Shopify has no one-click way to duplicate a store. There is no “copy this store” button, no export that contains everything, and no import that accepts everything. What there is, is a route for each part of the store, and an order you have to do them in.
This is the full list of what copies, what does not, and what breaks if you get the order wrong.
The answer changes what you need to copy.
A development store, created through a Shopify Partner account, is free. Two limits decide whether it is the right choice:
For staging that is fine. For a second store that actually sells, you need a second paid plan.
Three things have to exist on the destination before the catalogue lands, or the import quietly drops data:
Products → Export on the source, Import on the destination. Rows are matched on the product handle, so handles have to agree. Two things to know before you trust it:
Customers export and import. Marketing consent, though, is a record of what each person agreed to on that store, so carrying it across is a decision about your own obligations rather than a technical step. It is the one part of this job worth taking advice on instead of guessing.
The Shopify admin has no CSV export for manual collections, pages or navigation menus. They are recreated by hand or copied with an app. Automated collections are quicker: recreate the conditions and they fill themselves, as long as the products and tags arrived first.
Orders export to CSV for your records, and there is no native way to import them into another store. If your reason for duplicating is to move order history, that history stays where it is.
Apps install per store. Every one has to be installed again on the destination, and the data it holds does not come with it: review content, bundle rules, subscription contracts, page-builder layouts. On a store that leans on apps this is usually the biggest piece of the work and the easiest to underestimate.
Checkout, payments, shipping profiles and rates, taxes, markets, notification templates, domains, staff permissions and discount codes are all configured per store, and none of them export. Discount codes have no export at all, so an active promotion has to be rebuilt by hand.
Item six is the one that bites quietly. A menu rebuilt by hand very often keeps one or two absolute links to the source store, which on a staging copy sends your own team back to live without anyone noticing.
Duplicating earns its cost when one change set touches many products, collections, pages or menus at once, and when you need to see the result before customers do.
The copy is accurate for about as long as nobody touches live. After that the two stores drift, and the hard question stops being “how do I copy this” and becomes “which of these differences did I mean, and how do I move only those back”. A CSV cannot answer that, because re-importing a file writes every column in it, and Shopify keeps no history of what a field used to say.
No. There is no copy-store button, no export that contains everything and no import that accepts everything. Themes and products have a route; collections, pages, menus and discount codes do not; and orders export but cannot be imported.
A development store created through a Shopify Partner account is free, which is enough for staging or testing. It is always password protected and cannot take real payments, so a second store that actually sells needs its own paid plan.
Locations, because inventory is held per location and quantities have nowhere to go without them. Metafield and metaobject definitions, with the same namespaces and keys, because values need a definition to attach to. The theme is best uploaded first too, so what you check afterwards is the real layout.
They are referenced by URL rather than embedded in the CSV, so the destination fetches each image from the source store while the import runs. The source has to stay reachable for that to work: importing from a store you have just closed leaves the images missing.
No. Apps install per store and must be installed again on the destination, and the data they hold does not come with them, including review content, bundle rules, subscription contracts and page-builder layouts. On an app-heavy store this is usually the largest part of the work.
No. Orders export to CSV for your own records, but Shopify has no native order import. Order history stays on the store where it happened.
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