How to Use the Store Migration Shopify App & Import Data into Shopify (2026)

A store migration is the process of moving your business’s digital infrastructure—including data, storefronts, SEO strategies, and operations—from one platform to another. 

US ecommerce sales reached $1.2 trillion in 2025, according to the US Census Bureau. The platforms store owners use to capture that revenue impact their ability to grow, adapt, and operate during high-traffic periods. Concerns about losing product data, disrupting search engine rankings, or unexpected downtime are legitimate, especially if you’re processing a large volume of transactions every day both online and offline. 

The free Store Migration app for Shopify offers a straightforward way to import product and customer data without technical expertise. This guide shares how to import store data into Shopify with the Store Migration app, including a pre-migration checklist and pre-launch quality check to make sure the migration process runs smoothly. 

What Shopify’s Store Migration app does

Store Migration is a free, Shopify-built app to help you quickly import product and customer data from other platforms into a new Shopify store. You can use it to move data from Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Wix, Amazon, eBay, Clover, and Lightspeed R/X (Vend) into Shopify.

The Store Migration app is best for fast imports of specific objects; it’s not a full replatforming by itself. There are two ways to import data: 

1. Upload a CSV file exported from your previous platform.
2. Connect your account directly for automatic data transfer via a guided setup (for supported platforms only).

Here are a few questions to help you determine whether the Store Migration app is right for your store: 

• Do you only need to move products and customers? The app imports product and customer data. Orders, reviews, and navigation menus require separate tools or manual setup after import. 
• Is your store on a supported platform? If your platform isn’t on the list above, see the Shopify Help Center for other options. 
• Do you use a single price across all store locations? The app sets prices to the highest price for a product and doesn’t import inventory by location. You’ll need to configure those manually in Shopify after import. 

All migration paths Shopify supports 

There are several paths retailers can take when migrating to Shopify, each of which is a process rather than a one-click event. The Store Migration app is one lane best suited for smaller brands looking only to import product and customer data.

If you need complex catalog rules, business-to-business (B2B) pricing, or multistore, consider another migration path:

Pre-migration checklist

The most common cause of a difficult store migration is the data going into it. Duplicate product records, inconsistent product variant naming, and unresolved operational decisions create problems that no migration app can fix automatically. Working through this checklist before you import reduces the likelihood of errors that are harder to resolve after the fact.

1. Clean up your data

Most migration pain is caused by messy source data. Before migrating anything, agree on which system holds the authoritative version of each data type:

• SKU numbers
• Product titles
• Variant names
• Customer emails 
• Image filenames
• Shipping weights 
• Pricing rules 

Remove or archive any discontinued products or inactive customer accounts, and do a full backup of your current platform’s data before you close it down.

Tip: Implement a change freeze in the run up to your store migration. This means no new products, no price edits, no active discount codes, and no promotional campaigns that modify product data. Communicate the freeze clearly to anyone on your team with admin access. Use this window to complete your final data export and backup.

2. Prioritize essential functionality

To avoid the migration becoming an open-ended project, think in phases rather than attempting to move everything at once. 

Essential functionality (the minimum your store needs to trade) should go live first. This includes your active product catalog, current customer accounts, and core shipping and payment configuration. Everything else—including historical order data, archived products, and advanced integrations—can follow.

A phased approach also reduces risk. A smaller, cleaner initial import is easier to audit and correct than a single large migration where errors are harder to trace. It also shortens the time your team spends in a transitional state, where two systems run simultaneously, each with associated costs. 

Heritage retailer Le Chameau took this approach and completed its transition to Shopify in just five weeks (down from the 19 weeks it originally forecast), which included two weeks of user acceptance testing. This rapid migration saved them between £160,000 and £170,000 in costs and significantly improved operational efficiency.

“Our total cost of ownership has gone down by 65%,” says former digital marketing officer Aaron Smedley. “We’ve been able to be a lot more agile and respond quicker to either needs of the business or customer needs.”

3. Confirm operational dependencies

These dependencies aren’t imported by the Store Migration app, so you’ll need to configure them manually after Shopify data migration:

• Document your current tax settings (rates, exemptions, and any regional rules applicable to your locations).
• List all active shipping profiles, including rates, carrier integrations, and any location-specific rules.
• Confirm all fulfillment locations (warehouses, retail stores, or third-party logistics providers) and how inventory is split between them.
• Verify your email domain configuration (transactional emails, customer notifications) and note any domain name system (DNS) records you’ll need to update.
• List all third-party apps or integrations currently in use, and confirm Shopify equivalents are in place before go-live.

4. Set an analytics baseline

An analytics baseline gives a reliable way to determine whether changes in traffic, revenue, or conversion rate after launch are a result of the migration itself, or whether outside factors like seasonal variation influenced performance.

Before migrating, export the following key performance indicators (KPIs) from your current platform over a 90-day window. This smooths out short-term fluctuations and gives you a more representative picture of normal performance:

• Top landing pages
• Top revenue pages
• Current conversion rate, segmented by device
• Average page load time 
• Organic search sessions 
• Revenue by channel 
• Average keyword ranking positions 

Once your new Shopify store has been live for 30 days, revisit each of these figures. A 30-day comparison will surface any immediate issues—a drop in indexed pages, for example, often signals a redirect problem. A 90-day comparison gives a more complete picture of whether SEO and revenue performance has recovered to the pre-migration baseline.

How to use the Store Migration app

Once you’ve prepared your data for import, here’s how to move it to Shopify using the Store Migration app:

1. Install the Store Migration app and pick source. Options include ecommerce platforms (WooCommerce, Wix, Lightspeed), marketplaces (Etsy, Amazon, and eBay), and point-of-sale (POS) systems (Lightspeed, Square, Clover).
2. Export data from source. Each platform has its own guidance. Clover, for instance, separates data exports into three categories: products, customers, and orders. Find the relevant list inside the platform and export it as a CSV file. 
3. Prep CSV. Normalize headers, variants, images, and weights. 
4. Import files. Check the Publish to online store button. Shopify will match your CSV to its own template once you upload the file into the app. This process takes a few minutes.
5. Run validation pass. Press View products and check the data has been imported correctly.
6. Fix errors. Common importing errors include duplicate SKUs, missing images, and shipping weights. Re-run import or make bulk edit corrections to fix.

Quality check before launch

Before going live with the new site and closing down your old platform, run a final quality check that covers:

• Products. Check variant count, prices, inventory, and images. Start with your highest-value and highest-traffic products, then work through the remainder of your catalog. Pay particular attention to products with multiple variants—these are a common source of import errors.
• Customer data. Check for duplicate customer profiles and marketing consent (where applicable). This information is responsible for every personalized touchpoint on Shopify, so it needs to be accurate.
• Storefront. Walk through the following as a customer would, on both desktop and mobile. Check collections, navigation, and search results appear as expected.

What success can look like

Learn more about how migration outcomes from real Shopify migrations:

FAUCHON: 50% faster checkout speeds post-migration

Parisian luxury food brand FAUCHON migrated from Magento to Shopify to unify its retail and ecommerce operations across 70 boutiques, franchise partners, and its online store.

On Magento, the team was burdened by high maintenance costs and slow updates—particularly problematic given that more than 50% of FAUCHON’s ecommerce revenue falls in the holiday season. In-store, outdated POS systems slowed checkout, complicated inventory management, and left staff unable to order out-of-stock items for customers on the spot.

After adopting Shopify POS in its Parisian flagship stores, FAUCHON’s sales associates could process transactions faster and check inventory in real time. They could also place direct orders for unavailable products, thanks to unified data inside the POS system. The results were measurable: a 20% increase in add-to-cart rate, a 4% peak ecommerce conversion rate, and checkout speeds 50% faster than before.

“Before Shopify, we would spend all of October worrying about technical issues for the holiday season,” says marketing director Marianne Tanguy-Rossé. “Now, we can actually focus on what matters—our products, our customers, and our sales.”

Bauer: 60% revenue increase within six months

Sports retailer Bauer is one of the most recognized brands in hockey. When reevaluating its tech stack, it determined that its previous ecommerce platform (Salesforce Commerce Cloud) wasn’t serving it as well as it could. The retailer faced high development costs and long timelines if it wanted to make a change to the site.

Bauer enlisted the help of Shopify Partner agency CQL to migrate to Shopify and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). CQL helped Bauer redesign its site with categories, develop a customer loyalty program, and integrate third-party apps like SAP. Plus, with its new page designer feature, non-designers could make changes to the site without technical input.

In the six months post-migration, Bauer recorded:

• 60% increase in revenue
• 30% increase in orders
• 20% cost savings

“The move to Shopify has been so beneficial to our business,” says Chris Cocca, Bauer’s chief digital officer. “We get so much out of the box, plus a huge pipeline of new features dropping regularly. And the Shopify ecosystem of apps and developers helps us move fast. This has let us shift focus from basic ecommerce feature development and maintenance to high-value areas for our consumers, like content creation and loyalty.”

Bombas: $108,000 in platform cost savings

Sock and apparel brand Bombas’s appearance on Shark Tank catapulted the brand to success. But when the episode premiered (and re-ran), the worst happened: Bombas’s site fell apart. Product images broke and customers couldn’t check out, leading to losses of more than $15,000 in just a few minutes of outage.

Bombas began paying thousands of dollars each month in server maintenance fees to keep the lights on. It needed a better solution, so it turned to Shopify.

Bombas timed its migration with the busiest time of the year: Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). They pull in as much as 60% of annual revenue during the final quarter of the year, so if the new site could handle the busiest shopping day, re-runs of its Shark Tank appearance wouldn’t be a problem.

Bombas’s new Shopify-powered site didn’t crash during the BFCM weekend—nor any re-airs. They saved $108,000 in platform costs in their first year alone, recording $17.2 million in sales in the first full year post-migration (300% year-over-year growth).

“From an infrastructure standpoint, Shopify Plus has our back,” says Bombas CTO Adam Weinstock. “We feel incredibly comfortable that, as we continue to scale, our website’s going to be up and running. As an IT function, that allows us to really focus on the things that we do best.”