Quick answer: Customer records, addresses, order history and product reviews can be moved to Shopify. Passwords cannot, because they are stored as hashes on the old platform, so customers must reactivate their accounts. Subscriptions, loyalty points and store credit depend on the apps involved and usually need a planned transfer rather than a simple import.
When a store owner asks us about migration, the first question is rarely about design or cost. It is: “Will I lose my customers?”
The short answer is no, but the long answer has several parts. Some data moves cleanly. Some moves with effort. A few things cannot move in the way you might expect, and it is better to know that before you plan the launch email.
Customers
Customer records transfer well. A standard import covers:
• Name, email, phone number
• Billing and shipping addresses
• Marketing consent status
• Tags and notes
• Total spent and order count (as reference fields)
Shopify’s customer import accepts a CSV, and the main work is cleaning. Duplicate emails, missing consent flags and malformed phone numbers are the usual problems. For India, check that mobile numbers include the country code, because SMS and WhatsApp tools depend on it.
Consent matters
Do not mark customers as subscribed to email or SMS unless your old platform recorded consent. Importing a purchase list as a marketing list can damage your sender reputation and breach consent rules. If consent was captured, bring the timestamp and source across as well.
Passwords
Passwords cannot be migrated. Platforms store them as one-way hashes, and Shopify does not import hashes from another system. This is a security feature, not a limitation of any particular migration tool.
What you can do is make reactivation easy:
1. Send an account invitation to imported customers, ideally in batches so your email provider is not flooded.
2. Enable guest checkout, so a forgotten password never blocks a sale.
3. Consider passwordless login options such as one-time codes, which many Indian customers already prefer.
4. Tell customers in advance what is changing and why.
Most customers who return simply buy as guests or use a code. A minority use saved addresses and order history, and these are the customers worth communicating with directly.
Order history
Past orders can be imported so that customer service can see them and reports remain continuous. Two points to be aware of:
• Imported orders are historical records. They do not trigger fulfilment, payment capture or notifications.
• Order numbering, tax fields and payment details may not map one-to-one. Decide in advance whether to keep the old order numbers (often with a prefix) and how to represent old payment methods.
For businesses that must keep complete GST records, do not treat the Shopify import as your system of record. Keep an export of the old platform’s orders and invoices in your accounting system, and confirm with your accountant how credit notes and returns on pre-migration orders will be handled.
Some brands choose to import only the last 12 to 24 months of orders to keep the store lean, with older data archived in a spreadsheet or warehouse. This is a legitimate approach, provided customer-facing order history does not matter for older orders.
Product reviews
Reviews are valuable social proof, and also a source of structured data and long-tail keywords. They can be migrated if you plan for it.
• If you use a third-party review app (Judge.me, Yotpo, Okendo, Stamped and similar), check whether the same app is available on Shopify. If it is, you can often keep your data with minimal work. If not, most apps allow a CSV export and import.
• If reviews are stored natively in WooCommerce or Magento, export them with product SKU or handle, rating, text, date and reviewer name, and import them into the new review app.
• Map reviews to the right products. The most common failure is a mismatch between old and new product identifiers, so match on SKU or handle rather than title.
Keep review dates and verified-buyer flags if the app supports it. A review wall that suddenly shows hundreds of reviews with the same date looks suspicious, to customers and to anyone auditing the store.
Subscriptions, loyalty points and store credit
This is the category that causes the most surprises.
Subscriptions
Active subscriptions are tied to a payment token held by the old gateway. Moving them means moving the tokens between payment providers, which requires cooperation from both. Some providers support secure token migration; others do not. Where it is not possible, customers must re-enter their payment details, and you should expect some to lapse.
Plan this early. If subscriptions are a meaningful share of your revenue, the subscription migration is the project, and the storefront is secondary.
Loyalty points and rewards
Points balances can usually be exported and recreated in a Shopify loyalty app as a starting balance. Check how the new app records the adjustment, because some treat it as an expiring promotion rather than earned points.
Store credit and gift cards
Gift card balances can be recreated as Shopify gift cards, and store credit can be applied to customer accounts. Reconcile the totals against your finance records, because these are liabilities on your books.
Marketing and tracking data
Do not forget the quiet data assets:
• Email lists and segments in your ESP, which sit outside the store
• Customer tags and lifecycle segments that drive campaigns
• Analytics history in Google Analytics, which stays with the property if you keep the same ID
• Ad pixels and catalogues in Meta and Google, which need to be reconnected to the new store
A sensible migration sequence
1. Audit every data type and decide: migrate, archive or drop.
2. Clean the source data before export.
3. Run a trial import on a development store and check a sample of records.
4. Do the final import close to launch, with a delta import for orders placed in between.
5. Reconcile totals: customers, orders, revenue, gift card balances.
6. Send reactivation emails after launch, in batches.
Keep the old platform running read-only for a few weeks after launch. It gives customer service a place to look up anything that did not import cleanly, and it gives you a fallback while you reconcile totals.
The trial import is the step that saves projects. It reveals mapping errors while they are cheap to fix.
Frequently asked questions
Can I keep my customers’ passwords when moving to Shopify?
No. Passwords are stored as hashes that cannot be transferred between platforms. Customers receive an account activation email and can set a new password, or check out as guests.
Will my past orders appear in my customers’ accounts on Shopify?
Yes, if you import them and match them to customer records by email. Orders appear in the customer’s account after they activate it.
Do I lose product reviews when I migrate?
Not if you export them and import them into a Shopify review app, matching by SKU or handle. Check that the reviews display correctly and carry structured data.
Can subscriptions be migrated?
Sometimes. It depends on whether the payment gateways support secure token transfer. If they do not, customers must re-enter payment details.
Next step
Before committing to a timeline, it helps to know exactly which of your data types move cleanly and which need a plan. We run a data migration assessment that lists each data type, the method, the risk and the effort. Ask for a data migration assessment and we will send you the findings.
