We make a registry app, and this checklist is the one we work from. It's written so it's usable whoever you're moving to, because the sequence isn't ours: it comes from what breaks when the steps happen in the wrong order.
Two things here are genuinely irreversible if you get them backwards. Everything else is recoverable with a bit of annoyance. The irreversible pair is marked where it appears.
Decide this before you contact anyone
One question, and it sets everything else: are your registries busy right now?
A store with quiet registries can migrate any week and nobody notices. A store in the middle of its season, with lists that are half bought and events three weeks out, has a different job, because gifted progress is the thing most likely to be lost and the loss is customer-facing. Guests who already bought get asked again.
So before you email anyone, look at how many active registries have purchases against them. That number decides whether you're doing this now or after your season, and it's worth five minutes.
The related question, which you can't answer alone, is whether your current app's export carries purchase records. Some do. Where it doesn't, gifted progress has to be reconstructed from your Shopify order history, which is usually possible and is never free. There's a full account of that in what actually transfers.
Stage 1: get the export
- Ask your current provider for a full export, CSV or spreadsheet.
- Ask for it raw. Explicitly tell them not to reformat, clean up or select columns. Tidying is where the field you needed gets dropped for looking redundant.
- Check it contains registrant email addresses. Without them, migrated registries can never be claimed by their owners, and there's no fixing that later.
- Check items carry SKU or barcode. Product name alone is a fuzzy match and gets ambiguous fast on a catalog with colour and size variants.
- Push for purchase records rather than a purchased count. A count has nowhere to live.
- Include closed and past registries. They're cheap to bring and they keep your reporting continuous.
- Save a copy somewhere that isn't your inbox.
The export request is often the longest part of the whole migration, and it's the part neither you nor your new app controls. Start it first, before anything else on this list.
Stage 2: check before you pick a date
This is the stage people skip, and it's the one that makes a date real rather than optimistic.
- 1
Match the export's SKUs against your Shopify catalog
Every registry item has to resolve to a real variant to be purchasable. SKU format and catalog coverage are separate problems: a perfectly formatted export still fails on a store whose registry assortment was never fully synced into Shopify. This check takes about an hour and it's what a quoted date should be based on.
- 2
Establish whether gifted progress can be rebuilt
Where the export carries purchase records, this is straightforward. Where it carries a count or nothing, the question becomes whether past registry purchases went through Shopify and can still be matched to the right registry and item. The answer changes when you should migrate.
- 3
Confirm the registry path your new app will use
It's a per-store setting rather than a universal one, so yours may not be the default. This value goes into every row of the redirect file, so getting it wrong is an error repeated identically hundreds of times.
- 4
Count what will not come across
Ask for a plain list: items that resolve to nothing, registries missing an email, registries whose progress can't be rebuilt. A short list is normal. Knowing its length before you start is what stops it becoming a surprise.
Stage 3: the move itself
Your current app stays installed and running through all of this. That's not a nicety, it's what makes the whole thing safe: every link your customers hold keeps resolving, and your registrants carry on using the app they already know while the work happens.
- Registries are imported and the results checked in your own admin, before anything is visible on your storefront.
- Review a handful of migrated registries by hand. Pick your most complicated one deliberately rather than your simplest.
- Confirm gifted progress looks right on two or three registries you know the real state of.
- Get the redirect file generated from the migrated data. It can only be built after the import, because it maps each old registry identifier to the registry it became.
- Configure how the widget looks on your storefront now, while nothing is live yet, rather than in the ten minutes after you switch over.
Stage 4: switch-over day, in order
The order below exists to keep the dead-link window at zero rather than merely short.
- 1
Import the redirect file into Shopify
Online Store, then Navigation, then URL Redirects, then Import. It's a platform-level feature, so it works regardless of theme or app.
- 2
Uninstall the old app
The moment its path stops being routed to it, your redirects take over. Shopify removes a theme app extension's blocks on uninstall, so there's nothing to clean out of your theme afterwards.
- 3
Enable the new app's storefront blocks
The embed and any blocks you want on product or account pages. Have this planned before the day rather than decided on it.
- 4
Test three real links from real emails
Take registry links out of emails your store actually sent, ideally from different months, and open them in a private window. Two minutes, and it catches a wrong path across the entire file.
- 5
Walk one registry end to end as a guest
Open it, add something to a cart, buy it if you can, and confirm the registry updates. This is the check that covers everything the other checks don't.
Stage 5: the week after
- Email affected registrants about passwords. Anyone who set a password on their registry needs to set a new one, because passwords are stored hashed and never transfer between apps. This is short and it's much better arriving from you than being discovered.
- Leave the redirects in place permanently. They cost nothing, and there's no way to know when the last guest will click a link from an invitation sent two years ago.
- Keep the export. It's the only thing that makes the move reversible, and its value doesn't expire.
- Watch for registries nobody claimed. A registrant who can't sign in usually means an email that didn't match. It's fixable while you still remember the migration.
- Check your reporting looks continuous. If you migrated closed registries too, last year's numbers should still be there.
Questions, answered honestly
- How long should we allow?
- The export request is the unpredictable part and it's outside anyone's control, so start it first. Once the file exists, the checking is about an hour, and the move itself is normally a matter of days rather than weeks. A date should follow the checks rather than precede them.
- Do we need a maintenance window?
- No. Your current app runs until you uninstall it, and the new one isn't visible until you enable its blocks. There's no interval where your storefront has no registry.
- What's the single most common mistake?
- Uninstalling before exporting. It's irreversible and it happens because uninstalling feels like the natural first step of leaving. It's the last step.
- Can we migrate in stages, some registries now and some later?
- Technically yes, but it means running both apps and two sets of links at once, and the redirect file gets built twice. It's usually more work than moving everything and choosing a quieter week.
- What should we tell our customers?
- About links, nothing: those resolve through the redirects. About passwords, one short email to the registrants who set one. Anything beyond that invites questions about a change they'd otherwise never notice.
If you're moving from a specific app, there's Gift Reggie and Swym. The link question goes deeper on redirects than this checklist does, and the migration page covers how we run the move with you.