Moving your shop from Shopify without breaking it

Replatforming has a bad name, and it earned it honestly: migrations that drop half the past orders, redirects nobody planned, rankings that quietly evaporate over the following month. None of that is compulsory. Moving a shop from Shopify to Orbit is mostly a sequencing problem: do the steps in the right order, test before you point the domain, and the risky part shrinks to one quiet hour with your DNS settings. Disclosure first: we build Orbit Commerce.

Here is the whole job, in the order we would do it, with honest notes about effort at the end.

What exports cleanly

Three things come out of Shopify in good shape: products (with their variants and images), customers, and past orders. Export all three from Shopify as CSV files and Orbit's importers bring them in on every plan, recognising Shopify's product export on upload and joining each past order to the customer with the same email address. You can tidy the data in a spreadsheet first, and the bulk importer takes CSV and Excel files: worth doing if your catalogue has accumulated years of half-finished drafts and duplicate SKUs. A migration is the cheapest spring-clean your product data will ever get.

Past orders matter more than people expect. Each one lands on the customer with the same email address, so returning customers are still recognised as returning customers, with their earlier orders on their record.

What has to be rebuilt

Two things do not move: the theme and the apps.

Shopify themes are written in Liquid and cannot be transplanted, so your pages get rebuilt in Orbit's page builder. For most stores this is the pleasant part rather than the painful one: a homepage, a few collection layouts and your information pages, working from templates. A day for a simple store; longer if your old theme carried years of custom sections you have grown attached to.

Apps need an audit before anything else moves. List every app you pay for and what it actually does, then sort the list into three piles.

The first pile is apps the plan replaces. Gift cards, abandoned-cart recovery, discount codes and reporting are included in Orbit plans. For plenty of stores this pile pays for the migration by itself.

The second pile is tools that work anywhere: your email marketing platform, your accounting software, your review platform. These connect to whichever store you run, so they survive the move untouched, and Xero and QuickBooks connect through Orbit's own plugins. Orbit sends transactional email out of the box (order confirmations, shipping updates, with an editable template), and campaigns are built in: link a promotion's codes and Orbit counts every order that uses one, wherever the shopper found the code, your newsletter included.

The third pile is apps that only exist on Shopify. Write down the job each one does and check it against Orbit in week one of the trial, before the import rather than after it.

Redirects: the part that usually goes wrong

When a store loses rankings in a migration, it is almost never because the new platform is "worse for SEO". It is because the URLs changed and nothing told Google where things went. Shopify has its own URL shapes, those /products/ and /collections/ prefixes, and any old address that changes needs a 301 redirect to its new home.

Product handles come across unchanged, and old /collections/ links forward to the matching /categories/ page on their own, which covers products and collections mechanically. The import itself creates no redirects, so the rest goes through the redirect importer, which reads Shopify's redirect export as it is, or Nebula. Your job is the long tail: pull your most-visited pages from Search Console or analytics (old landing pages, blog posts, the one collection a magazine linked to in 2024) and make sure each resolves somewhere sensible. After the move, Orbit automatically 301-redirects slug changes whenever you rename things, so the rankings you carried over stay carried. For the platform-neutral version, from building the redirect map to what is normal in the six weeks after launch, read how to change ecommerce platform without losing your search rankings.

The order to do it in

Start the trial and run the import first (products, customers, orders) because everything else builds on it. Rebuild your pages second, while the imported catalogue is fresh and you can check products render properly. Third comes the plumbing: shipping zones and rates, your carriers connected through Orbit Shipping, tax settings, payment details and the transactional email templates. Shopify keeps running and selling through all of this; nothing on the new store is visible to customers until the domain moves.

Test before you touch DNS

Place a real order with a real card, then refund it: the full loop. Check that the confirmation and shipping emails arrive and read right. Check shipping rates against your own spreadsheet for a light parcel, a heavy one and an awkward destination. Check VAT shows correctly at checkout. Open your five best-selling products on a phone, because that is where most of your customers are. Then have someone who is not you spend ten minutes trying to buy something: they will find the things you have stopped being able to see.

Cutover day

Pick a quiet hour: for most UK shops that is early on a midweek morning, not Sunday evening. Point the domain at Orbit, watch the first orders arrive, and click through your redirect list once the domain resolves. Do not cancel Shopify on day one: keep the account on its cheapest footing for a couple of weeks as a safety net and a reference for anything you forgot to export. Cancel it once the new store has taken a fortnight of orders without surprises, and keep your final exports somewhere safe.

How long this really takes

A small store (a couple of hundred products, a short app list) is a weekend. Import Saturday morning, pages Saturday afternoon, plumbing and testing Sunday, DNS early Monday. A big catalogue is honestly longer: thousands of products with deep variants need mapping checks and image QA, and the app audit takes as long as the app list is. Plan a couple of weeks of evenings rather than pretending otherwise. For very large moves, Orbit's enterprise migrations come with hands-on assistance and a dedicated account manager, which exists precisely because some catalogues should not be a weekend project.

The pleasant surprise is that the rehearsal costs nothing. Orbit's 14-day trial is the full platform with no card required: longer than the entire migration for most stores. Run the import, rebuild a page, place a test order, and you will know whether the move works for your shop before you have committed anything but a weekend. And if you are still weighing the platforms themselves, the Orbit vs Shopify comparison and the real-cost breakdown put the numbers side by side.