Migrating from Fairing
Of the four apps Firsthand imports from, Fairing is the cleanest move. Its responses export is thoroughly documented and carries real Shopify order ids, which means every answer reconnects to the order it came from — and your imported history is comparable against your new responses immediately, not approximately.
How to do it
Four steps, about ten minutes.
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Export your responses from Fairing
Use Fairing's own CSV export. Don't open it in Excel and re-save it first — Firsthand reads the file exactly as it downloads, and spreadsheet round-trips are the most common way order numbers get mangled into scientific notation.
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Upload it unchanged
In Firsthand: Surveys → Import → Fairing → choose the file. No column mapping screen, no template to match. The export's own headers are what Firsthand reads.
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Review the draft survey it creates
The import lands as a draft. Your questions are rebuilt in their original order with their answer options, and each response is regrouped into one submission per order — Fairing writes one row per question, so a three-question survey arrives as three rows that belong together.
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Map your answers to channels
Fairing answer labels are free text, so map them once to the canonical channels and the Attribution Reality Check can compare your imported history against what Shopify's own customer journey data credited over the same period.
Specifics
What Firsthand does with the file.
Comes across
- Questions in original order, with their answer options rebuilt
- Fairing's question-type values, mapped to the matching Firsthand type
- Multi-response answers, merged from their separate rows back into one multi-select answer
- The "Other Response" column, kept as an inline write-in on the answer it belongs to
- The original response timestamp, kept as the analytical date
- Shopify order id, order number and customer id — the strongest join of any export in this category
Doesn't
- Emails. Fairing's export includes them; Firsthand locates that column purely to skip it. The order and customer ids are a better join anyway, and they don't put a new category of personal data in our database.
- UTM and order-total columns. Firsthand reads those facts from your own Shopify orders instead of trusting a copy of them, so the numbers reconcile against Shopify rather than against an export.
- Response rates. No export records who saw the survey without answering, so imported responses carry no rate rather than a made-up one.
Export before you cancel, not after
Fairing does not publish a retention window for data after you leave, and its terms leave that to the company's discretion. That makes the safe order of operations unambiguous: download your full responses export first, confirm it imports cleanly into Firsthand, and only then cancel.
This is worth doing even if you end up staying. An export you can read without the vendor is the difference between owning your history and renting it.
A note on honesty
Imported history stays labeled.
Every row that arrives from a Fairing export is permanently marked as imported. It never counts toward a response rate, and it never mixes into the metrics of a survey you're actively running. Firsthand also creates the import as a draft, so it cannot start serving to live checkouts by accident.
The reason is simple: a survey app that lets you backfill thousands of historical responses into its own performance numbers is measuring itself with your data. Yours should be readable, comparable, and clearly what it is.
Want to test your export first?
Firsthand is finishing up ahead of its Shopify App Store listing. Send over a Fairing export and we'll tell you exactly how it reads — question count, response count, and anything in it that won't survive the trip.