The short version: Lock-in is not a contract problem, it is an asset location problem. You are locked in to the extent that something you depend on exists only inside one company's system. There are five such assets: your domain, your customer list, your catalog, your search ranking, and your customers' habit of where to order. Four of them can be moved out today, mostly for free, and the whole exercise takes about an hour. The fifth, habit, is the strongest lock-in of all, and it is the one nobody counts because it does not look like data.
Not terms of service. Dependency.
You are locked in when leaving would cost you something you cannot rebuild, and the cost is almost never a cancellation fee. It is that the thing you would need on the way out lives only in the place you are leaving.
Which means lock-in is measurable. Go through the five assets and ask, for each: if this platform disappeared on Friday, would I still have it?
Four "yes" answers is a business that can move in an evening. Four "no" answers is a business that belongs to a company you do not control.
The four questions take ten minutes to answer for your own setup, and they are worth answering before you need them. If you are choosing a platform now, starting somewhere with a full export and your own domain locks the two structural answers to yes from day one.
The single highest-return thing on this page, and it costs about $15 a year.
A domain you own means your public address survives any platform change. Point it at platform A today and platform B next year, and as far as customers, printed bags, old posts, and search engines are concerned, nothing moved.
A platform subdomain, `yourshop.platformname.com`, is an address you are renting. When you leave:
That is the difference between a migration and a rebuild, and it is fifteen dollars.
Do this first, today, even if you have no plans to move. Buy the domain, point it at your current store, and start using it in your bio and on your packaging. Every month it is your public address makes the next decision cheaper.
The asset, and the one most likely to be sitting in exactly one place.
What you need out, and it is three separate exports on most platforms:
That third one determines whether the list is usable. Without a record of who opted in and who unsubscribed, you have addresses rather than a mailing list, and the honest response is to re-permission from the old system while you still can.
Two platform-specific things worth knowing:
Export quarterly, not only when leaving. Five minutes, and it converts a platform failure from a catastrophe into an inconvenience.
Easy to rebuild and tedious, which is why people leave it and then regret it.
Keep a folder you own containing:
The photographs are the part that matters. Platforms recompress on upload, so downloading from your own product page gives you a degraded copy that degrades again on the next platform. Your originals are on your phone; the storefront version is not a substitute.
A vendor with this folder can rebuild a catalog in an evening. A vendor without it spends a weekend, and takes worse photographs in a hurry. Our guide to product photos with only a phone covers doing them properly once, which is the version that keeps paying.
Partly portable, and entirely dependent on asset one.
If you own the domain, ranking largely moves with you: set 301 redirects from old page addresses to their new equivalents, expect a dip of a few weeks, and recover. Most small food sites find three or four pages carry almost all their search traffic, so the mapping is a short job rather than a comprehensive one.
If you are on a platform subdomain, it does not move at all, and there is no technique that changes that.
Worth noting what is not portable in any case: marketplace ranking. An Etsy listing that ranks ranks on Etsy. Closing the shop destroys that permanently, which is a real argument for keeping a marketplace presence alongside your own storefront rather than replacing it.
The strongest lock-in, and the only one that is not a file.
If your customers have learned to order at a particular address, in a particular way, that habit is worth more than any of the data above and it is the thing a migration genuinely costs you. Moving it is a real piece of work: a heads-up before the date, an announcement on the date, a reminder a week later, an individual reply to everyone still using the old way, a fortnight of friction, and a small number of people who do not follow. Our guide to moving a food business off Instagram DMs in one weekend covers the same transition in its most common form.
Two things reduce this specific lock-in:
Own the address. If your customers have learned `yourbakery.com`, the habit points at something you control and a platform change is invisible to them. This is the second reason the domain matters and it is arguably bigger than the first.
Keep a direct channel. An email or text list you own means you can tell people about a change without depending on any platform's messaging. A vendor whose only route to customers is a platform's own notification system has outsourced the relationship.
That second point is worth dwelling on. Our guide to building a customer email list covers doing it properly, and the reason it matters is not marketing. It is that a list you own is the thing that makes every other platform decision reversible.
Four decisions that are much harder to reverse than to make, and worth pausing on.
Building on a platform subdomain. Every day you operate there makes the eventual move more expensive. Fixable now, not fixable later.
Letting customer relationships live only in a marketplace. Etsy restricts using its messaging to direct buyers off-platform, so the compliant route to your own Etsy customers is a card in each box. That means a migration takes a season rather than a weekend.
Accumulating app-held data. On Shopify, subscriptions, loyalty balances, and reviews each live in a separate third-party system with its own export or none at all. Every app added is a dependency.
Saved payment methods. Card tokens belong to the processor and merchant account that created them and never transfer, so recurring customers must actively re-subscribe. This is unavoidable rather than a mistake, and it is worth knowing before you build a subscription business.
None of those are reasons to avoid the platforms concerned. They are reasons to know what you are accumulating.
Six habits, all cheap, none of which require choosing differently.
The whole list is about an hour of work initially and five minutes a quarter afterwards. Against that, it converts every future platform decision from a migration into a settings change.
The IRS's recordkeeping guidance is worth reading alongside this, because your retention obligation runs longer than most platforms' retention policies. A dated quarterly export in a folder you control satisfies both requirements at once.
Mostly no, and this is the reassuring part.
Some platforms are structurally more portable than others: Big Cartel and LocallyGrown.net have you connect your own payment processor, so your transaction relationship never moves. Shopify exports cleanly, including consent status. Wix is the least portable by design, since absolute positioning means the site itself cannot be exported at all.
But the difference between platforms matters far less than the difference between vendors. A well-organised vendor on Wix, with their own domain and a quarterly export, is in a stronger position than a disorganised vendor on the most portable platform in the category.
So the honest answer: choose on fit, then do the six habits regardless. Portability is something you build, not something you buy.
Five questions, all answerable before you commit, none of which appear on a pricing page.
Question four is a disqualifier rather than a scoring criterion. A platform that will not let you point your own domain at it is asking you to build an audience at an address you do not control, and no other advantage compensates for that.
Better still, do not ask, test. Load a handful of real products into a trial, then immediately export them and open the file. That five-minute check tells you more than any support answer, and it is worth running on every candidate including the one you already use.
The FTC's privacy and data security guidance for businesses covers your obligations around the customer data you are now holding in your own folder, which are yours regardless of where it originally lived.
If you want a platform where the fee structure and the exports are both stated up front, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published on the pricing page, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: there is no bulk product import, so a large catalog goes in by hand, and there is no national shipping, no point-of-sale, and no app ecosystem. Apply the same standard here as anywhere: test the export during a trial rather than taking any claim on trust. You can load a few products and immediately try exporting them again, which is a five-minute test worth running on every candidate.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | How hard it is to leave | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Full CSV export including customers with consent | $29/mo Basic | 3-day trial, then $1/mo for 3 | 2% platform fee if not on Shopify Payments | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Square Online | Item and customer export | Free tier; paid from $29/mo per location | 30-day trial on paid plans | $0 platform fee | 3.3% + $0.30 free tier, 2.9% + $0.30 paid |
| StandScout | Export gated behind the $29.99 tier | Free to $59.99/mo (monthly only) | No card required on free tier | No checkout, so no platform fee | No checkout, so no processing |
| Etsy | The customer relationship does not come with you | No subscription | n/a | $0.20 listing + 6.5% commission | 3.0% + $0.25 processing |
| Homegrown | Export your customers and orders, own your domain | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Cococart | Export and retention terms not published | $19/mo store, $59 Pro | 7-day free trial | Platform fee not published | Processing not published |
Dependency, not contracts. You are locked in to the extent that something you rely on exists only inside one company's system: your domain, customer list, catalog, ranking, or your customers' habit of where to order.
Buying your own domain, for about $15 a year. It means your public address survives any platform change, and without it no redirect is possible and every old link breaks when you leave.
Quarterly, and check the file opens and the row count matches. Five minutes, and it turns a platform failure or a sudden re-tiering into an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
Email consent status. Without a record of who opted in and who unsubscribed, you have addresses rather than a mailing list, and the safe response is to re-permission from the old system while you still can.
Because platforms recompress on upload, so downloading from your own product page gives you a degraded copy that degrades again on the next platform. Keep the originals from your phone in a folder you own.
Your customers' habit of where to order. It is not a file, it takes a fortnight of friction and four messages to move, and a small number of people will not follow. Owning your domain removes most of it.
Usually not. The difference between vendors matters more than the difference between platforms: an organised vendor on a less portable platform is in a stronger position than a disorganised one on the most portable.
Lock-in is an asset location problem, not a contract problem. Go through the five assets and ask what would survive if the platform vanished on Friday: your domain, customer list, catalog, ranking, and your customers' habit.
Four of those move out today for almost nothing. Buy the domain, export quarterly with consent status, keep original photographs and descriptions in your own folder, and maintain a direct channel to customers that no platform controls. About an hour up front, five minutes a quarter after.
The fifth is the expensive one and it is why the domain matters twice over. Habit is the strongest lock-in there is, and if what your customers learned is an address you own, then changing platforms is something they never have to notice.
