Does customer purchase history and loyalty-points balance transfer from Lightspeed Retail to Shopify, or does that data get lost?
Purchase history does not transfer. Shopify's customer CSV carries Total Spent and Total Orders columns, and the field reference says of each that the column "isn't imported with customer details" (Shopify Help Center, September 2026). Lightspeed X-Series exports a loyalty_balance column, but no Shopify field receives it. Order history needs a separate third-party import.
The columns exist and are ignored, which is worse than their being absent
Shopify's customer CSV template includes Total Spent and Total Orders. Both are read-only in Shopify's model because they are derived from orders, and the field reference is explicit for each: the column "isn't imported with customer details" (per Shopify Help Center, September 2026).
This is the trap. A migration spreadsheet that maps Lightspeed's lifetime-spend column onto Shopify's Total Spent column will validate, import without error, and produce a customer list where every VIP shows $0.00 lifetime value. Nothing failed. The column was accepted and discarded.
The same page states two more limits worth writing into the plan: "You can't import order information using a customer CSV file," and "you can't migrate customer passwords from another online store using a CSV" (per Shopify Help Center, September 2026). Every customer will be asked to reset a password they never had on this platform.
What survives, object by object
| Object | Survives? | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email, phone, default address | Yes | Store Migration app or customer CSV |
| Tags | Yes | Customer CSV, comma separated, not case sensitive (Shopify, Sep 2026) |
| Marketing consent (email, SMS) | Yes as a field | Whether you are entitled to carry the consent forward is a legal question, not a CSV question |
| Customer metafields | Yes, for supported types, but the metafield must already exist in the Shopify admin (Shopify, Sep 2026) | Customer CSV |
| Lifetime spend and order count | No | Derived in Shopify; the column is discarded on import |
| Purchase history (the orders themselves) | No, not natively | Third-party import only |
| Loyalty balance | No | Lightspeed X-Series exports it; Shopify has no native field to receive it |
| Passwords | No | Stated limit |
Getting purchase history in anyway, and whether you should
Shopify's own guidance routes order history to third-party apps, naming Matrixify, LitExtension, EZ Importer and Cart2Cart (per Shopify, September 2026). Matrixify is live at 4.9 stars across 1,620 reviews, with per-file record limits by plan: Basic $20/month at 1,000 orders per file, Big $50/month at 10,000, Enterprise $200/month unlimited (verified on apps.shopify.com, September 2026).
That is affordable. The question is whether it is worth it, and for a retail migration the answer is narrower than people expect. Imported historical orders are useful for exactly three things: customer service lookup, returns against an old purchase, and lifetime-value segmentation. They are not useful as financial records, because the money already cleared on the old platform and re-stating it in Shopify creates a reconciliation problem rather than solving one.
Our rule: import the window you will actually be asked about, usually 12 to 24 months, matched to your returns policy. Archive the rest as files, in a place that is not a POS vendor.
And note where imported POS history quietly does nothing
Shopify's US tax liability insights calculate from "transactions that occur within Shopify" and "orders imported into Shopify that include valid shipping addresses" (per Shopify Help Center, September 2026). A walk-in sale has no shipping address. Importing three years of in-store orders will not move a nexus threshold in either direction. That is the right behaviour, and it surprises people who imported the history specifically to see it reflected there.
When NOT to import order history
- When nobody has named who will use it. "For reporting" is not a user.
- When the source is R-Series and the export is being hand-assembled. The reconstruction cost usually exceeds the value of a lookup table.
- Before the catalog is final. Historical line items referencing SKUs you are about to rename create orphans.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Treat purchase history as an archive problem, not a migration problem. Import the returns-policy window into Shopify so the service desk can do its job, export the rest to storage you control, and stop paying migration prices for data whose only consumer is a quarterly slide.
- What we tell clients to check first: Build one VIP segment in the new store before go-live and look at it. The Total Spent column fails silently, because it imports without error and produces a plausible-looking customer list where every high-value customer reads zero. A five-minute check before cutover beats finding it when marketing builds a segment three weeks after.
- Where we disagree: Migration vendors quote "full customer history" as a line item, and they can deliver the orders. They cannot deliver the derived fields, because Shopify computes those and will not accept them. Ask any vendor quoting lifetime value to state in writing which Shopify field receives it.
- What this page adds: that Shopify's customer CSV accepts and then discards the two columns most migration plans care about, that passwords never move, and that imported walk-in orders are invisible to Shopify's tax liability calculation because they carry no shipping address.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records