Key takeaways
- Get the catalogue out first. It is the one asset with a closing window.
- Suspension usually disables checkout before it removes the storefront. That gap is your opportunity.
- Public product data is recoverable without admin access. Customers and orders are not.
- Solve payments before you rebuild. A store nobody can pay on is not a store.
Plenty of entirely legal businesses operate in categories that platforms and payment processors classify as high risk: supplements and nutraceuticals, peptides and lab supply, CBD, vape, firearms accessories, adult, nootropics, certain hobby chemicals. Being in one of those categories does not mean you have done anything wrong. It means a risk team somewhere decided the category costs more than it earns.
When that decision lands, it arrives as an email, not a conversation, and it often takes admin access with it. This is the order of operations that saves what can still be saved.
One honest caveat: if the suspension is because the products themselves are not lawful to sell where you sell them, moving hosts does not fix that, and this guide will not help. What follows assumes a lawful business caught by a category policy or a processor's risk appetite.
The first hour: the catalogue
Everything else can wait. Your product catalogue is the asset with a closing window, and it is usually the one people leave until last because it feels like the biggest job.
Suspension typically happens in stages:
- Checkout disabled. The storefront still renders, products are still public, you may still be able to sign in.
- Admin access revoked. The storefront often still renders.
- Storefront removed. Now the public route is gone too.
Stage one and two are your window, and it can be hours or weeks. Assume hours.
If you still have admin access, run a full product export immediately, including custom fields, before doing anything else. If you have lost it, the storefront is still readable, and that is enough.
Extracting without admin access
This surprises people: you do not need to log in to recover your product catalogue.
Every storefront publishes its products so search engines and social previews can read them. Titles, descriptions, prices, images, stock state and often SKUs are in the page markup, usually as structured JSON-LD in the head. On Shopify the catalogue is additionally served as JSON at a predictable path, covered in the products.json endpoint explained.
An extraction tool reads the same public source your customers' browsers do. Paste the store URL into Scrapify and it detects the platform, reads what is published, and writes a WooCommerce-ready or Shopify-ready CSV. No plugin on the source, no login, nothing installed.
| Data | Recoverable without admin? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Product titles and descriptions | Yes | Published in page markup |
| Prices | Yes | Current price as displayed |
| Images | Yes | Full resolution, while the CDN still serves them |
| Variants and options | Usually | From the selector markup or embedded JSON |
| Categories | Yes | Reconstructed from category page membership |
| SKUs | Often | If the theme prints them |
| Meta title and description | Yes | From the page head |
| Customer records | No | Never public. Admin or a data request only. |
| Order history | No | Never public |
| Draft and unpublished products | No | Not visible to anyone but you |
The bottom three are the argument for exporting before you lose access, and for keeping your own customer list somewhere you control rather than only inside a platform.
Locked out of the admin?
Scrapify reads the public storefront, so it works when your login no longer does. Paste the URL and download a ready-to-import CSV.
Ask for your data in writing, immediately
Do this in parallel, not after. In the UK and EU, data protection law gives you a right of access to personal data you hold as a controller, and platforms have processes for returning it. In other jurisdictions your contract usually specifies something similar.
Send a written request the same day covering customer records, order history and any outstanding balance. It costs one email, it starts a clock, and it is far easier to escalate later if you asked early and in writing.
Separately, check what money is held. Processors commonly hold a rolling reserve for months after termination. Knowing the amount and the release date changes your cash flow planning.
Solve payments before you rebuild
This is the mistake that costs the most time. People rebuild the store first because it is the visible part, then discover they cannot accept money on it.
Your platform and your processor are separate decisions, and the processor is the hard one. Before you commit to rebuilding:
- Find a processor that knowingly serves your category. High-risk merchant accounts exist and are a normal product. They cost more, typically with higher rates and a rolling reserve. Being upfront about your category during underwriting is essential, because being terminated a second time for the same reason is much worse than paying a higher rate.
- Expect to be asked for documentation. Supplier agreements, lab reports, licences, compliance paperwork. Have it assembled before you apply.
- Do not run two processors to disguise volume. It breaches both agreements and gets both closed.
- Consider redundancy afterwards. Once established, a second declared processor means the next termination is an inconvenience rather than an outage.
Where to rebuild
For restricted categories the usual answer is self-hosted WooCommerce, for one reason: nobody can switch it off from outside. You own the hosting, the database and the domain.
That control is a genuine tradeoff, not a free win:
| Hosted platform | Self-hosted WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Can be suspended by the vendor | Yes | No |
| Updates and security | Handled for you | Your responsibility |
| Backups | Usually included | You must set them up |
| Payment options | Limited to their partners | Any gateway with a plugin |
| Category restrictions | Vendor's policy applies | Your host's terms apply |
| Ongoing cost | Predictable subscription | Hosting plus maintenance |
Note the last row of the restrictions line: your host still has terms. Choose one that is explicit about your category rather than discovering their position during an incident. The same applies to your domain registrar and your CDN.
The mechanics of getting a catalogue into WooCommerce from anywhere are in migrating to WooCommerce from Wix, Squarespace, Magento or BigCommerce, and the import itself in how to bulk import products into WooCommerce.
Keep your URLs if you possibly can
If you are keeping the same domain, matching your old URL structure is the difference between keeping your search traffic and starting from zero.
WooCommerce lets you change its permalink bases under Settings, Permalinks. Set the product base to whatever your old platform used (products for Shopify, for instance) and a large share of your URLs match with no redirect at all.
Export your indexed URL list from Google Search Console rather than crawling the old site, since Search Console knows about pages a crawler cannot reach any more. Do it early: if the storefront disappears, so does your ability to crawl it, but Search Console retains the history.
Building so it hurts less next time
Once you are trading again, a few habits make a repeat far less damaging:
- Own your customer list. Export it on a schedule to somewhere outside the platform. This is the asset you genuinely cannot rebuild.
- Keep a current catalogue export. A monthly CSV in your own storage turns a crisis into an inconvenience. A live feed does this continuously.
- Own the domain independently. Registrar separate from platform, DNS you control. It is what lets you point elsewhere the same day.
- Keep a second processor relationship warm, declared and compliant.
- Back up off-platform. Files and database, tested by actually restoring one.
None of this is exotic. It is the same continuity planning any business does for a supplier that might fail, applied to the platform and processor most merchants treat as permanent fixtures.
If you are in the middle of this right now and would rather hand it over, our migration team can extract the catalogue and rebuild it on infrastructure you control, verified before handover.