Why Are Businesses Leaving Shopify in 2026?

I am Manoj, an open-source implementation consultant at Mith Tech in Bengaluru. I build Medusa.js storefronts for brands in India and abroad, so I am hardly a neutral party — moving people off Shopify is literally what I get paid for. Which is why this piece spends as much time on the case for staying as the case for leaving. Honest take: most of the people who email me saying they want to leave Shopify should not, and I tell them so on the first call.

Try it: is your problem actually Shopify?

Answer five questions honestly. This tool says "stay" more often than it says "go". Which is the correct distribution — most merchants who reach for a migration have a tier problem, an agency problem, or a grievance.

What actually makes a business leave Shopify?

A specific blocked capability, or fee arithmetic that has stopped making sense. That is the honest list. When I read through months of merchant discussion for this piece — including a 277-comment Leaving Shopify thread on r/shopify — the businesses leaving Shopify for real all traced back to one of those two, and the ones that were only grievances stayed grievances.

The most useful example came from a merchant who had already done it. Their reason was not price and not support: they needed credit lines, custom payment options, wholesale workflows, and control over their own commission and pricing logic. Those are things a hosted platform will not build for one merchant, at any tier. That is a real migration trigger.

Compare that with the complaints that dominate by volume — support wait times, monthly price increases, app fatigue. Every one is legitimate. None of them survives contact with the alternative, because the alternative has no support desk at all.

Skimmable summary: Migrations are driven by blocked capabilities and fee arithmetic. Support quality and plan pricing are complaints, not triggers — leaving makes support strictly worse.

The complaints themselves cluster into six categories. Each one below carries the evidence merchants actually posted, and an honest verdict on whether it justifies a move.

Why do Shopify's fees stop making sense as you grow?

Because they are percentages, and the cost of serving you is roughly flat. A store doing ten times the revenue does not cost Shopify ten times as much to host — but it pays close to ten times as much. Below a certain size that gap is irrelevant and Shopify is extraordinary value. Above it, the same gap quietly funds a full-time engineer.

The 2026 numbers make the direction clear. The Basic plan moved from $29 to $39 a month and the standard plan from $79 to $105 — increases of roughly a third. On Shopify Plus, merchants who had been paying around $2,000 a month reported renewal quotes in the $2,300–2,500 range, and analysts describe 2026 Plus pricing as having settled into a higher band. Those are the visible numbers. The ones that actually decide the question are the percentages stacked underneath.

Here is where the money actually goes on a growing store:

1. The plan fee — the only number most merchants quote, and usually the smallest.
2. The platform transaction fee — 0.5–2% of every sale if you do not use Shopify Payments. In India you have no choice, because Shopify Payments is not available there.
3. The gateway's own MDR — another 2–3%, plus 18% GST on that fee in India.
4. The app stack — one merchant of six years put it plainly: "Every month when I look at my bill over 1/3 of it is app charges." That thread ran to 199 comments of agreement.
5. Apps priced on your revenue — mobile-app builders list tiers at $250, $500 and $1,000 a month with further charges based on in-app performance, and some take a percentage above a threshold.
6. Currency conversion — 1.5% on every transaction in a non-primary currency.
7. Chargebacks — a $15 dispute fee, and industry data putting the true loss at around $4.61 per dollar disputed once operational cost is counted.

The question that matters is not "is Shopify expensive?" It is: at what monthly GMV do my platform, app and gateway fees exceed what it costs to own the stack? Below that line, staying is obviously right. Above it, you are renting something you could own — and the gap widens every month you grow.

Skimmable summary: Shopify's pricing is percentage-based while its cost to serve is flat. Plan fees are a distraction; the transaction, gateway, app and conversion percentages decide the question, and in India they stack worst.

What can't you change on Shopify — even on Plus?

The checkout, primarily — and the checkout is where most brands actually differentiate. Shopify deprecated checkout.liquid in two phases: information, shipping and payment pages in August 2024, then the thank-you and order-status pages in August 2025. From January 2025 it began automatically upgrading stores still using it, with 30 days' notice, and the customisations went with the upgrade.

The replacement, Checkout Extensibility, is a genuinely better architecture — safer, upgrade-proof, properly sandboxed. But it is bounded by design. One analysis of the April 2026 Checkout Editor found it covers roughly 80% of checkout.liquid use cases for most Plus stores. If your brand lives in the other 20%, that number is not reassuring.

There was a second cost most merchants did not see coming. The extensibility migration broke pixels and analytics on thank-you and order-status pages, and it broke them quietly — the symptom looks like underperforming ad campaigns until someone digs into Events Manager weeks later.

The clearest inventory of what remains out of reach came from a merchant in that r/shopify thread, listing what Shopify's checkout still will not do: custom checkout steps, custom fields without workarounds, conditional rules, real B2B checkout flows, multi-level approval processes, customer-specific or dependent payment methods, multiple shipping options, genuine multi-dimensional tiered pricing, and nested or dependent product options.

Skimmable summary: checkout.liquid is gone and its replacement covers about 80% of previous use cases. Custom steps, conditional rules and B2B approval flows remain out of reach — and the migration silently broke thank-you-page tracking.

Are there limits Shopify doesn't tell you about?

Yes, and they are the least-discussed reason large catalogues leave. In a long-running Shopify Community thread titled Shopify limitations, lies — the truth that no one tells you, merchants documented ceilings they only discovered by hitting them and then getting support to state them in writing.

One merchant was told directly: "Shopify does not support stores with more than 100,000 products. This is due to technical limitations." Another reported that past 50,000 products, you may create only 1,000 new products or variants in any 24-hour period. A third was told they had exceeded a storage limit while on a plan advertising unlimited storage, and support declined to say what the limit was.

The degradation before those hard walls matters just as much. Merchants in that thread reported collection filters and search failing past roughly 5,000 displayed products, sitemap generation failing on large catalogues, and CSV imports returning rateLimitExceeded and Net::OpenTimeout errors on routine bulk operations.

For a fashion brand with 400 SKUs, none of this will ever matter. For a distributor with 80,000 line items and a supplier feed that adds thousands a week, it is the entire conversation.

Skimmable summary: Merchants report a ~100,000-product ceiling, throttled creation past 50,000, unpublished storage caps, and search/filter degradation past ~5,000 products. These are architectural limits, not plan upgrades.

What happens to your data if you leave?

Some of it comes with you. A meaningful amount does not — and this is the part almost nobody checks before signing up.

Exports are CSV-only, capped around 15MB per file, with incomplete metafield support — and metafields are where most mature stores keep the product data they actually care about. More significantly, the standard data export reaches back only to 1 January 2019. Anything older is not in the file.

Then there is the category that does not export at all: analytics history, attribution data, abandoned-cart detail, and customer journey behaviour. Your transactional records leave; the years of behavioural context that make those records mean something stay behind. There is also no raw database access — no SQL, no arbitrary joins, everything through rate-limited APIs.

Two practical traps catch people mid-migration:

• Customer passwords cannot be migrated. Every customer gets a forced reset on cutover. On a large base that is a measurable churn event, and it needs to be planned as a marketing campaign, not a technical footnote.
• If your domain is registered with Shopify, that is one more thing to untangle under time pressure. Merchants who have been through it advise moving the registrar well before you need to.

This is worth taking seriously in both directions. Ask the same question of whatever you move to. The reason I push clients toward self-hosted platforms is not ideology — it is that when the database is yours, "can we leave?" stops being a question anyone has to research.

Skimmable summary: Exports are CSV-only, capped, and reach back only to 2019. Analytics, attribution and behavioural history do not export at all, and every customer is force-reset on cutover.

Does Shopify work as a back office?

No, and it does not claim to. Shopify is a storefront and an order system. Once your operation involves making things rather than only reselling them, the gaps are structural rather than cosmetic.

Shopify has no bill of materials. There is no way to define which raw materials or components make up a finished product, no raw-material consumption on sale or assembly, and no component-level stock. It tracks finished goods, full stop. It also has no native bundles, kits or assemblies — Plus manages inventory at product and variant level only — and no forecasting or production planning.

For B2B the picture is similar. Beyond customer-specific price lists, merchants point to a minimum-order-amount capability that existed in the old Wholesale Channel and did not survive into B2B on Shopify, no multi-level approval workflows, no customer-specific payment methods, and no genuine multi-dimensional tiered pricing. Shopify's own B2B positioning is that you integrate your preferred ERP — which is an honest answer, and also an admission that the back office is out of scope.

That second box is the fork in the road, and it does not automatically mean leaving. Bolting an inventory or ERP system onto Shopify is a perfectly reasonable architecture, and I set those up too — see the ERPNext Shopify integration guide if that is your situation. You only replace the storefront when the storefront itself is the thing blocking you. When it is, Medusa.js is the replacement, because it gives you the commerce layer as code you control and leaves you free to put whatever back office you like behind it.

Skimmable summary: Shopify has no BOM, no component stock, no production planning and no bundles. For manufacturers the back office must live elsewhere — which may mean adding an ERP behind Shopify, not replacing it.

Why is India a special case?

Because Shopify structurally cannot produce a legally compliant invoice for an Indian seller, and cannot process Indian payments itself.

Shopify Payments is unavailable in India under RBI payment-aggregator licensing rules. Every Indian merchant therefore runs a third-party gateway and pays Shopify's surcharge on top of the gateway's own MDR, plus 18% GST on that MDR. That is the fee stack in §2, and it is the highest-percentage version of Shopify anywhere.

The compliance gap is sharper still. Shopify does not generate a GST-compliant invoice — it does not split CGST and SGST automatically or produce a Rule 46 compliant document, and Shopify's own help centre directs Indian merchants to third-party apps for this. There is no native IRN or e-invoicing either, which stops being a convenience question and becomes a legal one once your annual aggregate turnover crosses the e-invoicing threshold.

Add the operational realities — RBI e-mandate and additional-factor-authentication rules breaking recurring payments where a gateway is not compliant, unrestricted COD driving RTO losses, gateways buckling under Diwali peak load — and the Indian D2C brand ends up paying platform fees, app fees and gateway fees while still bolting on the thing that makes its invoices legal.

None of this makes Shopify unusable in India — thousands of successful brands run on it. It does mean the value equation is materially worse there than the global marketing suggests. And it exposes the difference that actually matters: on an owned stack like Medusa.js, the invoice is a document you generate, so a Rule 46 layout and an IRN call are things you build once. On Shopify, the invoice is a document you rent, and no amount of budget lets you change it.

Skimmable summary: Shopify Payments is unavailable in India, so fees stack to roughly 4–5%. Shopify cannot produce a Rule 46 GST invoice or an IRN natively — compliance requires third-party apps.

What's the honest case for staying on Shopify?

Strong enough that I talk most people out of leaving. This is the part the "Shopify is a scam" content never writes, and it is the part that decides whether your migration succeeds. Most businesses leaving Shopify who are unhappy afterwards left for a reason from the bottom half of the table in the first section.

The invisible plumbing is the actual product. As one agency veteran put it in that r/shopify thread: hosting, PCI compliance, cookie compliance, integrations with every marketing tool, feed mapping — "'Just' developers and programmers is a VERY strong 'just' when you're comparing over a decade of R&D." You do not see any of that work because Shopify does it. You will see all of it the day you own it.

If support is your complaint, leaving is the wrong fix. The sharpest reply in the whole thread: you are complaining about customer service, and in the next breath proposing to build from scratch — going from some support to zero support. That is unanswerable, and it applies to most people who say they want out.

Most "we lack control" complaints are misdiagnosed. A Shopify Expert in that discussion argued the real cause is almost always one of three things: you are on the wrong tier and expecting Plus capabilities, you are asking Shopify to do something outside its scope, or your agency is the actual problem. Rule those out before you spend a rupee on migration.

The numbers on building are sobering. A developer with 25 years' experience said a full rebuild still took six months. An agency estimate in the same thread was around $300,000 and a year for something genuinely reliable. Another experienced commenter advised budgeting honestly for the first twelve months of dev and ops before you reach stability. And the maintenance never ends — "the hidden cost is always the ongoing maintenance once you own the whole stack."

Below roughly $10M GMV, hosted SaaS usually wins on pure economics — the platform fee is noise next to the engineering cost of running your own backend.

That is the bar. Not annoyance — a specific, unsolvable problem. If you cannot name yours in one sentence, you are not ready to leave.

Skimmable summary: Shopify invisibly handles PCI, fraud, tax, hosting and uptime. Leaving over support makes support worse, most control complaints are tier or agency problems, and a serious rebuild is commonly six figures and a year.

How do you decide whether to leave?

Work through these in order. Most businesses stop at step two, and that is the right outcome.

If you get to step six and the case still holds, the destination worth evaluating first is Medusa.js — MIT-licensed, self-hosted, no platform cut of your sales, and the option merchants in these threads spoke about most warmly. It is not friction-free: its plugin ecosystem is thin next to Shopify's app store, and you need a developer. For B2B specifically, the Medusa vs Shopify Plus comparison goes deeper on where each one lands.

Skimmable summary: Name the blocker, rule out tier and agency, do the fee arithmetic, audit your exportable data, price the invisible plumbing, then pilot one channel before committing.

Frequently asked questions

Are lots of businesses leaving Shopify?

No — Shopify keeps growing, and the businesses leaving Shopify are a small, specific minority. What has grown is the volume of discussion about leaving, driven by the 2026 price rises and the withdrawal of phone support. Treat forum threads as a source of failure modes to check against your own situation, not as evidence of an exodus.

Is Shopify getting worse in 2026?

Not technically — the platform is more capable than it has ever been. What changed is the commercial posture: plan prices rose roughly a third, Plus renewals moved into a higher band, phone support was withdrawn, and more capability now sits behind apps that charge on your revenue. Merchants describing Shopify as "worse" are usually describing cost and support, not the product.

At what revenue does leaving Shopify make financial sense?

There is no universal number, because it depends on your fee mix rather than your revenue. Do the arithmetic instead: total your annual plan fee, platform transaction fee, gateway MDR, app subscriptions and currency conversion charges, then compare that to one competent developer's annual cost plus hosting. If your fees are not comfortably larger than that, owning the stack will cost you more, not less.

Can Medusa.js fully replace Shopify?

Yes, as a commerce platform — Medusa covers products, carts, checkout, orders, payments, inventory, promotions and an admin, MIT-licensed and self-hosted with no cut of your sales. What it does not replace is Shopify's surrounding service: hosted infrastructure, PCI scope, fraud scoring, tax calculation and a support desk all become yours. Medusa replaces the platform; it does not replace the operations team the platform stood in for.

What is the best Shopify alternative?

For teams with a developer, Medusa.js is the strongest open-source option — MIT-licensed, self-hosted, no platform transaction fee, and the one experienced merchants recommend most consistently. WooCommerce suits WordPress-centric content businesses but carries a real maintenance and security burden. BigCommerce is the sidestep if you want to stay on hosted SaaS. Building entirely from scratch is almost never the right answer.

Will I lose my SEO rankings if I migrate off Shopify?

You will lose some traffic temporarily unless the migration is planned properly, and the URL structure is the main reason. Shopify forces /products/ and /collections/ paths, so any new platform changes your URLs and every one needs a 301 redirect mapped in advance. Budget for a ranking dip of several weeks even on a well-executed move, and never migrate during your peak season.

Why can't Shopify issue a GST invoice in India?

Because Shopify was not built for Indian tax law. It does not automatically split CGST and SGST or produce a Rule 46 compliant tax invoice, and it has no native IRN or e-invoicing capability. Shopify's own help centre directs Indian merchants to third-party invoicing apps. Above the e-invoicing turnover threshold this is a legal requirement, so the app is mandatory rather than optional — verify the current threshold with CBIC for your turnover.

Is Shopify Payments really available everywhere?

No. It is unavailable in India, among other markets, because of RBI payment-aggregator licensing requirements. Where Shopify Payments is unavailable you must use a third-party gateway, and Shopify charges an additional platform transaction fee of roughly 0.5–2% on top of that gateway's own processing fee — so the same store costs materially more to run there than in a Shopify Payments market.

Closing

The honest summary of everything above: Shopify is a very good landlord, and most merchants complaining about it should stay. The platform handles PCI, fraud, tax, hosting and peak-season capacity invisibly, and the people who leave over support or monthly price reliably end up worse off.

But a landlord will never build the one room your business needs. When the thing blocking you is a capability no tier unlocks — a B2B approval flow, a credit line, a pricing model, a legally compliant invoice — no amount of goodwill toward Shopify changes the answer. Name that blocker in one sentence, or stay put. If you can name it, Medusa.js is where to look next.