Leaving Shopify Payments? How to Move Your Customer List and Email Flows

If you are weighing a Shopify Payments alternative, the payment rate is only part of the decision. The OneClick Upsell team compares the options and fees in Shopify Payments alternatives: when Whop makes sense. This post is about what comes next: your customers, their consent, and the emails that bring them back.

First, decide what you are actually moving

There are two very different moves:

• Swapping the payment provider but staying on Shopify. Shopify charges an extra fee on every order paid through a third-party gateway: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Your customer list stays in Shopify and nothing below applies.
• Moving some or all products to another checkout, such as Whop. Common for digital products, memberships and courses. This is where you need to move customers and rebuild emails.

Whop's own direct-to-consumer guide says physical goods support is still improving, with custom fields and Zapier webhooks used to collect shipping details. If you ship physical products, test that flow before you move everything.

Export your customers the right way

Shopify's help center explains how: Customers, then Export, then choose "All customers". Above 50 customers, Shopify emails you the file. The export is limited to 15 MB, so very large stores may need several exports by segment.

Before importing anywhere, check one column: Accepts Email Marketing. It is yes or no for each customer.

• Yes: these people can get your marketing emails on the new platform.
• No: they bought from you but did not opt in. You can email them about an order or membership they have, but not promotions. Shopify's own help page warns against emailing people who did not opt in.

Also note that the export does not carry order history in a reusable form. "Total Spent" and "Total Orders" are in the file, but Shopify says it does not import them. If you want to segment by spend later, keep a copy of those columns and turn them into tags before you import.

Tag before you import

Three tags save you a lot of guessing later:

1. Source: "from-shopify".
2. Value: a simple spend bucket, such as "spent-100-plus".
3. Last order: a month or quarter, so you know who is warm.

Rebuild the four flows that matter

Most Shopify stores run a handful of automations through Shopify Email or Klaviyo. On the new checkout, rebuild these first:

Welcome. Fires when someone joins or buys. See our 7-day welcome sequence.

Abandoned checkout. On Shopify this runs from checkout data. On Whop, WhopMail can run it from Whop events. Our abandoned checkout sequence has the copy.

Failed payment (dunning). Only relevant if you sell subscriptions. Whop marks the subscription Past due, emails the buyer and retries over five days before canceling, per its docs. A short personal email from you on day one recovers more than system emails alone.

Win-back. For anyone who has not bought in 90 days. See the win-back flow.

If you sell physical products on Whop, the Whop ecommerce email flows post covers order and shipping emails.

Tell your list about the move

One email is enough, and it should be specific:

• What changed: "Our digital products now check out on Whop."
• What did not: "Your past orders and receipts are still in your Shopify account."
• One link to the new store.

Send it to opted-in customers only. For past buyers who did not opt in, a one-time transactional note is fine only if it relates to something they already bought, such as where to access a course.

Subscriptions on Shopify

Shopify subscriptions usually run through a subscription app. Whop Migrations moves card subscriptions from Stripe, per Whop's June 2026 announcement. It does not list Shopify subscription apps. For those, the practical route is a Whop plan at the same price with a trial that ends on the subscriber's next billing date, then canceling the old subscription once they join.

Sources

• Importing and exporting customer lists (Shopify Help Center)
• Shopify pricing (third-party payment provider fees)
• Direct-to-consumer ecommerce (Whop docs)
• Failed subscription payments (Whop docs)
• Whop Migrations announcement (Whop blog)