Migrating from Grapevine
Grapevine's export is one of the better ones in this category: a full, documented column list, filterable, and joinable to Shopify orders. The import itself is unremarkable in the best way. The thing to get right is the timing, because Grapevine is also the one vendor here that publishes a hard deletion deadline.
Do this before you uninstall, not after
Grapevine documents a 30-day retention window after uninstall, after which your response data is purged. That's more transparency than most of this category offers — but it is a real deadline, and it starts the moment the app comes off your store.
The safe order: export first, import into Firsthand, confirm the history reads correctly, and only then uninstall Grapevine. Don't uninstall and plan to come back for the data.
How to do it
Four steps, about ten minutes.
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Export your responses from Grapevine
Grapevine lets you filter before exporting. Don't — take everything. A filtered export is a filtered history, and the whole point of migrating is to keep the baseline intact.
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Upload it unchanged
Surveys → Import → Grapevine → choose the file. Firsthand reads Grapevine's own column names, including its Order Name column and the free-text Comment column.
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Review the draft survey it creates
Grapevine writes one row per question per response, so a three-question survey arrives as three rows that belong together; Firsthand regroups them into one submission per order and rebuilds the questions in their original order.
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Map your answers to channels
One pass mapping old answer labels to canonical channels, and your Grapevine history becomes comparable against what Shopify's own 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
- Grapevine's question types, including the NPS and rating scales Firsthand keeps as scales rather than flattening into options
- Multi-select answers, merged from their separate rows into one answer
- The Comment column, kept as an inline write-in on the answer it belongs to
- The original response date, kept as the analytical date
- Order name, Shopify order id and customer id, wherever the export carries them
Doesn't
- Emails. Located only so they can be skipped. Firsthand joins on Shopify's order and customer ids instead.
- Response rates. The export records who answered, not who saw the survey.
- Your Shopify Flow wiring. Grapevine can stream responses into Flow; that's an integration to rebuild, not data to move.
A fair objection
"Imported data pollutes your metrics."
It's an argument the category makes against importing at all, and it is a legitimate one. Drop ten thousand historical responses into a new app and its response rate, its trend lines and its averages all become fiction — measuring a survey that was never served from here.
Firsthand's answer isn't a setting you have to remember. Imported rows are permanently marked as imported and are excluded from response-rate math by construction: the rate is computed against surveys actually served, and imported responses have no views because they never had any. They keep their original dates, so they chart truthfully in the months they happened, and they sit in a draft survey that cannot serve to a live checkout.
So the objection is right, and the fix is architectural rather than promised. You get your baseline back without the new app's numbers quietly inheriting it.
Want to test your export first?
Send over a Grapevine export and we'll tell you exactly how it reads before you touch anything on your store — well inside the 30-day window.