Development store limitations

Shopify development stores (the free stores created from a Partner Dashboard) are great for testing a migration before touching the live store — but Shopify restricts them in ways that directly affect what Graftport can load into them. If a load into a development store behaves differently than you expect, check this list first.

Orders load slowly (5 per minute)

Shopify throttles order creation on development and trial stores to 5 new orders per minute. Graftport respects this throttle, so an order load into a development store progresses in small batches — migrating a few thousand historical orders can take many hours.

What this means in practice:

• A test load that seems “stuck” after creating a handful of orders is usually just waiting on the throttle. Check the run’s progress on the monitoring page — it will keep creeping forward.
• For a realistic test, scope the run to a small sample of orders instead of the full history (see Runs → Resource scope).
• Plan the real order migration against the live (paid) store, where this throttle does not apply.

Gift cards can’t be loaded

Gift cards and store credit are not supported on development stores, because Shopify treats them as real financial transactions. Attempting to load the gift card resource into a development store fails on the Shopify side.

If your migration includes gift cards:

• Exclude the gift card resource from runs that target a development store.
• Test the gift card mapping with a dry run instead — it validates and transforms everything without writing to Shopify.
• Load gift cards only against the live store.

Real payments don’t work

Development stores can’t process real transactions. Checkout can only be tested with Shopify’s test payment gateway or a payment provider in test mode. This doesn’t affect Graftport’s loading of historical records, but it does mean you can’t fully rehearse a real purchase end-to-end on the migrated data.

Other restrictions to be aware of

• Password page — the storefront password page can’t be removed on a development store, so the migrated storefront is never publicly browsable. You can still preview it while logged in.
• Apps — only free apps and Partner-friendly apps can be installed. If your verification checklist depends on a paid app, it may not be installable until the store is on a paid plan.
• Shipping labels — labels are for testing only; functional labels aren’t available.
• File storage — file, video, and 3D model storage is capped at the Basic-plan limits while the store belongs to the Partner organization. Very media-heavy product catalogs can hit this cap during a product load.

Recommended workflow

1. Run the full migration into a development store to verify mappings, product data, and storefront appearance.
2. Scope order runs to a small sample; skip gift cards entirely.
3. Use dry runs to validate the order and gift card mappings at full volume.
4. Run the final load — full order history and gift cards — against the live store.