How to move your store to Shopify: A guide to moving

This guide will walk you through the steps to migrate your store from another platform to Shopify.

You can use this guide as a starting point and reference resource to ensure you don't forget any key tasks in setting up your new Shopify store.

<!-- Contents -->

Step 1: Set up basic settings in your Shopify store admin panel

Before you start adding products and setting up payment systems, there are a few administrative tasks you should complete:

1. Use the online store migration checklist to make sure you don't miss anything when migrating your online store.
2. Complete the initial setup of your Shopify store to ensure your store address, email address, and other store settings are up to date.
3. Learn how to manage your account.
4. Create accounts for your store employees so that each of them has a personal login and all confidential information remains safe.

Step 2: Import your store content and data into Shopify

When moving to Shopify, you'll need to migrate your content: products and reviews, customer accounts, blog pages, and data like your customers' transactions. In this guide, the term "data" refers to both content and data.

Migrating your data can take some time, so start working on it as soon as possible. Assess your existing data and decide what needs to be migrated. Write down in a notebook all the types of data you need to migrate. Next to it, write down how much of each type of data you need to migrate. Examples of types of data you might want to migrate include: products, users, orders, gift cards, discount codes, blogs, pages (shipping policy, contact, and other web pages), and product reviews.

Once you have decided what data you want to migrate, you need to decide how you will migrate the data and in what order. Here are some data migration options you can use:

• Copy and paste the content from the old site.
• Use the appropriate app to migrate from the Shopify app store.
• Hire a Shopify developer who can migrate additional functionality from your old store or develop a new one.

The option you choose depends on your budget and the amount of data you need to migrate. If you have a lot of content to migrate, you'll probably want to use an app. But don't overlook the option of manually copying and pasting data, especially if you have smaller amounts of content to migrate, such as shipping and policy pages.

The table below lists the different data types and available migration options:

The order in which you import product, customer, and order data is important. If you need to import all of these types of data, you must transfer them in the following order:

1. Goods
2. Clients
3. Orders

If you follow this procedure, you will have access to your customers’ full transaction history in Shopify. Transferred orders will also be linked to the relevant products and customers.

Temporarily disable email notifications about orders

When migrating orders, the same notifications will be sent as when creating new orders. Therefore, before you start importing, turn off sending notifications about orders.

When you turn off order notifications, you will also not receive notifications about any new orders. However, you will still be able to view all orders in your Shopify store admin panel.

Once the migration is complete, be sure to enable order notifications.

Find an app to migrate to Shopify from your current platform

Migration apps reduce the amount of work you need to do to import data. You can find free and paid data migration and import apps in the Shopify App Store.

Importing Store Data Manually Using CSV Files

If you choose to import your products and customer data manually, you can use CSV files to bulk import them into your Shopify store.

Here is information about the CSV file templates you need to use to import your data:

• CSV file template for importing products
• CSV file template for importing clients

Step 3: Organize your items after moving them

If you used the app to import your products into Shopify, it's important to make sure all of your product information was imported correctly. Learn more about common migration errors and how to fix them.

If you sell digital products or services, make sure you understand all the differences between digital and physical goods.

To check if the product data has been transferred correctly:

• Review your product information, which includes description, images, variations, and metadata.
• Create collections to categorize your products and make them easier for your customers to find. You can add drop-down menus and create links to collections.
• Learn about inventory and transfers to properly manage your store's inventory. You can find inventory apps in the Shopify app store to help you with this task.

Step 4: Take care of the appearance of your website

To help you get started, there is a default theme already installed in the Themes section of your admin panel. If you want to upload a different theme for your online store, you will need to add one from the Shopify theme store.

You can:

• Choose one of the free Shopify themes. Free themes are developed by Shopify. Help with setting up free themes is also provided by Shopify support.
• Buy a paid Shopify theme. Paid themes are developed by third-party developers. Help with setting up third-party themes is provided by the theme developer.

Opportunity to try out a paid theme in your store

You can try out a paid theme to see how it looks with your products, brand colors, and style before you commit to purchasing the theme.

• While previewing a theme, you can make changes using the theme editor.
• Any changes you make will be saved after purchasing the theme.
• You can browse up to 19 paid themes in your Shopify store.

Step 5: Set up URL redirection

Redirect traffic from your old platform to your new Shopify store. This way, you won't lose traffic and SEO rankings for your site in search engines.

Step 6: Set up your domain

When setting up a Shopify store, you can either purchase a new domain or transfer the domain associated with your existing store to your new Shopify account.

To prepare for migrating your store, you may need to disable any existing domains you want to migrate from your previous platform settings. If you don't do this, you may encounter errors with SSL certificates.

Buying and connecting a new domain

1. Purchase a domain through Shopify or another domain name registrar.
2. Set your domain as your primary domain so that it becomes the domain that appears to customers in their browser, search results, and social media.
3. Set up email forwarding so that emails customers send to your custom domain email address are forwarded to your personal email address.

Transferring an existing domain

If you have an existing domain, follow the steps here to connect your domain to your Shopify store.

Step 7. Set up delivery

It is important to set up your shipping rates and methods correctly before launching your store. For more information on shipping and order processing, click here.

If you sell digital products or services, you need to disable the shipping option because your customers do not require shipping service.

To set up delivery:

• Add your shipping address in your store settings to get accurate shipping rates based on your location.
• Create different delivery zones to offer different delivery options to different regions, states, and countries.
• Set up package dimensions if you use shipping rates calculated by the carrier. Many carriers use volumetric weight (the height, weight, and depth of a package) to calculate shipping costs.
• Set up shipping costs for the shipping zones you've created.
• Choose a shipping strategy that works for your business. You may find it helpful to try out several options to see which one best suits your needs before making a final decision.
• Review order fulfillment services to decide whether you'll ship orders yourself or let someone else handle order processing for you.

Step 8. Set up taxes

Collecting sales tax is an important part of running your business. Depending on your location, different sales tax rules and regulations may apply to your products. To ensure your store is compliant with these rules, take some time to understand the Shopify tax setup process.

If your store ships to Europe, please note the rules that apply to selling digital products.

Tax collection depending on the delivery destination

When you set up shipping, you can apply shipping taxes to your products based on the tax rules of your customer's region. These are calculated automatically by Shopify.

If you need to adjust taxes for a region with unique tax restrictions or based on a specific set of products, you can do so by manually reassigning taxes.

Monitor tax collection

When you set up taxation for your items, you should think about how you will track your taxes throughout the year.

If you're not sure which system you're going to use to track your taxes, you might want to check out the accounting apps in the Shopify App Store.

Step 9. Connect your payment provider

To allow customers to pay you, you need to connect and set up a payment provider. A payment provider allows you to securely accept credit card payments and other payment methods. Shopify offers its own payment provider ( Shopify Payments ) as well as many supported third-party payment providers.

If you choose to use Shopify Payments, you can avoid paying additional third-party transaction fees and view your payouts directly in your Shopify store's admin panel.

To set up a payment provider:

1. Select a payment provider from the list in the Shopify admin panel or connect a third-party provider.
2. Enable Shopify Payments or a third-party payment provider in your Shopify admin panel.
3. Choose how you want to process and authorize payments when customers buy something from your store.

Now that you have set up your payment providers, you need to set up your checkout page so you can process customer orders.

To customize your checkout page:

1. Decide what your customer ordering process should be so that it aligns with your order fulfillment strategy.
2. Create pages with your store's rules and policies so your customers are aware of them before they check out.
3. Select your customer information collection settings on the checkout page depending on whether you want to collect their email addresses to inform customers in the future about events and promotions happening in your store.

Step 10. Place a few test orders

Now that you have your payment settings set up, you should try out a few transactions to make sure everything is working. Placing a test order will help you understand the process your customers go through when they buy your products. You can access all the orders your customers place in the Orders section of your Shopify store admin panel.

You can run test orders for several different transaction types:

• completion of successful and unsuccessful transactions;
• return and cancellation of order;
• execution or partial execution of an order;
• archiving a successful order.

When you create, return, and fulfill orders, you will receive the same emails that your customers will receive for each action with their order. You can edit the templates of these emails in the Notifications section of your Shopify store admin panel.

Step 11: Invite your customers to create accounts on your new site

Once you've migrated your customers' data and launched your store, you can invite your customers to create accounts on your new Shopify store.

If you have a lot of customers, you can use an app from the Shopify app store to send bulk invitations. If you have a Shopify Plus plan, use the Bulk Account Inviter app.