Kajabi to Shopify: moving courses and memberships

Kajabi is good at hosting courses. It is not good at being a store.

Most people who move to Shopify are not unhappy with the course player. They are unhappy that they cannot sell a physical product alongside the course, cannot run the checkout they want, cannot get the data out, and are paying a percentage on every sale for the privilege.

This is what that move actually involves, including the parts that are genuinely harder than a normal migration.

What makes this different from a normal migration

A product migration moves things that exist in both platforms. Courses do not work that way.

Your content is not a product, it is a library. Modules, lessons, videos, downloads, quizzes, drip schedules. Shopify has no native concept of any of it.

Your customers have entitlements. Not order history: live access rights. Jane bought the course in March and can watch lesson 12. That relationship has to survive the move or Jane emails you.

Some of them are mid-subscription. They are being billed monthly and expect it to continue without a lapse, a double charge, or a new card entry.

None of that is impossible. All of it needs deciding before anything moves.

Decide where the course actually lives

Three options, and this is the decision the rest of the project hangs on.

Keep Kajabi for delivery, sell on Shopify. Shopify handles checkout, customers, and everything physical. Kajabi keeps hosting and serving the course. They connect at purchase.

Cheapest, fastest, lowest risk. You still pay Kajabi, but usually on a smaller plan, and you get the checkout and the customer data. If your course library is large and works well, this is very often the right answer and the one people talk themselves out of because it feels like half a migration.

Move delivery to a Shopify course app. Several handle modules, video, drip, and progress, and gate access on purchase automatically.

You leave Kajabi entirely. You accept the app's model of a course, which may not match yours, and a new monthly fee. Check specifically: does it support your drip schedule, your quiz format, your certificates, and your community if you have one.

Build custom. A theme app extension serving gated content, with entitlements against the Shopify customer record.

Right when your delivery is genuinely yours: unusual access rules, cohort logic, an integration with something you already run. Not right because you want to avoid an app fee. This is a real build and it deserves a real reason.

We ask three questions to get to an answer. How many courses and how often do they change. Does anything about the delivery matter commercially, or is it just video behind a login. Is there a community attached, because communities are the hardest part to move and the easiest to underestimate.

Entitlements: the part that goes wrong

Whichever route you pick, existing customers have to keep their access. Get this wrong and your support inbox is full on day one.

Export from Kajabi, per person: email, what they bought, when, subscription status, and how far through they are.

That last field, progress, is the one people forget. If Jane is on lesson 12 of 30 and lands on lesson 1 with no record of the other 11, she does not care that the migration was technically successful.

On Shopify, entitlements usually live as customer tags or metafields, checked when someone requests gated content. The mechanism is straightforward. The data hygiene is the work: duplicate accounts, people who bought under two email addresses, refunded customers who somehow still have access.

Budget real time for reconciling that list. It is boring and it is the difference between a quiet launch and a week of tickets.

Subscriptions: migrate carefully or not at all

If you have active recurring billing, this is the highest-risk item in the project, and it is worth being blunt about why.

You cannot move a subscription the way you move a product. Payment methods are held by the payment processor, tokenised, and generally not portable between platforms. In most cases the customer has to re-authorise.

Two workable approaches.

Run both until the cohort ages out. Existing subscribers keep billing through Kajabi. New ones go through Shopify. You pay for both for a while and nobody's card fails. Unglamorous, and the safest thing available.

Migrate with a real communication plan. Email everyone before anything changes, explaining what they need to do and when, then follow up more than once. Expect churn. Some people will use the friction as a moment to cancel, and you should price that into the decision rather than discover it.

What does not work: assuming it will transfer, and finding out when the failed payment notifications start.

SEO, if your content is public

If your Kajabi site has public sales pages or a blog that ranks, treat this like any other migration.

Export Search Console Performance, Pages, 16 months. Every URL with impressions gets a 301 to its equivalent. Kajabi URLs do not map to Shopify automatically, so each one is a row in a redirect file.

Sales pages usually carry the most value. Those are the ones people link to and search for by name.

What this costs and how long it takes

Honest ranges, because "it depends" is useless when you are trying to budget.

Keep Kajabi, sell on Shopify. One to two weeks. A store build plus the purchase-to-access connection. The cheapest route by a distance.

Move to a Shopify course app. Two to four weeks. Store build, course rebuild inside the app, content migration, entitlement import, testing with real accounts.

Custom delivery. Four to eight weeks and it should be quoted as an app build, because that is what it is.

Add time in all three if you have active subscriptions. Add more if you have a community.

The mistake worth avoiding

Rebuilding the course exactly as Kajabi structured it.

Kajabi's structure is Kajabi's opinion about how courses work. If you have been fighting it, moving is your one cheap opportunity to change it, and after launch it becomes expensive again.

The corollary: if you have not been fighting it, and the course works, seriously consider keeping Kajabi for delivery. Moving something that works, to save a monthly fee, is how migrations turn into six month projects.

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We migrate to Shopify from Kajabi, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, and Wix, and we will tell you when the answer is to keep what you have and just move the checkout.

Book a free 30 minute call and bring your course structure and subscriber count. You will get a straight answer on which of the three routes fits, and a fixed quote before you commit to anything. See what we have migrated for real examples.