Shopify exports products, customers, and orders via CSV. It does not export your analytics history, attribution data, or customer journey insights. Those disappear permanently when you migrate—and most store owners don’t discover this until they try to leave.

Everyone talks about ease of entry when comparing ecommerce platforms. Nobody talks about exit. What happens to the data you’ve accumulated over years when you decide Shopify no longer fits your business? The answer is more uncomfortable than Shopify’s marketing suggests.

What Shopify Actually Lets You Export

Shopify’s native export tools handle the transactional basics. According to their documentation, you can export CSV files containing:

• Products: SKUs, titles, descriptions, variants, prices, inventory
• Customers: Names, emails, addresses, order count, total spend
• Orders: Order details, line items, shipping information
• Discount codes: Code names and configurations
• Financial reports: Sales summaries, tax reports

For the basic transactional record, Shopify delivers. These exports preserve the bones of your business—what you sold, to whom, and when.

The problem is everything they don’t let you export.

The Data That Stays Behind

Here’s what cannot be exported from Shopify—at any price, on any plan:

• Complete analytics history: Your years of traffic data, conversion funnels, and performance metrics
• Customer browsing behavior: Which products customers viewed before purchasing
• Abandoned cart sequences: Who abandoned, what they left, when they returned
• Session recordings and heat maps: How shoppers interacted with your store
• Attribution data: Which channels drove which conversions over time
• Customer journey patterns: The full path from first visit to purchase

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This isn’t hidden in some advanced export option. It simply doesn’t exist outside Shopify’s ecosystem. Migration services like Cart2Cart preserve 85-95% of structured data—but the 5-15% lost is your behavioral intelligence. The data that told you which customers looked at winter boots three times before purchasing. The session data showing checkout friction points. The patterns that informed your marketing decisions.

The 60-Day Data Access Window

Shopify’s data restrictions extend to third-party apps as well. Apps can only access 60 days of recent orders by default (Shopify Help Center). Want full historical access? The app developer needs Shopify’s approval.

This matters because many store owners assume their analytics apps are capturing complete historical data. They’re not—unless the app specifically requested and received approval for full order history access.

The result: even your integrations don’t have the complete picture. Your analytics tools are working with whatever window Shopify decides to expose.

BigQuery Requires Shopify Plus

Want to send your Shopify data to BigQuery for custom analysis, ML models, or advanced attribution? BigQuery integration requires Shopify Plus at $2,000+ monthly minimum.

For standard Shopify merchants, there’s no native path to warehouse your data externally. You can export CSVs manually and upload them, but continuous streaming to BigQuery—the foundation for serious analytics and AI applications—is gated behind enterprise pricing.

This creates a structural disadvantage. While WooCommerce stores can stream events to BigQuery on a $29/month plan, Shopify merchants need to pay 70x more for the same capability.

Password Migration: It Doesn’t Exist

When you migrate from Shopify, your customers lose their passwords. According to Shopify’s documentation, customer passwords cannot be migrated due to encryption.

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After migration, every customer must reset their password to access their account on your new platform. Apps exist to send bulk password reset invitations, but the friction remains. Some customers won’t bother. Others will assume their account was compromised. The trust disruption is real, even if temporary.

The Hidden Switching Costs

Here’s where data lock-in becomes financially significant.

The average store waits 3-5 years before considering a platform switch. That’s 3-5 years of customer behavior data, attribution patterns, and marketing insights—all trapped in a system you can’t take with you.

The switching cost isn’t just the migration service fee. It’s the institutional knowledge embedded in data you’re forced to abandon. Every marketing decision you made based on Shopify analytics? That historical context disappears.

You’re not just migrating a store. You’re starting fresh with analytics—as if those years of customer behavior never happened.

How WooCommerce Handles This Differently

WooCommerce stores retain 100% of historical data in MySQL databases indefinitely. Not because WordPress is philosophically superior—because of architecture.

Every order, every customer interaction, every event you choose to capture lives in a database you control on hosting you own. When you migrate from WooCommerce, you export 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 ideology. It’s whether you can take your customer intelligence with you when business needs change.

What To Do If You’re Already on Shopify

If you’re currently on Shopify and concerned about data portability, you have options—but they require proactive setup:

First: Implement external analytics capture now. Use server-side tracking to stream events to BigQuery or another data warehouse you control. Solutions like Transmute Engine™ can capture WooCommerce events directly, but for Shopify you’ll need custom implementations or Shopify Plus for native BigQuery access.

Second: Export everything you can, regularly. Set up automated CSV exports of products, customers, and orders. Store them externally. This doesn’t capture behavioral data, but it protects your transactional foundation.

Third: Document your analytics insights. Since you can’t export the data itself, export the knowledge. Document your key customer segments, attribution patterns, and conversion benchmarks. When you migrate, you’ll have the strategic context even without the raw data.

Fourth: Evaluate your data ownership needs. If your business increasingly depends on customer behavior data for AI applications, predictive modeling, or advanced attribution, the structural limitations matter more. Factor data portability into your platform roadmap.

Key Takeaways

• Shopify exports transactional data (products, customers, orders) but not analytics, attribution, or behavioral data
• The 5-15% of data lost in migration is your behavioral intelligence—the insights that informed marketing decisions
• 60-day default data access means even your apps may not have complete historical records
• BigQuery requires Shopify Plus ($2,000+/month) for native integration
• Customer passwords cannot migrate—all customers must reset after platform switch
• WooCommerce architecture enables 100% data export from MySQL databases you control

Platform decisions are entry decisions and exit decisions. Shopify’s simplicity makes entry easy. The data architecture makes exit expensive—in ways that only become visible when you try to leave.

Building a store where data ownership is non-negotiable? See how first-party tracking architecture changes the equation at seresa.io.