What a Cart Migration Actually Moves — And Four Things It Can't
Roughly 70% of moving a cart to another platform is mechanical and can be pulled through the source platform's API: products, prices, bumps, upsells, funnel structure, customers, affiliates, and live subscriptions. The other 30% is work someone has to do by hand, and four parts of it cannot be automated at all. If your students live inside your current platform's course product, or your business runs on three-payment plans, the honest answer is that GoCushy is not the tool for you today.
Most migration copy is written to make the move sound like a button. I would rather write the version you can plan around, because the parts that do not transfer are the parts that cost you a weekend you did not budget for.
The part that is genuinely mechanical
About seventy per cent of a cart migration is data sitting behind an API, and data can be moved without a human retyping it. That covers your products and their prices, your order bumps, your one-click upsells, the structure of your funnels, your customer records, your affiliates, and your live subscriptions.
That is a real seventy per cent. It is the part that would take you days of copying fields between two browser tabs, and it is the part where a human introduces typos into prices. Automating it is worth doing. It is also, quietly, the easy part.
Four things that cannot come across
- Page design and copy. Layouts do not translate between platforms. Two carts can render the same offer and share almost nothing structurally. Your pages get rebuilt, and someone has to decide how they look.
- Email sequences and delivery rules. Those live inside the platform's own automation, not in a portable format. Whatever fires after a purchase today has to be recreated deliberately.
- Course content, students, and their progress. This one deserves its own section below.
- Any published link on the platform's own domain. Checkout links, affiliate links, coupon links. You do not own that domain, so once you leave you cannot redirect it. Every place you control — your site, your emails, your posts — gets updated to new links. Anything you do not control keeps pointing where it always pointed.
The course problem, stated plainly
GoCushy has no course, lesson, or module feature. Not a limited one — none at all. If your students log in to your current platform to watch your videos and tick off progress, that content is not coming across, because there is nowhere for it to land.
Some sellers hear that and it changes nothing, because their delivery already lives somewhere else and the cart only ever took the money. Some sellers hear that and should stop reading. I would rather you find that out in a blog post than four steps into an import.
Subscriptions match on email, and email is imperfect
Reconciling live subscriptions between two platforms usually keys on the buyer's email address, because processor-side customer IDs are not always exposed by the source platform's API. Email is the field both sides reliably have.
Email is also messy. The same human can appear as one address at gmail.com and another at googlemail.com. Some records arrive with no usable name attached. So a match rate is never going to be a clean hundred per cent, and any tool that reports one is either lucky or not looking hard enough.
The most important line in the report is the failures
This is the thing I care most about getting right. A migration report that lists what transferred is marketing. A migration report whose most important line is the list of what did not match is the one you can act on.
If 214 of your 219 subscriptions match, the useful output is not the 214. It is the five — who they are, what we saw, and what you need to check by hand before you consider the move done. Those five are where the refund emails come from if nobody names them.
It is parallel, not a cutover
Migration is not a day where one cart switches off and another switches on. Both checkouts run at the same time. Your existing subscribers keep billing on your own processor, untouched, exactly as they are now. New traffic moves first, and you move the rest at whatever pace you can stand.
That is possible because GoCushy settles on your own Stripe, PayPal, or Airwallex account and is never the merchant of record. Your money keeps arriving where it already arrives. There is no window in which billing depends on the migration having gone perfectly.
Who should stay where they are
Two disqualifications, said clearly.
- GoCushy supports one-time and subscription pricing — monthly or yearly. It does not support split payments. If your business depends on the "3 payments of $397" shape, GoCushy cannot run it today, and no amount of migration tooling changes that.
- If your course and your students live in your current platform, moving the cart splits your business across two systems for no gain.
If neither of those is you, the move is smaller than it looks: the data comes over, you rebuild your pages and your email rules, you swap every link you control, and you read the failure list before you call it finished. If one of those is you, stay where you are. I would rather lose the sale than have you discover the gap on the other side of an import.
The full comparison of what each platform does is on the comparison page, the technical detail is in the docs, and if you want to ask me directly, I am on the founder page.