old URLs after launch. “The import finished without errors” isn’t the same as nothing lost. The [replatforming check](https://nr10.com/labs/replatform/) shows what we’d look at first for a store like yours. ## Start the inventory before the build The list above is cheap to make and expensive to skip. It is the start of a migration plan for any online store moving to Shopify. Before you migrate your store, start with the checklist, then add your own extensions and integrations by name. Run your store through the [replatforming check](https://nr10.com/labs/replatform/), see how our [Shopify migration services](https://nr10.com/what-we-do/replatforming-to-shopify/) run, or [talk to #10](https://nr10.com/contact/). We’ll go through what your store would lose before anything moves.