On Shopify you don't own the rules. You rent them.
Shopify pulled every vape and e-cigarette product from its US platform this month. No court order - just a policy change, enforced through its own terms of service. The clause that removes one category today can reach the next vertical tomorrow, with little notice and less recourse.
If your storefront, your catalog, your customer list and your order history all sit inside someone else's terms of service, you are one policy update away from losing access to the business you built. We move you off that risk - onto a stack that lives under your own roof.
The problem: rented infrastructure has an off switch
On a SaaS platform you don't own the platform - you rent it, and the landlord can change the lease. When that happens, the pattern is always the same:
- Products get delisted through Acceptable Use Policy or Payments Terms changes.
- Payouts get held or accounts frozen while a review runs.
- The export window is short - usually far shorter than merchants expect.
- Your customers find out from a broken checkout page, not from you.
This is not hypothetical. Shopify's own Acceptable Use Policy and Shopify Payments Terms of Service reserve the right to restrict or terminate entire categories, and in 2026 they did exactly that with vapes after pressure from a coalition of US state attorneys general. Whole legal businesses were given days, not months, to move.
Who is exposed
If you operate in a regulated or "high-risk" vertical, your category can be restricted or removed by policy at any time. The most exposed:
- Vape / ENDS / e-cigarettes (fully removed in the US, 2026)
- CBD, hemp and hemp-derived products (Payments blocked, sudden terminations)
- Firearms, ammunition and accessories
- Adult and sexual wellness retail
- Supplements, nutraceuticals and nootropics
- Tobacco, nicotine pouches, alcohol
- Crypto, high-risk financial services
Even fully compliant, licensed merchants in these categories report account shutdowns with little warning. The issue is rarely your paperwork - it is that you depend on infrastructure you don't control.
What you get on a self-hosted stack
We migrate you to Adobe Commerce, Magento Open Source or a Hyva-powered storefront. Self-hosted means:
- You own your data. Catalog, customers, orders and content live in your database, not behind someone else's export button.
- You choose your payment processors. Connect high-risk-friendly gateways directly. No single provider can switch off your revenue.
- You own the rules. No Acceptable Use Policy can delist your category overnight.
- Full control of the storefront. Custom checkout, B2B, subscriptions, age verification, compliance flows - built the way your vertical actually needs.
- No per-transaction platform tax on your growth.
The tradeoff is honest: self-hosted is more work to run. That is exactly what we handle for you - migration, hosting, maintenance and support - so you get the ownership without the operational burden.
How the migration works
- Audit. We map your Shopify store: catalog, customers, orders, themes, apps, integrations and payment flows. You get a clear migration plan and timeline.
- Data migration. We move products, variants, categories, customers, order history, reviews and SEO URLs - with redirects so you keep your rankings.
- Rebuild. We recreate your storefront on Magento / Adobe Commerce / Hyva, matching or improving your current design and checkout.
- Payments and compliance. We connect processors that support your vertical and wire up age verification and any required compliance steps.
- Launch and support. We go live with monitoring, then handle hosting, maintenance and ongoing support.
Free migration on larger projects. If your store is a serious operation, we will often absorb the migration cost as part of the engagement - ask us.
Proof: we do this for regulated verticals
We have built and run self-hosted stores in exactly the categories SaaS platforms push away:
- hemptouch.com - CBD and hemp cosmetics, selling worldwide
- sveterotike.si - sexual wellness retail (EU)
- slovarms.si - firearms and ammunition (EU)
Recent results on these self-hosted stores: sveterotike.si ranks #1 for its main category term with tens of thousands of organic clicks; slovarms.si sits on Google's first page for its leading product searches; hemptouch sells CBD worldwide through hemptouch.com and keeps growing its organic search traffic - all in categories SaaS platforms restrict or ban.
We have been running large-scale migrations for market leaders for years, moving complex stores off rented platforms without breaking what they have already built.
