For bands · rung 0

Own the exits. An hour, $0.

Do this and stay where you are. Nothing changes for fans. It just means that if the plan price goes up, or the terms do, leaving is a weekend instead of a crisis. Print it; tick it.

Back

The domain

• Look yourself up at ICANN Lookup. The registrar named there is where your domain lives. If it says Shopify (or Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy through a website builder), you don’t hold the keys.
• Bought through Shopify? Transfer it out: Shopify admin → Settings → Domains → the domain → Transfer domain, then follow Shopify’s own steps. Takes five days; the site stays up. Move it to Cloudflare Registrar, Porkbun or Namecheap.
• Make sure the registrar login uses an email that belongs to the band, not a former manager or the person who made the site in 2014, and turn on two-factor.
• Put the store at shop.yourband.com rather than a store-owned address, so it can move without the link changing. Shopify: Settings → Domains → Connect existing domain.

The exports

• Shopify admin → Products → Export → All products, Plain CSV. Save it as exports/products-2026-09.csv in a folder you keep (a shared drive or a GitHub repo).
• Customers → Export → All customers, Plain CSV. Same folder.
• Orders → Export → All orders, Plain CSV. Same folder.
• Put a repeating reminder in your calendar: first of the month, export all three. Ten minutes.
• Big Cartel: Products → Export. Bandzoogle: Store → Products → Export. WooCommerce: Products → Export and Tools → Export.

The list

• Start a mailing list in a tool that isn’t your store: Buttondown (free to 100), Mailchimp (free to 500), or your own listmonk.
• From the customers export, import only the people who accepted marketing (the Accepts Email Marketing column says yes). The others bought a shirt; they didn’t ask for mail.
• Put the sign-up on your homepage and in your bio, not only at checkout.

The pixels

• Shopify admin → Settings → Customer events: every pixel installed on your store is listed. Remove the ones you don’t use. Then Settings → Apps and sales channels: uninstall apps you stopped using; each one is a script your fans load.
• Check with an ad blocker on: the store should work exactly the same. If it doesn’t, something you didn’t choose is in the path.

The door for fans and their tools

• Link your store from your homepage with a plain link, no shortener and no tracking parameters. That is how fan tools find it.
• Keep the public product feed on. Shopify has it on by default: yourstore.com/products.json should return your products. Big Cartel and WooCommerce publish one too.
• Don’t switch payment providers while you’re on Shopify: the Basic plan adds 2% to every sale that doesn’t go through Shopify Payments.

Done? You’re portable. Fans noticed nothing. When you want the next rung, the store is here; the export you just made is what it imports.

Written by a fan.Admin paths checked 26 Sep 2026.