We are in the process of developing a new store for our company.
Our developer account was locked for transfer/publishing because of developer preview and uploading an app that we were testing for our Members area. It collected PII for our customers. As a result, the store was locked, preventing any future transfer or publishing. Unfortunately, we were unaware of these specific Shopify restrictions concerning PII, which led to the store being permanently disabled for public use.
Is there any possible way to unlock the store and make it live? I have reached out to support.
The owner of our company suggested reaching out to Shopify Plus, but we are not yet a customer. Has anyone been through this and what was the end result? Any suggestions on how to migrate a massive store with a lot of applications being used for the Blog and lots of media?
We had such issue once, and we had to redevelop the store due to this limiation.
I don’t know if shopify came up with some solution on this, but you should try reaching out to shopify support in case they have some solution now for this problem,
Yes, they were the first that we reached out to - they said that we had to build a new store. It is absolutely devastating being that I was the only person at my job developing all of the main content without a team. I am trying to recover it all as fast as I can.
Old thread but a warning that with the new dev dashboard Shopify are tagging most stores as “developer preview” this has been disastrous for us and we have had not assistance or support with a lot of having to rebuild stores.
You have to start again on themes as well because if you import you get blocked from updates. This partner dashboard vs dev store loop to get stores on a PAID plan has set Shopify back 5 years for us.
That sounds like a really tough situation. I’ve seen something similar happen before, and unfortunately once a store is locked due to PII collection under developer preview, Shopify Support is usually the only team that can review and decide if it can be restored. The best thing you can do right now is keep your ticket open and provide a clear explanation of what data was collected and how it was used (or deleted). That transparency helps.
If Shopify confirms the store can’t be unlocked, you can still migrate everything. I’d recommend using a paid Shopify plan on a new store and exporting key data like products, customers (without sensitive info), and blog posts via CSV or an app like Matrixify. For media-heavy sites, store your assets on a CDN or external host first so you can re-import faster.
It’s a painful lesson, but it might be a good time to rebuild with stricter data handling and modular apps to prevent this in the future. Hope Support gives you some flexibility, keep us posted on what they say.