Matrixify has a feature that will allow you to duplicate/clone your Shopify store. We have made it so this process is a smooth experience for you!
The starting point
As an example, we are starting by having a Pet Shop store with some Products, some Smart Collections, some Custom Collections with Products in them, Customers and Discounts. We are going to clone this store to another store we have.
As most of the store settings cannot be set by the app then there are few things you must do in the new store before migrating your data.
We also recommend going through our Import checklist before migrating as well!
Disable automatic Order fulfillment
(skip if not migrating Orders)
First, we would need to make sure that if we are migrating Orders then Shopify should not send out any emails to the customers automatically.
Go into your new stores Shopify Admin -> Settings -> Checkout. On this page find the section “Order Processing“.
Then make sure that “After an order has been paid” is set to “Do not automatically fulfill any of the order’s line items”
This is needed so that when importing Orders, the app can fulfill orders with details as they are in the file. Otherwise, Shopify can fulfill orders automatically before the app can do that and Shopify would also automatically send out fulfillment notification emails.
Disable Staff Order notifications
(skip if not migrating Orders)
For each created order in Shopify, the store owner and possibly other store staff members receive a notification email.
To disable these Staff notifications go into Shopify Admin -> Settings -> Notifications and find the section “Staff order notifications“.
Under “Recipients” you can disable notifications to any recipients there are. Do not delete the recipient so that you can enable these notifications after finishing the migration.
Set up locations
Next, you would need to set up locations in your new store to be the same as the location in the original store.
This is needed so that Matrixify can replicate Product Inventory and Order Fulfillments.
Go into your Shopify Admin -> Settings -> Locations in both of your stores. Make sure that the “Locations” section in the new store has the same locations as the original store.
It is important that the Location Name is the same in both stores as the app will be using names to match locations. Address of the location doe not matter.
Set up custom data definitions
If you are also migrating Metafields and/or Metaobjects between your stores, then for the app to re-create them correctly, you would first need to set up definitions in your Shopify Admin.
Go into Settings -> Custom Data in both of your stores and make sure to set up definitions for any Metafields and Metaobjects in the new store to be the same as in the original store.
If the same definitions are not set up in the new store then importing Metaobjects will fail to import because Matixify is importing Metaobject entries that are linked to specific Metaobject definitions.
Metafields would not fail if imported without pre-existing definitions but would be created as “Metafields without definitions”.
This will cause issues with “Rich text” or any reference type metafields as Shopify does not allow creating those types of definitions from “Metafields without definition”, only when setting up new definitions in the store.
1. Export from your existing Store
Once the Shopify settings are set up you can head back to the Original store to export the data.
In the Matrixify app Home page in the Export section click “New Export” and this will open a New Export page.
On this page select items that you wish to clone to your new store.
It is preferred to select the “Matrixify: CSV” format if exporting a lot of data, but if you know that you will be editing data before importing then select the “Matrixify: Excel” format.
When selecting checkboxes there are many fields that have an “Export Only” tag. Those do not need to be selected as they slow down export and cannot be migrated anyway.
When cloning Products and Collections, you also should not select the “Collections” checkbox under Products, as this information will be exported with Smart Collections and Custom Collections details and would otherwise slow down export and later import.
If cloning all information that Matrixify allows then the New Export page should look as in the following screenshot (click on it to view in full length).
If you are using reference Metafields, then you will need to also include those entities being referenced.
For example, if you wish to migrate only Products but they include Metafields that reference Collections, then you will need to also migrate Collections for the reference Metafields to be migrated.
When the export has finished, press that green Download Exported File button to get your Shopify data as a zip or Excel file:
2. Import the Zip or Excel file
If you simply want to copy the contents of one Shopify store to another, you even don’t have to look inside that file.
Just go to your new Shopify store, install the Matrixify app, and in the Import section of the app upload your previously exported file.
When you upload that Zip or Excel file, the app will analyze it, and show you all the Zip file CSV files or Excel Sheets it found inside, and how many items it found in each Sheet.
Then press the blue “Import” button to start the import.
“Metafield […] […] not found by […]” warning
If you receive a warning message that the metafield referenced entity is not found then you would need to reimport the data.
For example, if one product is referencing another product that is exported later in the file, then the app might not have yet created that product to reference it.
Importing the same file again would resolve the issue as the first import should have created all the products and thus now the reference Metafields can be correctly linked.
3. Go, Check Your Shopify Store Clone
See?
Notice that the store name is different, URL is different. No joking – everything is there the same as it was in that Pet Shop store.
Good To Know
- That other store can have items there already. When you clone the Shopify store by this method, the additional items will be added, and the ones that have the same Handle (or E-mail, or Discount code) will be updated. Others will not be touched.
- If you open the Excel file you downloaded, you will notice that it’s perfectly human-readable. If you need to, you can change, add or remove data there, and do the import again in all your stores.
- After the import is complete, you can download the “Import Results” Excel file, where the last 2 columns (
Import ResultandImport Comment) will show you the result for each row. This is helpful when something failed in the import – you will see the failure reason there. - You can use this method to translate your store items to whatever other languages you have in your other store. Export it to Excel, give to the professional translator that Excel file, and import the translated file into your new store.
- If you have two stores in separate languages, you can import column updates to both of them, without touching the translated columns (like inventory quantity or price). Only then those items need to have the same Handles, as this is how the app will identify that they are the same ones to update.
- If you need to set up the automatic repeated data copying between Shopify stores every day/week/month, you can follow this tutorial.
Where To Go From Here?
- Create a second store.
- Install the Bulk Import Export Update with Excel app to your Shopify store. Actually to all of your stores, so that you can clone them back and forth.
- Activate your free additional store in the Matrixify settings.
- Read other Tutorials, to get an idea of what else can you do besides cloning your Shopify store.
- Read the detailed Column Descriptions of all columns (fields) that you can export and import.
