In this guide, we'll cover connecting your PayPal Express account to Shopify to migrate your existing customer payment methods so they can be used with Shopify's subscription tools.
Requirements to migrate customer payment methods subscriptions
Your existing customer payment methods need to be stored in a PayPal Express account.
You'll need an export of your customer data from PayPal Express.
You'll need an export of your subscription data from your previous platform.
Shopify Payments needs to be connected as your main gateway in Shopify.
PayPal Express needs to be connected as a secondary gateway in Shopify.
Import customer data into Shopify (names, email, addresses)
First, import all your customers using Shopify's native import tool located on the customer's page in your Shopify account. In this step, you'll use the .csv import tool in Shopify to migrate basic data from your subscription customers to Shopify. This should include their names, email addresses, shipping addresses, etc. Alternatively, Shopify makes a store importer app that can assist with importing customer information.
Detailed instructions for this step can be found at the following link: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/customers/import-export-customers
***Configure PayPal Express with your Shopify account****
Next, you'll need to ensure that Shopify Payments is configured and PayPal Express has been set up for PayPal payments. PayPal is one of Shopify’s default payment providers. As soon as you open a Shopify store, you're given a PayPal Express Checkout account that is linked to the email address you used to sign up for your Shopify store. Before you can collect payments for orders made with PayPal, you need to set up your PayPal account.
Export your customer data from PayPal Express
Once you have imported your customer data and connected your PayPal Express account to Shopify, you'll need to export your customer data from PayPal Express and send it to a PayWhirl team member to process the import file. We need a .csv export from PayPal Express or another system that contains your customers' Email addresses and PayPal Express Billing Agreement.
You will need to update the column headers in the spreadsheet you send to our team to the following values: email, paypal express billing agreement before sending it to our team.
Contact our team to process the import file
The last step is to connect with a PayWhirl team member through live chat or email team@paywhirl.com, so we can process your import. Our system will import and match the customers from PayPal Express with your existing customers using their email addresses (imported in the first step).
**Verifying the import worked**
During the import to Shopify, we do not have access to your PayPal Express or payment data directly. We can only confirm that Shopify has received the payment information you gave us. There can be circumstances where Shopify vaults the card, but there are issues trying to charge the cards down the road. We highly recommend making a few live charges to reduce the chance of issues.
Migrating Subscriptions
Once the import is complete, you'll be able to re-create subscriptions for your customers (or create new subscriptions) using their existing payment methods from PayPal Express. You can use the create subscription tool in the PayWhirl app to ensure customers bill on the same schedule and with the same products or services they were subscribed to previously.
Detailed instructions for creating subscriptions can be found at the link below:
If you have more than 50 active subscriptions to create, we can also assist by importing your legacy subscriptions. To learn more, please see the following link. https://docs.paywhirl.com/en/articles/5497441-how-to-migrate-active-subscriptions-to-shopify-in-bulk-with-paywhirl-2020-version
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If you have any questions, please reach out to our support team. We're happy to help.
Sincerely,
Team PayWhirl