Cancel your Shopify subscription without losing what you built

To cancel your Shopify subscription, go to Settings, then Plan, then Cancel plan in your Shopify admin, but export your products, customers and orders first. Once the store is deactivated at the end of your billing cycle, you lose access to the admin unless you reactivate, and reactivating means paying again.

Shopify does not refund subscriptions, not even when you stop halfway through a month or a year. The store stays open until the end of the period you already paid for. Use that time to take everything out, sort out your domain and, if you keep selling elsewhere, redirect your old product URLs. Not sure you need to cancel? Check what you pay now in Shopify cost and whether Shopify is free for what you need.

This guide works through it in three columns: what to export, how to cancel, and what to redirect. First the question to answer for yourself: do you want to stop, or just stop selling for a while?

Pause or close: what each option costs you

Pause and Build is only open to the store owner, after the free trial, on a paid plan, and not on Shopify Plus. The switch takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle, and until then the store keeps taking orders. To stop orders straight away, put the store in private mode with a password page.

What to export before you close the store

Take out everything you will need later while the store is still open. In this order:

Keep invoices and orders for your accounts as well; how long depends on where your business is registered, so ask your accountant. What you may do with customer data after closing depends on the consent you collected. You can also ask Shopify to erase your customers' personal data from a closed store before the two years run out. For comparison, what happens when you leave Wix is in how to cancel Wix.

How to cancel a Shopify subscription, step by step

1. Log in as the store owner. Only the owner can close the store, and Shopify Support cannot do it for you.
2. Go to Settings, then Plan.
3. Click Cancel plan (or Cancel trial during a free trial). Shopify shows the alternatives: a cheaper plan, Pause and Build, or a new store.
4. Review your Shopify-managed domains and pending charges, choose Cancel my plan and uninstall all apps, then Continue.
5. Pick a reason, enter your password and confirm with Cancel plan.

When you cancel, every app is uninstalled and pending charges are billed straight away: app usage, transaction fees and shipping labels. Apps that bill you outside Shopify have to be cancelled at the app itself.

Cancelling during the free trial

In a free trial without a paid plan selected, you do not need to do anything. If you already chose a paid plan during the trial, cancel it yourself to avoid the first bill. Cancel during a promotional pricing period and you do not get back what you paid.

Your domain: keep it, move it or let it go

On closing, your custom domain is disconnected from the store. What happens next depends on where it is registered:

• Bought through ShopifyRenewal does not stop when you cancel. Transfer it to another registrar to keep it; for generic extensions such as .com that is only possible 60 days after registration. The general steps are in how to transfer a domain name.
• Registered elsewhereRemove it from the store and point it to your new site at your registrar. Switch off auto-renewal there if you no longer need it.
• HTTPS stays mandatory for 90 daysShopify keeps an HSTS policy on your domain for 90 days after closing. If the domain points to a site without HTTPS during that time, visitors see an untrusted certificate warning. Any current host with an SSL certificate avoids this.

Either way, your myshopify.com address belongs to that store only. A new store with the same name later gets a different myshopify address.

Redirect your Shopify product URLs

If you keep selling on another platform, every old Shopify page needs a new home. Shopify uses fixed paths you will rarely see elsewhere:

The redirects live on the new site, not at Shopify: after closing, Shopify serves nothing on your domain. One 301 redirect per old URL to the page with the same intent keeps your rankings; sending everything to the homepage throws them away. After the switch, submit the new sitemap and check in Search Console that the 404 count stays flat. The full checklist is in website migration SEO.

Where to go after Shopify

Why you are leaving decides where you go:

• Choose WooCommerce if you want to swap the monthly plan and apps for a system you host and extend yourself, with the upkeep that comes with it. The trade-off is in Shopify or WooCommerce.
• Choose a European platform if you want your data and your contract inside the EU; the options are in Shopify alternatives in Europe.
• Choose a custom store if your process does not fit a standard shop: a product configurator, customer-specific prices, or an integration with your own systems.
• If you stop selling online altogether, keep the domain, put a simple site on it, and redirect the old product URLs to the pages that remain.

If the real issue is the bill, check first whether a cheaper plan would do; the full numbers are in Shopify cost.

Do it yourself or have it done

Cancelling itself has to be done by the owner; nobody else can do it. Exporting is easy to do yourself too. Where it goes wrong is what comes after: a new store that sells from day one, customers who can sign in, and a redirect map that misses no product page. Get help if the store brings in visitors from Google, has more than a few dozen products, or has accounting and stock tied to it. How we build stores you own is on webshop development; for a site without a shop, see website design.

The mistake we see most: closing the store before exporting, then reactivating and paying again just to get the orders out. The runner-up: moving the domain to a host without HTTPS inside the 90 days, with a warning in every browser as a result.

We build and move stores from Ghent, Belgium, for businesses across Europe, with a redirect for every old URL. We do not yet show a client store moved to or from Shopify; we do show how we handle a move, as with Business Centrum, which went from business-office.be to business-centrum.be with a single 301 per URL. See webshop development.