How To Delete A Shopify Account?

As an eCommerce business owner, you are continuously on a stroll towards achieving greater heights so changes are meant to happen. If you are selling your products or services through the Shopify store, you might want to delete your Shopify account.

It might be because you want to get rid of the business altogether (or) working on some other business apart from the current one. It might also be because you are not getting enough sales on Shopify and finding it difficult to pay the monthly subscription. You might also want to move your online store to a different platform. There can be a plethora of reasons why you want to cancel your Shopify subscription or delete your Shopify account.

Whatever the reason for closing your online business on Shopify may be, choosing to close the store is a hard decision to take.

In this article, I will walk you through the process of cancelling a Shopify account as well as pausing your monthly Shopify subscription. But before that, let us understand some things that you must know before you delete Shopify account permanently.

5 Things To Know Before You Close Your Shopify Store

Shopify as a business runs on its own regulations and as a customer, thus you must take steps accordingly before deleting your Shopify account permanently. Hence it is suggested to go through these things, first:-

1. Pay outstanding charges – You must need to clear all your outstanding bills on your account or else you can’t cancel your Shopify subscription. Once your bills are settled, then you can delete Shopify account.
2. Save your Shopify store date – It is advisable to save your store’s date from the Shopify admin so that you could have access to valuable data like bills, customer emails, (or) anything else related to your business. Thus exporting CSV files from your current store is a must before deleting them.
3. Only account holders can manually close stores – TheShopify admin panel makes it mandatory that only the account holders can delete their own Shopify account. Shopify’s support team cannot do that for you. This means you need to be the owner of that account and have to delete it manually.
4. Cancel all apps – Before choosing the option of ‘Delete my Shopify Account’, you must contact all your third-party app providers and cancel their services. Make sure to cancel any app which has recurring charges or else you will have to keep paying their bills even after you close your Shopify store.
5. Transfer your custom domains – If you have a custom domain on Shopify, then you should either transfer that domain to another domain registrar (or) else you can cancel it. In a scenario where you didn’t remove/transfer the custom domain from Shopify, you won’t be able to use that domain anywhere elsewhere.

How To Delete My Shopify Account Permanently?

The process is quite simple though the Shopify support team cannot do that for you instead, they can help you with anything if you run into any trouble.

You must remember that Shopify will store all your data and configuration for up to 30 days from the date of closing of the account. So, if you change your mind within 30 days, you can come back to restore your account and restart your business.

Although the data of your store will be saved in Shopify’s servers even after two years into closing the store, however, you can’t access it to re-open a store once the 30-day mark is crossed.

If you’re able to log in within 30 days of deleting and if you add your credit card details and did not need to create a new store. Your old account with the same store name and same URL will be reactivated.

I assume now that it’s clear to you, so let us now move toward the four simple steps to delete Shopify account permanently –

Step 1: Log into your Shopify admin panel using the credentials you made. Once you have logged in, navigate to the ‘Account’ tab by clicking on the ‘Settings’ icon at the left bottom.

Step 2: Once you’re on the settings page, click on ‘Plan & Permissions’ and scroll down to the bottom to view these options.

Step 3: You have to click on the ‘close store’ option and immediately you will see a pop-up window where it will ask for your password. Further, select a reason from the drop-down menu as to why you want to delete your Shopify account. Once you have selected the reason, click on the ‘Close Store’ tab now.

Step 4: Once you have clicked on the ‘Close Store’ tab, the screen will take you to another page where it clearly informs you that you have a 30-day duration to restore your account. Thus this is how you delete Shopify account and close your Shopify store permanently.

In the above step, you could also choose to sell your Shopify business by clicking on the ‘sell store’ option which enables your eCommerce business to be sold on Shopify’s Exchange marketplace.

How To Pause a Shopify Store Instead of Deleting It?

If you have any ounce of doubt about deleting your Shopify store account, then you can pause the store instead of deleting it permanently. In that case, Shopify does provide options where you can pause your store completely (or) semi-pause it and have access to the Shopify admin panel for 3 months with a monthly subscription of $9.

Currently, Shopify provides you with two pause options:-

1. Pause and Build
2. Pause

You must note here that if you want to pause your account, you must be a paid customer for at least 60 days after completing your free trial period.

1. Pause and Build Plan

If you are choosing the Pause and Build Plan, it will let you pause the store while allowing you to continue working on your store. You can avail of the plan for a minimal subscription fee of 9$ per month. The best part of this plan is that you will be able to access your own Shopify Admin Panel in order to optimize your store, edit your products, and manage all your bills.

Also, people coming onto your store will be able to view your site, and products, as well as could read your product reviews. But during this plan, no transactions are allowed in your store hence people cannot do complete checkouts but you can still save their checkout attempts and send a draft invoice once your store comes back to life so that they can finish the checkout later if they’re interested.

Apart from checkouts and transactions, you can’t use store gift cards, or any third-party integrations such as Facebook and Google to publish your products

Most of the Shopify owners who opt for ‘Pause & Build’ are actually either trying to re-vamp their site (or) working on a different business model (or) might be trying to change their eCommerce marketing strategies. Thus for such users, the pause & build plan does provide some features like:-

• Ability to hide the product pages
• Ability to hide the add-to-cart and checkout option
• Option to create a protected password to view the store
• A customized message to show to the visitors, while the store is still paused.

Therefore features above help Shopify sellers to continue working on their store at the backend until they feel confident to launch a live store.

Note: All of your apps that were active before pausing the store will still be active. Hence it is recommended to manually pause the app services which you don’t need, if not you would be paying for those app services despite not using them.

Honestly, ‘Pause & Build’ is not a good option for someone who is in dilemma to close the store and at the same time who doesn’t have an idea about what to do with their Shopify business. Hence this option is for people who have an idea (or) are working on an idea to grow their eCommerce business so that until then their store can stay paused and later they can work on it.

2. Pause Plan

A complete pause plan is apt for someone who is on the verge of deleting their account but has a few questions about it and wanna give it a second thought.

This plan will allow users to pause their account for three months with no Shopify subscription fee charged. As you get to not pay any subscription fee, you will not be able to access your control panel and hence you can use this time to only focus on your other priorities or build a different business altogether outside Shopify.

Remember that all your app charges will be paused once you pause your store and if you have any pending app charges, then you’re billed for those charges when you are pausing your store.

If you choose this plan, your customers and visitors to the site will know that your store is temporarily closed. However, you will have the option of collecting their email addresses and other information so that you can let them know once you reopen your store. Till then, you can also use this information to direct them to another site (or) business of yours that you plan to open.

Within these three months, you can come back anytime and reopen your business by simply logging in and selecting a new plan. However, even after three months, if you decide to not reopen your store, then it will upgrade to the Pause and Build a plan for which you will need to pay a Shopify subscription fee of $9 per month.

How To Unpause a Shopify Store?

In case, you delete your Shopify account and want to get it back within 30 days, here is how you can unpause or reopen your Shopify account –

Steps to reopen a Shopify Store

You can reopen your Shopify account by following the given instructions:-

• First of all, log in to your Shopify admin dashboard and then select ‘Settings’. From there, navigate to the plans and permissions store.
• Choose the Shopify store that you wanna re-open and choose a plan according to the features you require for your website. The billing cycle will start when you select. Pay the bill here.
• Once you pay the bill, your account will become active again.

Even if you are on the Pause and Build Plan, you have to follow the same processes given above to unpause your account and reopen your store.

Delete Shopify Account: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Yes, you can reopen your Shopify Store within 30 days of closing your Shopify store permanently. You just have to log back in, select a plan, and reopen your account. However, you should think of pausing your account if you are not sure about whether you want to delete it permanently.

While closing your Shopify store, you will have to pay all the outstanding fees. If you have any third-party integrations, you will need to pay them off before closing the Shopify store permanently.

Thus if all of your bills are settled and you have successfully opted out from all of your recurring app services. Then you won’t be charged anything.

If you do not want to run your business, you can sell it off instead of closing the store. You can take the help of Shopify’s Exchange Marketplace for sellers to start the sales process. You can list your business on the exchange which has partnered with Escrow.com to ensure that all payment process in the sale goes on smoothly.

It is important to note that some branded stores on Shopify with Shopify plus subscription are funded by Shopify Capital. Thus pausing such a store will affect the remaining Capital funding advances.