Moving off Shopify: what transfers, and what you rebuild

Your products transfer automatically. Your customers, orders, discount codes, pages and theme do not — you rebuild those. Whether that trade is worth making depends mostly on where you sell: in the UAE and India, Shopify charges an extra percentage on every order for using a local gateway, and that penalty is why most merchants here start looking in the first place.

Most migration guides are written by whoever wants you to switch. This one is too, so here is the version with the awkward parts left in.

What actually transfers?

Your catalog. Paste your store address into Niblr and it reads the product feed Shopify already publishes — no CSV export, no column mapping, no app to install. Titles, descriptions, images, options, variants, per-variant prices and SKUs come across, and everything arrives as a draft so you review before anything is public. The catalog import guide has the click-by-click.

That's the piece that would otherwise eat a week of retyping, and it's genuinely the bulk of the work. It is also, honestly, most of what automatically transfers.

What doesn't?

Everything else. Specifically:

• Customers. Not imported. If you have a list you care about, export it from Shopify and bring it in for email marketing separately — but shoppers will need to create accounts on the new store.
• Order history. Not imported. Export it from Shopify and keep the file; you'll want it for accounting regardless.
• Discount codes. Rebuild them. Niblr has percentage and fixed-amount codes with minimums, usage limits and date windows, so the codes themselves are straightforward to recreate — there's just no automatic path.
• Your theme. Rebuild it. You compose pages from blocks, or start from one of the starter packs. A visual match to a bespoke Shopify theme is not a copy-paste job.
• Pages, navigation, and blog posts. Rebuild the pages you need. Niblr has no blog for storefronts.
• Apps. Anything an app was doing needs a native equivalent or it stops. Check your app list before anything else — it's the most common source of "wait, where did that go".

Stock levels deserve a footnote: Shopify's public feed doesn't publish inventory, so imported products arrive at zero stock and are flagged as such. You set real numbers before publishing.

Will my URLs and search rankings survive?

This is the part most guides gloss over, so plainly: Niblr has no redirect manager today. There is no screen where you upload a list of old URLs and map them to new ones.

What that means in practice:

• Product URLs are /products/<slug>, and an imported product's slug is generated from its title. Shopify handles are usually the slugified title too, so many URLs land identically — but "usually" is not "always", and customised handles won't match.
• Check the URLs that actually earn you traffic before you switch, not after. For most small stores that's a handful of products and the home page.
• If you have real organic traffic across a deep catalog, you need a redirect story, and right now that means handling it at your DNS or proxy layer yourself.

If SEO is the main thing keeping your lights on, treat this as the blocking question and not a detail.

Who shouldn't move yet?

Some stores genuinely can't, and it's cheaper to know now:

• You sell subscriptions or anything recurring. Niblr has no subscription commerce for storefronts. This one is a hard stop.
• You sell gift cards.
• You price in several currencies, or run B2B price lists.
• You sell on marketplaces or social channels through your platform.
• You have deep, revenue-critical organic search across hundreds of URLs — see above.
• Your store depends on a Shopify app with no equivalent. Bundles, loyalty, complex shipping rules by carrier rate.

None of that is on a promised timeline here, which is exactly why it's a list rather than a "coming soon".

What does staying actually cost?

Here's where the honest number is, and it's narrower than most comparison pages will tell you.

Shopify charges an additional transaction fee for using any payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. By plan, as published on shopify.com/pricing (checked 25 July 2026):

Shopify plan	Third-party gateway fee	Monthly, billed monthly
Basic	2%	~$39
Grow	1%	~$105
Advanced	0.6%	~$399
Plus	0.2%	from ~$2,300

Two things about that table matter more than the numbers.

First, this is not your processing rate. You pay Stripe, Razorpay, Tap or whoever else their own rate on either platform. Nobody removes that, and any comparison implying otherwise is selling you something. The fee above is a separate penalty, charged on top, purely for not using Shopify's own payment product.

Second, it only bites where Shopify Payments isn't available. In the UAE and India it isn't, so that percentage is unavoidable rather than a choice — it's a tax on using the only gateways you can actually use. In the US or UK you can sidestep it by switching to Shopify Payments, and the advantage largely evaporates. If you're selling from London, this argument is much weaker, and you should weigh the rest of this post on its own merits.

On Niblr that penalty is zero, because Niblr is never in the payment flow. You connect your own gateway keys, money settles directly to you, and the platform takes no percentage of anything. The subscription is the whole cost.

What's the order of operations?

1. Audit your apps and your top URLs first. Both of the genuine blockers live here. Do this before you touch anything.
2. Export your customers and order history from Shopify and put the files somewhere safe. You want these whether or not you switch.
3. Import your catalog and review it as drafts — prices, stock, and the descriptions that came across oddly.
4. Connect your gateway and place a real test order end to end.
5. Set up tax if you're registered, and check an invoice actually looks right.
6. Rebuild pages, discounts and navigation.
7. Point your domain across only once the store above it is genuinely finished.
8. Keep Shopify running until DNS has settled. Cancelling early is how people lose images and order history they hadn't finished exporting.

Is it worth it?

If you're in the UAE or India, paying Shopify a percentage on every order for the privilege of using a local gateway, and your store is products-and-checkout rather than subscriptions-and-apps: yes, and the maths isn't close.

If you're in a market where Shopify Payments is available, or your store leans on the things listed above as not-yet-built, then no — not today, and we'd rather say so than have you find out in week three.

The reason we're comfortable writing that is the same reason the export exists: your catalog, orders and customers download as spreadsheets from any plan, including Free. Leaving should be the easy part, whichever direction you're going.

If you want the broader argument rather than the mechanics, our take on Shopify's transaction fees covers the model itself. If you've decided, the catalog import guide is the place to start.