Shopify exports orders, customers, and products—but NOT your analytics history, abandoned cart data, or customer journey insights. Those disappear permanently when you migrate. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the average store waits 3-5 years before considering a platform switch. That’s 3-5 years of customer behavior data trapped in a system you can’t take with you.
What Shopify Actually Lets You Export
Shopify’s export tools are more limited than most store owners realize until they try to leave. According to Shopify’s own documentation, you can export CSV files containing products, customers, orders, discount codes, and financial reports. That covers the transactional basics.
What you can’t export: your complete analytics history, customer browsing behavior, abandoned cart sequences, session recordings, heat maps, and the full customer journey data that shows how shoppers interact with your store over time. This isn’t hidden in some advanced export—it simply doesn’t exist outside Shopify’s ecosystem.
Platform lock-in isn’t just about payment processing fees or theme limitations. It’s about the data you accumulate that becomes increasingly difficult to leave behind.
The Math on Migration Data Loss
Migration services like Cart2Cart advertise “complete” migrations, and they deliver on the core promise. Cart2Cart typically preserves 85-95% of your structured data: product catalogs, customer accounts, order history, and basic metadata. For the transactional record, migration works.
The 5-15% that’s lost? That’s your behavioral intelligence. Customer journey patterns. Abandoned cart analytics. The browsing history that tells you which customers looked at winter boots three times before purchasing. The session data showing checkout friction points.
You may be interested in: WooCommerce Events to BigQuery Without GA4
Here’s where it gets worse: if you’ve been on Shopify for five years, you have five years of customer behavior patterns that informed your marketing decisions. None of that transfers. You’re not just losing data—you’re losing the institutional knowledge embedded in that data.
Why WooCommerce Handles Data Differently
WooCommerce stores retain 100% of historical data in MySQL databases indefinitely. That’s not marketing—that’s architecture. Every order, every customer interaction, every event you choose to capture lives in a database you control on hosting you own.
The difference matters because data ownership determines your exit options. On WooCommerce, migrating to another platform means exporting from a MySQL database you have full access to. Your behavioral data, assuming you’ve captured it properly, comes with you.
Data ownership isn’t about ideology. It’s about whether you can take your customer intelligence with you when business needs change.
The Timing Question: Why 2026 Is Decision Year
If you’re thinking about migrating “someday,” understand what waiting costs. Every month on Shopify adds customer behavior data to the pile you’ll leave behind. Another year means another year of customer journey insights that won’t survive the move.
The stores who migrated early to WooCommerce made the decision before their data history became too valuable to abandon. Those migrating now face harder choices—the longer you’ve been on Shopify, the more behavioral intelligence you’re walking away from.
This isn’t about Shopify being bad. It’s about recognizing when your data strategy has evolved past what any SaaS platform can accommodate.
Building Data Preservation Into Your Post-Migration Stack
Once you’re on WooCommerce, the question becomes: how do you never face this problem again?
You may be interested in: Build Your Own Analytics Stack: WordPress to BigQuery to Looker
Server-side tracking with direct BigQuery integration means every customer event from day one lives in a database you own. Not in Google’s GA4 property. Not in Facebook’s ad platform. In your BigQuery instance where it stays indefinitely.
Transmute Engine™ routes WooCommerce events simultaneously to GA4, Facebook CAPI, Google Ads, and BigQuery through a first-party Node.js server on your subdomain. Your analytics platforms get the data they need for optimization while BigQuery stores the complete record for long-term analysis and data ownership.
The migration from Shopify gives you one chance to build the data infrastructure you should have had from the start.
Key Takeaways
- Shopify exports transactional data—products, orders, customers—but not behavioral data like analytics history, abandoned carts, or customer journeys
- Migration services preserve 85-95% of core data while behavioral intelligence is lost permanently
- Every month waiting adds more data to the pile you’ll leave behind—if migration is inevitable, earlier is better
- WooCommerce stores retain 100% of data in MySQL databases you control indefinitely
- Post-migration server-side tracking to BigQuery ensures you never face data lock-in again
Shopify allows CSV exports of products, customers, orders, discount codes, and financial reports. However, analytics history, abandoned cart details, customer journey data, and behavioral insights cannot be exported and remain locked in Shopify’s platform.
Cart2Cart and similar tools preserve 85-95% of core transactional data—products, orders, customers. Behavioral data including analytics history, customer browsing patterns, and abandoned cart timelines are lost because Shopify’s export APIs don’t include them.
Now, if you’re considering it. Every month you wait adds more customer behavior data that can’t be migrated. If you’re planning to leave within the next 2-3 years, starting the process now minimizes data loss.
Once on WooCommerce, implement server-side tracking that routes events directly to BigQuery. This gives you full data ownership from day one—every customer journey, every event, stored in a database you control indefinitely.
Start planning your exit strategy at seresa.io.
