This is a runbook for a UK shop owner who has decided to leave EKM, ShopWired or Bluepark and wants to do it without losing orders or search traffic. It covers what each platform exports, what never transfers, the redirects that protect your rankings, and switch day itself. Every price and export claim below was checked against the platforms’ own pages on 15 September 2026. Disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, one of the places people move to, so we have a stake in you switching. The runbook works the same wherever you land.
Almost every result for this search is an agency selling a Shopify migration. The job is smaller than that: take your exports first, build in parallel, map your URLs, and the risky part shrinks to one hour with your DNS settings. We have written the same runbook for leaving Shopify and leaving WooCommerce.
What can you actually export from EKM, ShopWired and Bluepark?
All three give you your product catalogue back as a spreadsheet, which is the part that matters most. Orders and customers are less consistent. ShopWired documents an export for all three. EKM’s Import/Export System covers products, categories, image lists, customer details and orders. Bluepark’s help documents product and order exports, but we could not find a customer export in it. Docs change, so if anything below is missing from your admin panel, check your platform’s export page or ask support.
| What you need | EKM | ShopWired | Bluepark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Products | Import/Export System. CSV under 500 products, XLSX above | Product Import/Export. CSV, filter by status or category | Products > Export > Create Full Backup. CSV |
| Customers | “Customer details” in the Import/Export System | Customers > export. CSV, filter by marketing consent | Not documented in Bluepark’s help; ask support in writing |
| Orders | Listed in the Import/Export System | CSV by date range or hand-picked orders | Order export CSV with an editable header row |
Sources, checked 15 September 2026: EKM support, ShopWired help with its customer and order pages, and Bluepark help. One trap: product images travel as URLs in the product file, not as files, so the old shop must stay online while the new one downloads them.
What never transfers, whatever you move to
Four things never come with you, whichever two platforms you move between: customer passwords, saved card details, live subscription agreements, and your theme. That falls out of how passwords and card data have to be stored.
Passwords. They are kept as one-way hashes, so nobody can hand them over in a usable form. Shopify’s migration documentation states the general constraint plainly: “Because passwords are encrypted outside of Shopify, you can’t migrate customer passwords from another online store using a CSV”, and tells you to “invite your customers to create new passwords” afterwards (help.shopify.com, checked 15 September 2026). Records, addresses and order history come across fine. The login does not.
Saved cards and recurring payments. Card details never sit on your shop. They sit with your payment gateway as a token tied to one merchant account, which is what PCI rules require. Change platform or gateway and the tokens do not follow, so saved cards disappear and active subscriptions need recreating with a fresh authorisation from each customer. That is the biggest risk in the move if you sell on subscription, and a minute at the next checkout if you do not.
Reviews and balances. Reviews in a tool like Trustpilot or Reviews.io survive untouched. Reviews native to the old platform often have no export, so look early. Gift card and store credit balances are a liability to real customers: record every one before you switch and honour them by hand if they do not import.
How do you keep your rankings when the URLs change?
With 301 redirects, one for every old URL, kept in place for at least a year. Google’s site move guidance is the source to use rather than an agency blog: “We recommend server side permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs”, and “301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank” (Google Search Central, checked 15 September 2026).
- List every URL that earns something: the Search Console Pages report, your sitemap, your top landing pages in analytics.
- Map old to new in the next column: product to product, category to category, post to post.
- Send anything with no equivalent to the nearest relevant category page. A homepage dump is how redirects get treated as soft 404s.
- Import the map instead of typing redirects one at a time. Orbit’s redirect manager takes a bulk CSV.
- Keep the same domain if you can, and you need no Change of Address in Search Console, which Google says to submit only “if you’re changing domain names or subdomains”.
- Submit the new sitemap, which Orbit generates automatically, and 301s any slug you rename later.
- Leave the redirects alone for “as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”.
Google also says “for medium-sized websites, it can take a few weeks or more” before the new URLs replace the old ones. A wobble in impressions inside that window is normal, not evidence the move failed. The longer version is in our guide to replatforming without losing your search rankings.
What happens to your domain, your email and your SSL on switch day?
Your domain stays yours. You point it at the new platform by changing DNS records, not by moving the registrar, so the switch is reversible in minutes. Email is what catches people out, because your MX records sit in the same DNS zone you are about to edit. SSL is issued fresh by the new platform once the domain resolves to it.
- Check who the registrar is before you give notice. If the old platform bought the domain for you, get access or start a transfer weeks early: transfers are not instant.
- Drop the TTL on your A and CNAME records to 300 seconds the day before, so the cutover propagates in minutes.
- Do not touch MX or TXT records. But if your mailboxes came with the shop package they die with it, so move mail to its own provider first.
- Expect a short gap for SSL between the DNS change and the certificate being issued, so cut over early on a midweek morning. Orbit renews certificates automatically on every plan.
How long does this really take, and what does it cost?
For a typical UK shop with a few hundred products, a weekend of work and under £50 of overlapping subscription. You will see replatforming budgets quoted in the tens of thousands of pounds. Those are enterprise numbers, for projects with custom integrations and a project manager on the payroll. They say nothing about a 300-product shop, and quoting them at a small merchant is how people get talked out of a weekend.
| Your shop | Realistic effort |
|---|---|
| Under 500 products, no custom code | A weekend plus an evening on redirects |
| 500 to 2,000 products, integrations | A couple of weeks of evenings |
| Live subscriptions or trade accounts | Add two to four weeks |
The cash arithmetic, assumptions stated. A shop on ShopWired Advanced pays £79.95 + VAT a month, so £95.94 including VAT (shopwired.co.uk, checked 15 September 2026). Say six weeks: two building, four of overlap before you cancel.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Orbit 14-day free trial while you build, no card required | £0.00 |
| Orbit Solo for the four weeks after the trial, £25 + VAT | £30.00 |
| Old platform for the same six weeks (paid anyway) | £0.00 extra |
| Redirect map, imports and testing | Your own evenings |
| Extra cash to migrate | £30.00 |
The real reason merchants delay is not the £30. It is the fear of paying two platforms for months, and a trial that needs no card removes it. There is no reliable public figure for what UK freelancers charge to do this, so get two quotes and judge them against the table above.
The order we would do it in
- Take your exports first, before you tell anyone anything.
- Import in order: products, then customers, then orders, so that, in Shopify’s words, “products and customers can be properly connected to the orders”.
- Rebuild the pages, then the plumbing: shipping rates, VAT, payments, email templates.
- Import the redirect map, then test with a real order and a real refund on a phone.
- Email your customers, lower your DNS TTL a day ahead, and cut over at a quiet midweek hour.
What should you do in the first two weeks after going live?
Watch four things and change nothing else: orders arriving, redirects resolving, Search Console coverage, and whether your emails are landing. Do not cancel the old platform yet, and do not redesign at the same time. One change at a time is how you tell what caused what.
Day one. Place a real order from a phone on mobile data, then refund it. Check the confirmation and dispatch emails arrive and are not in spam. Click your twenty highest-traffic old URLs, check VAT at checkout, and price a heavy parcel against your own shipping spreadsheet.
Week one. Watch the Pages report in Search Console. Every 404 that appears is a URL missing from your map, so add the redirect the same day. Compare impressions against the same weekday last month, not yesterday.
Week two. Reconcile orders and revenue against the same fortnight before the move, and chase the accounts that have not reactivated. Cancel the old platform only after a fortnight without surprises, and archive those final exports permanently: they are the only copy of your old order history you will ever have.
Where Orbit fits, said plainly
Orbit is a UK platform on the same shelf as ShopWired and Bluepark. What differs is the shape of the caps. ShopWired caps plans by annual turnover at £50,000, £200,000 and £500,000, so growing moves you up the ladder whether or not you need anything new (shopwired.co.uk, checked 15 September 2026). Bluepark caps by catalogue: 500 products and 500MB on Retail at £29.99 + VAT, 2,000 and 1GB on Business at £44.99, unlimited with 2GB on Enterprise at £64.99 (bluepark.co.uk, checked 15 September 2026). EKM sells no self-serve tier at all now, only one managed plan at £327 + VAT a month (ekm.com, checked 21 July 2026).
Orbit’s plans are £25, £85, £249 and £999 a month ex VAT, or £19, £64, £187 and £749 billed yearly, with unlimited products and no turnover cap. For this move: the importer takes products, customers and orders as CSV, Excel or XML, the redirect manager takes a bulk CSV, a custom domain with automatic SSL is on every plan, and the 14-day free trial needs no card, so you build in parallel with the shop you are still selling on. The honest other side: Orbit is the youngest of the four, B2B trade accounts sit on Enterprise while ShopWired includes them lower down, there is no point of sale, and nobody here builds the shop for you the way EKM does. Detail on Orbit vs EKM, Orbit vs ShopWired and Orbit vs Bluepark. If you have not settled on where you are going, start with the three-way EKM vs ShopWired vs Bluepark comparison.
Questions people ask about moving off EKM, ShopWired or Bluepark
Will I lose my Google rankings if I move platform?
Not if every old URL 301-redirects to its new home. Google’s site move guidance says permanent redirects do not cause a loss of PageRank, and advises keeping them at least a year. Expect a few weeks of movement while Google swaps old URLs for new. Rankings are lost to missing redirects, not to the platform.
Can I move my customers’ passwords to a new platform?
No, and no platform can. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, so they cannot be handed over in a usable form. Customer records, addresses and order history migrate fine; the login does not. You invite customers to set a new password, which is worth warning them about before switch day.
What does it cost to move a small UK shop to a new platform?
For a few hundred products and no custom code, a weekend of your time plus one month of overlapping subscription, which on Orbit’s Solo plan is £30 including VAT. Five-figure budgets come from enterprise projects with ERP integrations, and are no guide to what a small UK shop should pay.
Do I have to change my domain when I switch platform?
No. You keep the domain and change its DNS records to point at the new platform, which is why the cutover takes minutes and is reversible. Check who the registrar is before you cancel anything, in case the old platform registered it for you, and leave your MX records alone so email keeps flowing.
The cheapest useful step is a rehearsal. Orbit imports products, customers and orders from a spreadsheet, takes your redirect map as a bulk CSV, and puts your domain on automatic SSL on every plan. The 14-day free trial needs no card, so build alongside the shop you are still selling on: start free, run the import, and see how your catalogue looks before you give notice.