Migrating to Shopify: a 12-point checklist for small shops

Moving a shop to Shopify is not hard, but it is fiddly, and the parts that go wrong are never the parts people worry about. Nobody loses sleep over the theme. They lose sleep three days after launch when a customer turns up with a gift card from the old system and nobody can redeem it.

This is the checklist we work through for every migration, whether the shop is coming from Square Online, Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce, or one of the florist-network sites like FTD or Teleflora. It is ordered roughly the way the work actually happens.

1. Inventory what you have

Before exporting anything, write down what exists on the old platform: products and variants, categories, customers, order history, gift cards, subscriptions, discount codes, blog posts, and every page with a URL. Then note which of those actually matter. Order history from 2019 usually does not. Outstanding gift-card balances always do.

This is also the moment to prune. A migration is the cheapest time you will ever have to delete forty products that have not sold in two years.

2. Export products with their variants, not just their names

Every platform exports a CSV. The trap is that variants (sizes, colours, options) often come out flattened or as separate rows with no link to the parent. Shopify's importer expects one row per variant, grouped by a shared handle, with option names and values in dedicated columns.

Check the export for three things before importing: that variants attach to the right product, that SKUs and barcodes came through, and that images are referenced by a URL Shopify can fetch. Image URLs that point at the old platform's CDN break the moment that account closes, so download the images or import them while the old site is still live.

3. Decide the product model before you import

Shopify gives you up to three options per product and 2,048 variants, plus metafields for anything else. The common small-shop question is whether "Small / Medium / Large" is a variant or three separate products. Variants are right when it is the same thing in different sizes with its own price and inventory. Separate products are right when the items are sold and searched for separately.

Get this right before import. Restructuring three hundred products afterwards is slower than importing them correctly the first time.

4. Move customers, and tell them what is happening

Customer records import cleanly as a CSV: name, email, phone, addresses, tags, and marketing consent. Two rules apply. Keep the marketing-consent flag honest, because Shopify Email will respect it and your customers will notice if you do not. And send one plain email before cutover explaining that the site is moving, that their history comes with them, and what they need to do (usually nothing, except subscribers; see point 6).

5. Gift cards are a balance-sheet item, treat them that way

Export every outstanding gift-card balance with its code and the customer's email. In Shopify, issue a new gift card for each balance and send the new code to the customer. Keep the export as a record, because the old platform will stop showing it once the account closes.

If you use physical gift cards in store, Shopify POS can read them, but the codes will be new. Plan a short overlap where staff can look up an old code in the spreadsheet and issue the replacement on the spot.

6. Subscriptions: the one thing that cannot fully transfer

Subscriptions are the most common reason a migration feels painful. The subscription itself (who, what, how often) moves fine as data. The stored payment method does not, because card tokens belong to the old payment processor.

The workable pattern is: import the customers and their plan details, set the subscriptions up in Shopify's free Subscriptions app, and send each subscriber a link to add a card. Make the email warm and specific, give them a small reason to act (a free upgrade on their next delivery works), and follow up once. You will lose a few. You will lose more if the first they hear of it is a failed charge.

7. Build the redirect map

List every URL on the old site that receives traffic: product pages, categories, the about page, the blog. Map each to its new Shopify URL. Shopify has a built-in URL redirect tool that accepts a CSV, so the map can be uploaded in one go.

This is the single most important step for search rankings. A migration that ships without redirects throws away the authority those old URLs earned. One that ships with them keeps it, apart from a brief wobble while search engines re-crawl.

If you are consolidating several domains into one (three florist-network sites into one store, say), each old domain needs its own redirect set, and the old domains must stay registered and pointing at the redirects for at least a year.

8. Payments, taxes, and the legal pages

Shopify Payments needs the owner's identity and bank details and takes a day or three to approve, so start it first. Set up tax collection for your state; Shopify calculates it but you have to turn it on. Fill in the refund, privacy, terms, and shipping policies (Shopify generates templates; edit them so they say what you actually do). Check that the store email and the notification templates carry your name and logo, because customers will see order confirmations before they see anything else.

9. Delivery, pickup, and shipping rules

Recreate the old platform's delivery rules exactly, then improve them. For local shops that means delivery zones by zip code, fees per zone, a same-day cutoff, and pickup locations with preparation times. Shopify handles the zones and fees natively; if you need customers to choose a delivery date or time slot, that is an app (Zapiet is the common choice, about $30 a month). We wrote a separate guide on local delivery and pickup on Shopify.

10. In-store sales

If the old platform also ran your register (Square does this for a lot of shops), decide what replaces it. Shopify POS Lite is included on every plan and runs on a phone or iPad with a card reader. Inventory then lives in one place, which is the whole point of consolidating. Order the reader before launch week; shipping takes a few days.

11. Test like a customer, on a phone

Before switching the domain, place real test orders: delivery and pickup, each size, a discount code, a gift card, a subscription. Do it on a phone, because that is where most of your customers are. Check the confirmation emails. Check that the order shows up in POS. Fix what you find, then test again.

12. Launch day, in order

Launch is a sequence, not a switch. Put the old store into a "moving" state or stop taking orders on it. Do the final product and inventory sync. Upload the redirect map. Point the domain at Shopify (DNS changes take minutes to a few hours). Place one live order to confirm checkout and email. Then tell customers.

Keep the old platform's account open, read-only, for a month. You will want to look something up.

What this costs with us

Our Launch Shopify package is $799 for the build, and the Store Migration add-on ($149) covers the parts of this list that are tedious rather than difficult: products, customers, gift-card balances, subscriber re-enrollment, and the redirect map. If you are comparing platforms first, start with Shopify vs Square Online, and if you are working out the budget, what a Shopify site costs breaks it down.