From Gumroad to Shopify: a migration diary

Alex Mora has been selling design resources since 2018. He built a loyal following on Gumroad — 2,400 active subscribers, a catalog of 340 individual files, and a product called the 'Design Systems Library' that generates about $11,000 MRR.

After Gumroad's fee increase last year, Alex reached out asking if Content Vault could be a viable migration target. We spent four weeks working through the process with him. Here's the honest account of what happened.

Friday: Export and audit

Gumroad gives you a CSV export of all your sales and subscriber data. The CSV is comprehensive but not clean — subscriber email addresses are in there, but payment method details are not (they never are in a migration like this). Alex exported everything on Friday night.

The audit took about two hours. We built a simple script to parse the CSV and identify: subscribers with active billing (2,411), subscribers who had cancelled but still had access (678), lifetime access customers (203), and subscribers on grandfathered pricing (89).

Saturday: Shop setup and product import

Alex already had a Shopify store — he sold some physical merch occasionally. We built the Content Vault product catalog on top of his existing store rather than creating a new one. This preserved his existing customer accounts and purchase history.

1. Install Content Vault and connect to existing Shopify store
2. Create subscription product: 'Design Systems Library Monthly'
3. Configure three tiers: Standard ($19), Pro ($39), Team ($99)
4. Upload all 340 files to the Content Vault file library
5. Map files to tiers — which files are Standard, which are Pro-only
6. Set up drip schedule for new subscribers (existing subscribers get full access)
7. Configure email templates with Alex's brand
8. Test checkout flow on staging

The file upload was the longest part — 80 GB took about six hours on a 200 Mbps connection. We added batch upload support last month specifically because of migrations like this.

Saturday evening: the migration email

The migration email is the hardest part of any platform move. You're asking paying customers to take action — re-enter their payment details — in exchange for a continuation of a service they were already happy with.

“I was terrified to send that email. I thought half my subscribers would just not bother. The actual migration rate was 91%, which was way better than I expected.”

Alex's migration email had three things that likely contributed to that 91% rate: a genuine reason for the move (not just 'we're changing platforms' but 'this gives us better infrastructure for the feature roadmap'), a clear benefit (faster file downloads, better iOS/Android portal), and a deadline (30 days before the Gumroad account would wind down).

Sunday: cleanup and monitoring

By Sunday evening, 847 subscribers had already migrated. The rest came in over the following three weeks. Final migration rate at 30 days: 2,195 of 2,411 active subscribers (91%). Churn attributable to the migration: 216 subscribers, about 9%.