For reasons such as closing your Shopify store and switching to another e-commerce platform, you may want to cancel your Shopify subscriptions. Fortunately, you can complete this task with just 5 easy steps.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through each step on how to cancel Shopify subscriptions. Besides, some factors are worth considering before cancellation. If this task puts you at any inconvenience, you are recommended to think of alternative methods.
Let’s get started now to deeply understand this!
On This Page
- Reasons Why a Merchant Cancel Shopify Subscriptions
- How to Cancel Shopify Subscriptions in 6 Steps
- What Happens After You Cancel Your Shopify Subscription
- What to Consider Before Canceling Shopify Subscriptions
- How to Reactivate Your Store After Cancellation
- Alternative Method: Changing Your Shopify Plan
Reasons Why a Merchant Cancel Shopify Subscriptions
When Shopify merchants decide to stop their subscriptions, popular reasons often link to financial issues, changes in business strategies, and dissatisfaction with current services. Let’s explore them in detail!
1. Limited Budgets
When a store generates poor sales or faces financial difficulties, the subscription fees will become a burden. Many merchants cut costs by canceling their subscriptions so that Shopify will stop charging them. In this case, they might resume the subscriptions when finding a better strategy to develop their businesses.
2. Lack of Needed Features
Another reason for merchants to stop their subscriptions is that they don’t find the necessary features and tools in the current Shopify plan. Therefore, they look for alternatives, one of which is migrating to another platform like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Magento. Besides, you can choose a more advanced Shopify plan instead of deleting their subscriptions.
3. Temporary Closure
Some businesses such as stores selling wedding services, holiday decoration items, and outdoor gear operate seasonally. During the off-peak time, a slowdown in customer demand and sales might occur. Quite a few merchants have difficulties in paying subscription fees or don’t want to waste money maintaining the store during downtime. To solve this problem, they cancel Shopify subscriptions for expense savings. They’ll come back once their business picks up.
4. Selling Through Other Channels
Some merchants shift to selling their products on other sales channels, such as social media platforms or brick-and-mortar stores. They no longer need an e-commerce platform to build their online stores.
How to Cancel Shopify Subscriptions in 6 Steps
Step 1: Access Your Shopify Admin
Visit https://www.shopify.com/store-login to log into your Shopify account.
Then, you’ll navigate to the Shopify Admin Dashboard.
Step 2: Navigate to the Settings
You click “Setting” located at the lower-left corner of the dashboard. Here you can configure various aspects of your Shopify store, including Shopify subscriptions.
Step 3: Choose to Cancel the Plan
On the ‘Settings’ menu, navigate to the ‘Plan’ tab that will show you two options, ‘Deactivate Store’ and ‘Change Plan’. You can delete your Shopify subscriptions with the “Deactivate Store” option while “Change Plan” allows you to downgrade or upgrade your plan.
Step 4: Review Important Things Before Canceling
Before you take action, Shopify provides notes, warnings, and suggestions. You should follow this guide to avoid future risks. You can visit the link in the final note to see specific steps.
After considering these things, if you feel ready to close your store, click the “Continue” button.
Step 5: Select a reason for canceling the subscriptions
Shopify wants to get your feedback by asking why you end subscriptions. From the drop-down menu, you select a reason and click “Continue”.
Step 6: Confirm the cancellation
After that, a confirmation pop-up will be displayed to claim that you will lose access to your store data. If you decide to cancel, please enter your admin password and click “Deactivate store” to complete this process.
What Happens After You Cancel Your Shopify Subscription
After your Shopify subscription is deleted, everything changes as below:
1. Store deactivation
When you stop paying, Shopify won’t delete your account immediately, but it will deactivate your store. This means your website will be inaccessible to the public, and you will no longer be able to access the Shopify admin dashboard for store management. Consequently, visitors won’t browse your store, and no new orders can be placed.
2. Data loss after 30 days
After you cancel your Shopify subscription, Shopify will keep your store’s data including customer records, order history, product listings, store themes, and app configurations for 30 days, depending on Shopify’s policies. During this period, you can review and reactivate your store with the retained data.
However, after the retention time, all your store data will be deleted permanently and you lose the opportunity to recover your product, customer, order data, and customizations. That’s why you should back up store data if you don’t intend to reactivate the subscription in the data retention period.
3. Loss of Access to Third-Party Apps
When the subscription cancellation takes effect, you no longer have access to third-party apps. However, please note that your app subscription fees are separated from your Shopify plan. They won’t be automatically canceled, and you continue to be charged for them. Therefore, it is essential to manage your Shopify apps to avoid incurring unexpected expenses.
What to Consider Before Canceling Shopify Subscriptions
As mentioned above, canceling Shopify subscriptions means you stop the recurring payment for the subscription plan and no longer have access to the features and services offered by Shopify for store management. After that, you only can retain access to your store data for a limited time. For this reason, you need to carefully prepare before deleting the subscriptions.
1. Back up/Export data
Store theme, product data customer records, and order history are essential information for any online store. Therefore, you must back up or export them, or do both. This will be useful once you start a new business or migrate to another platform.
You can refer to importing and exporting customer lists, export orders, and export products to learn more about how to export store data. Besides, you can use a Shopify backup app to back up your store data.
2. Manage third-party apps
Since Shopify external services or third-party apps might have recurring charges, you should manually cancel third-party app subscriptions to stop being charged after deactivating the store. You also should export app data before canceling to save important data.
To stop app subscriptions, you go to the Shopify admin dashboard, navigate to “Apps” and uninstall paid apps. For apps charged separately from Shopify’s billing, you contact the app providers or visit their websites to cancel app subscriptions.
3. Let customers know
It is advisable to send a notification email to customers, show an alert on your website, and share it on social channels. This helps them update your situation and shows your respect for them
4. Consider alternatives to cancellation
If you don’t want to deactivate the store, upgrading or downgrading Shopify plans should be considered. We’ll explain these methods in the following parts of the article.
How to Reactivate Your Store After Cancellation
It is quite easy to reactivate your store within the retention period; however, after this time, everything starts from scratch.
1. During the Retention Period
If you decide to reopen your store within the retention period, you simply log back into your Shopify account and reactivate your subscription. Here are specific steps:
- Step 1: Log in to your Shopify admin dashboard.
- Step 2: Click Re-open <shop-name>.myshopify.com.
- Step 3: Select a new plan from the list of available plans.
Once you select a new plan, all store data of customers, orders, and products will be restored as it was before cancellation. Besides, any third-party apps, integrations or settings installed before the cancellation will be recovered. - Step 4: In the “Review and Subscribe” section, enter your payment information.
- Step 5: Click “Subscribe” to restore your store.
The store reactivation has been completed. Now your storefront goes live again, allowing customers to place orders.
2. After the Retention Period
Once the retention period has expired, Shopify will permanently delete your data. Therefore, you need to rebuild your store, re-upload products, and reconnect apps. It is much easier to complete these tasks if you backed up or exported data beforehand.
Alternative Method: Changing Your Shopify Plan
Canceling Your Shopify subscriptions means you stop payments for your Shopify plan, close your store, and lose access to the Admin. Although your store data is temporarily retained, it might be deleted after a certain period.
If you are not ready to cancel your Shopify subscriptions, please consider changing your Shopify plan. You can choose to upgrade or downgrade your plan. If your business grows strongly and you want more powerful features and capabilities to boost your store, don’t hesitate to enhance your store with a higher-tier plan. In contrast, your sales are down but you still want to keep the business going, it is suggested you switch to a lower-tier plan to reduce monthly fees.
How to Change Your Shopify Plan
Follow the steps below to downgrade or upgrade your plan.
- Step 1: Navigate to ‘Settings’ in the sidebar.
- Step 2: Go to ‘Plan’ and click ‘Change plan’.
- Step 3: Select the plan that meets your current requirements.
- Step 4: Click ‘Start plan’ to confirm the change.
Other FAQs on Shopify subscriptions
- What happens if you don’t pay a Shopify subscription?
If you don’t pay your Shopify subscription, your account will be suspended. You won’t be able to access your store or process orders in this period. If you don’t make payment within 30 days, Shopify may deactivate your account and you will permanently lose access to your data and store.
- Can you cancel Shopify after a free trial?
Yes, you can cancel your Shopify subscription after the trial period without any charges. After that, your store will be deactivated and you won’t be able to access any store data.
- Why did Shopify charge me after I canceled?
Because you haven’t canceled third-party app subscriptions, they keep charging you. Another reason is that you stop the subscriptions after the billing date. Therefore, you need to carefully check all active subscriptions before canceling.
- Can I get a refund if I cancel my Shopify subscription?
Shopify won’t give you a refund for subscription fees once you’ve been charged. That said, you can contact the Shopify support team to ask about your request if you detect an error or go into an exceptional situation.
For a Final Word
Canceling your Shopify subscription is a straightforward process. Just follow our steps, and you’ll finish this task in a few minutes. However, please remember to back up and export data and review third-party apps before canceling to avoid future issues such as unexpected charges and store data loss. Also, apart from Shopify cancellation, you can consider downgrading or upgrading your plan to match your current needs.
