GoDaddy → to Shopify

GoDaddy to Shopify: the store, the URLs and the domain, in the right order

Most GoDaddy stores started as a website with a shop section added later, on the Websites + Marketing builder. That is a sensible way to begin, and a hard way to grow. This guide covers how we move a GoDaddy Online Store to Shopify: what the exports carry, where the gaps are, how the odd GoDaddy URLs are redirected, and how to point a GoDaddy domain at Shopify without breaking the business email that runs on the same domain. If your store runs on GoDaddy’s Managed WooCommerce hosting instead, that is a WooCommerce migration, and our WooCommerce guide is the one to read.

Why stores leave GoDaddy

• The store is a feature of a website builder. Websites + Marketing is built for service businesses and small catalogs. Products are capped at three options, categories at three levels, and there is no multi-location inventory, B2B pricing or real bundle support.
• Few integrations. Email marketing, reviews, subscriptions, ERP and 3PL tools are Shopify-first. On GoDaddy, most of them either do not connect or connect through a workaround.
• Checkout and conversion. Shopify’s checkout, Shop Pay and its accelerated wallets are the conversion gain most stores notice first after a move.
• Product changes at GoDaddy. GoDaddy now runs several builders side by side (the classic Websites + Marketing builder, the AI Website Builder it set to end on July 31, 2026, and the newer Airo products). Owners who have been moved between editors often decide it is time to choose a dedicated commerce platform.
• Reporting. GoDaddy’s commerce reports cover sales and orders. Shopify’s reports, and the apps built on its data, add cohorts, margins and lifetime value.

What migrates from GoDaddy to Shopify

The Websites + Marketing online store has CSV exports for products, orders and customers, plus the GoDaddy Commerce APIs for catalog, orders and customers. Between them they cover the core data. The gaps are in images, SEO fields and add-ons.

Data	Source on GoDaddy	Moves to Shopify?
Products with SKU, name, price, sale price, description, stock, backorder flag, weight, dimensions, tax category, visibility	Commerce, Products, Import/Export (CSV)	Yes. Rows that carry a Parent Product SKU are the option combinations and become Shopify variants.
Options (up to three per product)	Option1 to Option3 name and values columns	Yes, one to one. GoDaddy’s three-option cap matches Shopify’s, so no restructure is needed for options.
Add-ons (list of values or custom text, up to three)	Add-on columns in the same CSV	Not natively. Shopify has no add-on field. We rebuild them as line item properties or with a product options app, and price-changing add-ons get a plan in the audit.
Product images	The spreadsheet format carries one image URL per product	Yes, but the full gallery comes from the API or the live storefront, not the CSV. We download and rehost every image before the GoDaddy plan is canceled.
Categories and subcategories (up to three levels)	Commerce, Products, Categories	Yes, as collections, with the hierarchy carried in menus and tags.
Orders with line items, totals, tax, shipping and status	Commerce, Orders, export with line item details, or the Orders API	Yes. Imported as real orders with the original number, date and a paid transaction. Canceled and refunded orders keep that status.
Customers with names, emails and addresses	Customers export (a CSV link arrives by email) or the Customers API	Yes. Marketing consent is carried only where the export shows it.
Passwords	Not exportable	No. Customers set a new password or use Shopify’s passwordless sign-in.
SEO titles and descriptions	The SEO columns are deprecated in the spreadsheet	Yes, but we take them from a crawl of the live pages, because the export no longer carries them.
Coupons, gift cards, reviews	Admin screens, no reliable export	Coupons recreated as discount codes, balances recreated as Shopify gift cards, reviews moved where the store has them.
Website pages and blog	Builder sections, no content export	Design is rebuilt on Shopify. Pages and posts are moved as content, with their images.

GoDaddy URLs and the redirect map

GoDaddy store URLs sit under whatever page the shop section was added to, followed by an /ols/ segment. On a typical store the product listing is /shop/ols/products or /shop/ols/all, a product is /shop/ols/products/product-slug, and a category is /shop/ols/categories/category-slug. The first segment varies from store to store: we see /shop-1/, /products/ and /shop-all-products/ in the wild, and category slugs sometimes carry a short random suffix such as /shop/ols/categories/phone-cases-86218f. Shopify uses /products/handle, /collections/handle, /pages/handle and /blogs/news/handle.

Because the listing pages render with JavaScript, a simple crawler misses most product links. We build the map from the API’s slugs, a rendered crawl and the Search Console page list, keep the old slug as the Shopify handle wherever it is clean, and request every redirect against the live domain before launch. Website pages and blog posts are mapped from the same crawl.

Pointing a GoDaddy domain at Shopify

Many GoDaddy owners want to keep the domain at GoDaddy, and that is fine. You do not need to transfer the registration to use it with Shopify. What changes is where the domain points.

• Automatic connection. For domains registered at GoDaddy, Shopify can connect the domain for you from Settings, Domains, Connect existing domain, after you approve access in your GoDaddy account.
• Manual connection. In GoDaddy’s DNS settings, the root A record (host @) points to 23.227.38.65 and the www CNAME points to shops.myshopify.com. Shopify’s help center also lists an AAAA record (2620:0127:f00f:5::) and asks that any other A and AAAA records on the root be deleted, since a domain can have only one of each pointing at the store. We check those values against help.shopify.com on the day of the change.
• Timing. Shopify verifies the records within minutes, but the change can take up to 48 hours to reach everyone. There is usually a short window, often an hour or less, where some visitors still see the old site, which is why we cut over at a quiet time.
• Clear out the builder’s settings first. GoDaddy forwarding or a builder connection on the same domain can override the new records, so we check for both before the switch.

Keeping GoDaddy email working

If your mailboxes are GoDaddy’s Microsoft 365 or Professional Email, they live on the same DNS zone as the website, and a careless cutover is how shops lose email for a day. The rule is simple: only the root A record, the AAAA record and the www CNAME change. MX records, the autodiscover and other mail CNAMEs, the SPF TXT record and any DKIM or verification records stay exactly as they are. We export the full zone before touching it, change only those records, and send and receive a test message from each mailbox after the switch. If Shopify Email or Klaviyo will send from your domain, their authentication records are added to the existing SPF record rather than creating a second one, because a domain can have only one SPF record.

Tools

Cart2Cart and LitExtension both list GoDaddy as a source, and both are fine for a first pass on products and customers. Cart2Cart is an RDA partner and we use it where it fits. Neither carries tracking numbers on shipped orders, both tend to model refunded orders as plain paid orders, and redirects built by a tool are based on guessed slugs, which matters on GoDaddy because the store path and category suffixes differ from site to site. We finish those parts ourselves, and we still collect the full image galleries and add-ons, which no tool maps cleanly.

How we run it

1. Audit. Exports, API access, a rendered crawl, add-on and image inventory, the DNS zone and mail records, and a fixed-price scope.
2. Build in a free Shopify development store. As a Shopify Plus Partner we build in a development store, so you pay Shopify nothing until launch. Theme, checkout, payments, shipping and taxes are set up there.
3. Catalog. Products, variants, full image galleries, add-ons rebuilt, collections and SEO fields from the crawl.
4. Customers, with addresses and the consent the export supports.
5. Orders, with original numbers, dates, statuses and refunds.
6. Redirects for products, categories, listing pages, website pages and posts.
7. Sample, then full import, with a reconciliation of every count against the export before we move on.
8. Cutover with a delta sync of new orders and customers, then the DNS change with email records untouched.
9. Post-launch SEO evaluation, once Google has re-crawled the store and the first real analytics exist, including a 404 review and fixes.

Cost and timeline

A GoDaddy to Shopify migration starts from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores), and typically takes six to eight weeks. Larger stores, marketplace connections and custom integrations are a fixed price after the audit. Terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures.

Add-ons, services and appointments

GoDaddy’s online store sells more than physical products. Add-ons such as engraving or gift wrap, digital products, and services with appointment booking all live in the same admin, and each needs its own plan on Shopify. Custom text add-ons become line item properties on the product form. List add-ons that change the price are either rebuilt as a real option, where the product has fewer than three, or handled by a product options app. Digital products move to a digital downloads app with the files re-uploaded. Appointments do not fit Shopify’s product model well, so we usually recommend a booking app that works without turning each service into a product, or an embedded scheduler, and we move upcoming bookings with the client’s sign-off.

Marketplaces, payments and shipping

GoDaddy stores can list products on marketplaces from the same admin. Those listings need to be reconnected from Shopify, and the order matters: we finish and stabilize the Shopify catalog first, then connect the marketplace channel, because connecting early creates duplicate listings. GoDaddy Payments does not move, so Shopify Payments is usually set up in its place, with payouts and tax details re-entered by you. Shipping rules are rebuilt as Shopify shipping zones. If you want live carrier rates at checkout, third-party carrier-calculated shipping needs Shopify Advanced or Plus, or Grow with annual billing, so that question is settled in the audit before the plan is chosen.

Images and SEO fields before you cancel

Two details catch GoDaddy owners out. The first is images: the spreadsheet format carries a single image URL per product, and the images are served from GoDaddy’s servers, which stop answering once the plan ends. We collect every gallery image from the API or the storefront and rehost it on Shopify before anything is canceled. The second is SEO: GoDaddy has deprecated the SEO title and description columns in its product spreadsheet, so an export alone silently loses them. We read the live title and meta description of every product, category and page and load them into Shopify’s SEO fields, so the listings Google shows today carry across.

What you get at handover

A reconciliation ledger that runs from the GoDaddy export counts to the live Shopify counts for products, variants, images, customers and orders, with every exclusion named; a redirect verification list with the status each old URL returned; the add-on mapping; a before and after copy of the DNS zone showing that mail records were not changed; and a recorded walkthrough of the Shopify admin for your team.

Questions we settle in the survey

• Is the store on Websites + Marketing, or on GoDaddy’s WooCommerce hosting?
• Which products use add-ons, and do any change the price?
• Where is the domain registered, and who hosts the email?
• Do you sell services, appointments or digital products?
• Do you need live carrier rates, which decides the Shopify plan?

Frequently asked questions

Start with the migration survey. If your GoDaddy site runs on WordPress, see the WooCommerce guide, and for another website builder with a store attached, the Wix migration guide.