Migrating an established online store to Shopify Plus
Moving an older e-commerce business to a new platform requires transferring decades of products, SEO, customer history, and custom features, which often exposes missing native functionality. Store owners are forced to pay high recurring fees for basic apps to replace built-in tools they previously relied on, while dealing with disconnected checkout flows that fracture the customer experience.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1building custom apps to handle bulk discounting and avoid app subscriptions
- 2excluding products from the Shop sales channel
- 3switching to outside payment providers to bypass platform checkout behavior
- 4Staying with the current payment flow and avoiding a rebuild
- 5Looking into embedded checkout options to keep the experience closer to the site
- 6Checking WHOIS records
- 7Looking up A records and nameservers
- 8Contacting customer support
- 9Hiring a professional
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“After running a successful e-commerce store on Yahoo for over 20 years, I finally made the jump to Shopify Plus. It is easily the single biggest mistake of my business career.”source ↗
“Migrating an established e-commerce business is brutal. We had more than 20 years of products, URLs, SEO, customer data, reviews and custom functionality to move.”source ↗
“Yahoo Store had basic e-commerce functionality built in 20 years ago that Shopify Plus still doesn’t have.”source ↗
“So you pay thousands for Shopify Plus and then get the privilege of renting all the missing pieces.”source ↗
“Everything feels pretty smooth until someone wants to pay, then they get pushed into a completely different flow.”source ↗
“Right now checkout is probably the most disconnected part of my customer journey.”source ↗
“when we logged into GoDaddy to access the website, hosting, and domain dashboard, we were presented with a setup screen that says”source ↗
“The website and domain are already live, so we don't want to accidentally overwrite, disconnect, transfer, or delete anything.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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