To set up a monthly Shopify export routine, you manually export data such as products, orders, and customers into separate CSV files from their respective pages in the Shopify admin. This creates a backup of your data for record-keeping or bulk editing (Shopify Help Center).
Key takeaways
- A Shopify export creates a CSV (comma-separated values) file of your current products, orders, or customer data.
- You can export data for all items, a filtered list, or just the items on the current page in your Shopify admin.
- Exports are useful for creating backups, performing bulk edits in a spreadsheet, or moving data to a new store.
- An export is a static snapshot; the file becomes out of date as soon as the data in your store changes.
- Shopify does not have a single "export everything" button; products, orders, and customers must be exported separately.
How do I export data from Shopify?
Shopify allows you to export products, orders, customers, and inventory data from your admin, each from its own section (Shopify Help Center). The process for each is similar. The steps below are for exporting products, but the same pattern applies to exporting your orders or customer lists.
In Shopify, follow Exporting products.
You should keep an untouched original copy of any export you plan to edit, just in case you need to revert your changes (Exporting products).
Why is a monthly export not a complete backup strategy?
Relying only on monthly exports gives a false sense of security. While exports are a useful task, they are not a complete data strategy because they create disconnected snapshots, not a continuous, reliable record of your store.
This creates several hidden costs:
- Version control issues: When multiple people export files at different times, it becomes difficult to know which version is the most current. This often leads to exporting yet another file just to be safe.
- Stale information: Decisions made from an export are based on past data. If a product's price or inventory level changes minutes after you run the export, your file is already wrong.
- Lost structure: An export flattens your store's data into rows and columns, losing the rich relationships between them, like how an order relates to a customer and specific products. This makes deep analysis difficult without manually rebuilding those connections.
- Gaps in history: A monthly routine leaves a month-long gap between each snapshot. Any changes that happened and were then reversed between exports, like a price change that was quickly corrected, are missed entirely. You see the state at the start and end of the month, but not what happened in between.
An export preserves values but discards the connections and the story of how your data changed over time. According to Beck Technology, for a truer picture of your store's history, you need a system that records changes as they happen.
What data can I export from Shopify?
Shopify's native tools allow you to export several key types of data as separate CSV files. There isn't an option to export all store data in a single action (Exporting products).
| Data Type | What It Includes | What It Leaves Out |
|---|---|---|
| Products | Title, Body (HTML), Vendor, Type, Tags, price, SKU, weight, inventory policy. | Product images themselves are not in the file. The CSV contains URLs to the image files, which must remain publicly viewable online to work. |
| Orders | Order number, customer email and phone, financial and fulfillment status, billing and shipping address, line items, and discounts. | Captured payment data can be included in a transaction history export, but authorization data is not. Order history is from when the order was created, not the current state of the product. |
| Customers | Name, email, phone number, address details, marketing preferences, tags, total orders, and total spent. | Passwords and detailed order history for each customer are not included. |
| Inventory | Product identifiers (like handle and title) and inventory quantities per location. | You can choose to export only "Available" stock or "All states," which includes incoming and other statuses. |
| Staff Users | User ID, name, email, role, and account status. This can be useful for security audits. | This is a list of staff with access to your admin, not a list of your store's customers. |
A worked example
Imagine you run a product export on the first of the month. A product called "Winter Coat" has a price of $150. Your CSV file correctly records this price.
The next day, a staff member accidentally changes the price to $50. They catch the mistake an hour later and change it back to $150.
When you run your next monthly export at the beginning of the following month, the price is still $150. Looking at your two exports, it appears the price never changed. The temporary, incorrect price change is completely invisible. You have no record that it happened, who did it, or how long the product was priced incorrectly. If sales occurred during that hour, you would have no context from your exports as to why.
This is the gap that a snapshot-based backup routine creates.
How Actorly helps fill the export gap
This gives you a more complete picture than a monthly file can. Instead of knowing a product's price was $150 on the first of two different months, you can see the recorded history of changes in between.
Some changes, like those to pages or menus, are found on a schedule: daily on the paid plan and weekly on the free plan. Even a weekly check provides more detail than a monthly export routine.
Frequently asked questions
How do I export my entire Shopify store?
Shopify does not provide a single button to export all store data at once. You need to export products, orders, customers, and other data types separately from their respective sections in the Shopify admin. For tax compliance in some regions, an app from Shopify called Data Exporter can be used to export store data like orders, products, and users (Shopify Help Center).
Do Shopify exports include customer personal data?
Yes, exports of orders and customers contain personal data. A customer export includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. An order export also contains the customer's shipping and billing address. You should handle these files carefully to protect your customers' privacy (Shopify Help Center).
Can I schedule automatic exports from Shopify?
Shopify's native export tools do not offer a scheduling feature. Each export must be started manually from the Shopify admin. Some third-party apps in the Shopify App Store offer automated or scheduled exports (Shopify Help Center).
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