Goal: Copy all data from an existing Shopify store to a new store, including products, orders, customers, collections, files, metaobjects, metafield definitions, discounts, and more.

Video walkthrough: Watch the 9‑minute video

Prerequisites:

In your old store, open Altera and click New Export. Select all the data types you want to transfer. Common choices include:

For each data type, expand the field selection and choose the fields you need. If you do not have a large amount of data, selecting All for each data type is the easiest approach. If you have many products and want to speed up the export, you can deselect fields you do not need (such as variant metafields).

Set the file format to Excel. This places all data types into a single workbook, which makes the import straightforward.

Click Start Export to begin generating the file.

Once the export is complete, click Download Output to save the Excel workbook to your computer.

You can open the file to verify the data. Each tab in the workbook corresponds to a data type (for example, Products, Files, Metaobject Definitions, Metafield Definitions).

Before importing, configure a few settings in the new store to avoid issues.

Go to Settings > Notifications > Staff Notifications and turn off new order notifications for all recipients. This prevents you from receiving an email for every imported order. See How to Disable Staff Email Notifications for New Orders for detailed steps.

Go to Settings > Shipping and Delivery and confirm that Automatically fulfill orders is not enabled. This is disabled by default, but verify it before importing.

If your old store has gift card products, go to Products > Gift Cards in the Shopify admin and click Add gift card product. You do not need to create a gift card, but this step accepts the terms of service so that gift card products can be imported without errors.

Some apps create their own metaobject definitions that Altera cannot recreate because they are protected by Shopify. For example, the Shopify Knowledge Base app creates FAQ metaobject definitions. If your old store uses these, install the relevant app on the new store and create at least one record before importing. This forces the app to create its metaobject definitions on the new store.

In the new store, open Altera and click Upload File. Select the Excel workbook you downloaded in Step 2.

Altera displays a summary of all data types found in the file. Review any warnings the app provides. For example, stores on free plans may see a warning about Shopify rate limits on order creation. Warnings about app-owned metaobject definitions are expected if you have not installed the related apps.

Once everything looks good, click Start Import.

Altera processes the data types in the correct dependency order automatically. For example, metafield definitions are imported before products that depend on them. You do not need to worry about the order of tabs in your spreadsheet.

As the import runs, you can scroll down to see a preview of the results for each data type. Unlike other tools, you do not need to wait for the full import to finish and download a results file to check progress.

File imports (images and videos) may take longer because Altera downloads each file from the old store.

All selected data is now in the new store. Verify the migration by checking:

Once you have confirmed the migration is complete, you can deactivate the old store. Re-enable staff email notifications on the new store by going to Settings > Notifications > Staff Notifications.