Moving a UAE store off Shopify

What comes across cleanly

• Products, variants, prices and stock levels
• Product images
• Categories and collections
• Customer names, emails and addresses
• Order history, as a record

What does not, and what to do about it

Some things simply do not transfer, and it is better to know which before you start.

• App-specific data. Anything living inside a third-party Shopify app — loyalty points, subscription schedules, review content — usually has to be exported from that app separately, if at all.
• Discount codes in flight. Recreate them; do not assume they migrate.
• Theme customisations. Your design is rebuilt, not ported. That is true moving between any two platforms.
• Saved payment methods. These stay with the gateway, not the platform. Customers on a subscription will need to re-authorise.

Keeping your SEO

This is the part that causes real damage when it is skipped, and it is entirely avoidable.

Keep your product and category URLs in the same shape wherever you can. For anything that must change, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one before you point the domain, not after. Export your current URL list from Shopify first — that list is the map.

Then check Search Console in the fortnight after the switch. A handful of 404s caught early is a non-event; the same 404s found in month three are lost rankings.

Run both for a fortnight

Build the new store on a temporary address while the old one keeps trading. Load the real catalogue, place real test orders, look at the invoice and the app.

Only when you are satisfied do you point the domain, and that switch takes minutes. There is no window where you have no shop — which is the fear that keeps most people on a platform they have outgrown.

The UAE-specific reason people move

Two, usually. The first is the third-party gateway fee: because Shopify Payments is unavailable here, UAE merchants pay Shopify a percentage on top of their gateway's own charge, and that grows with the business. The arithmetic →

The second is the accumulation of small local mismatches — a postcode field in a country without postcodes, tax added at checkout instead of shown on the shelf, COD as an afterthought. Individually trivial; together, the difference between a shop that feels local and one that feels imported.