Switching from Boost Commerce to Layers: A Shopify Plus Migration Guide

If you run a Shopify Plus store on Boost Commerce and the weekend of October 17 has you comparing alternatives, start with the honest part.

Boost is a deep, long-running filter app, and plenty of stores ran on it happily for years.

This guide is the technical walk-through. It covers what you run on Boost today, what maps to Layers, what you retire, and how we cut over without putting your revenue on the line.

Why are Boost customers looking right now?

On October 17, 2026, Boost AI Search & Filter disappeared from many Shopify storefronts, and its App Store listing now reads "This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store." Stores without a fallback lost their collection filters and search overnight.

Boost's status page showed the split. Search & Filter API and Data Sync stayed "Operational," while Storefront UIs and the Shopify Admin App sat at "Partial Outage."

The engine kept running, yet shoppers lost their filters, most likely because Boost's storefront UI renders through an app embed that depends on the app's standing with Shopify.

Boost says it is "working with Shopify to restore the Boost Commerce app on storefronts," and as of 09:25 UTC on October 18, its case was "with the appropriate Shopify team for review."

Whether it comes back or not, the question for a Plus brand is the same: should your collection pages depend on an app listing at all?

Should you switch from Boost Commerce to Layers?

Switch if you run a Shopify Plus store and you want search and collections built into your theme, merchandising your team runs without a developer, and a price that does not climb with your GMV or add an overage.

Stay on Boost if you are not on Shopify Plus, or if a low entry price matters more than anything else.

Stay, too, if you rely on the back-in-stock alerts and pre-order setup bundled into your search app.

We only build for Shopify Plus. If that is not you, we are the wrong tool, and we will say so on the first call.

The teams that switch and are glad they did tend to share a profile:

• A Shopify Plus store, or a Markets setup, that has outgrown a filter-first app.
• A merchandiser re-pinning collections by hand before every campaign send.
• A finance lead watching the search bill rise with every good sales month.
• A team that never wants to explain another weekend with no filters.

What are you running on Boost today?

A live Boost install is more than a filter menu. It is a filter configuration, a search setup, merchandising campaigns, and a storefront UI that the app draws on your theme, all billed on GMV, and each piece needs a decision before you switch.

1. Filter trees. Boost groups filters into filter trees built from tags, metafields, and product options, and each collection gets one tree. Higher plans allow more custom trees, from 5 on Launch to unlimited on Accelerate.
2. A storefront UI drawn by the app. Boost describes its Boost Core app embed as the piece that will "Define UI displayed in your storefront." Its filter block covers collections, instant search, and the search page.
3. Search tuning in the Boost dashboard. Manual synonyms, stop words, redirects, and a suggestion dictionary live in Boost's admin, and someone on your team keeps them current.
4. Merchandising campaigns. Pin, boost, demote, and hide rules run as campaigns, capped at 10, 40, or 100 active campaigns depending on your plan.
5. GMV-based pricing. Boost prices on GMV, and if you pass your plan's limit, "an overage fee of $2 per additional $1,000 in exceeded GMV" applies.

What changes when you move to Layers?

Your Shopify collections stay the source of truth. What changes is who draws the storefront, which moves into your own theme, and how much tuning your team carries, which mostly goes away. Our Boost migration reference has the full map.

What ports over, and what do you retire?

Less moves than you would think, and most of what stays behind is work you are glad to stop doing. Export what you can first, because Boost deletes your data if you do not reinstall within 7 to 10 days.

• Export the search dictionaries. If your Boost admin still loads, you can export synonyms, stop words, redirects, and the suggestion dictionary as CSVs, and analytics as CSV or Excel.
• Document what does not export. Boost's filter FAQ says it "does not support importing or exporting filter trees," and we found no export for merchandising rules, so screenshot both before you leave.
• Your collections stay put. We sync your Shopify collections natively, so you do not recreate a single one.
• Your search history comes with you. On install, we seed the last 30 days of search terms Shopify recorded, so tuning starts from real queries.
• Filter trees become attributes. Your tags, metafields, and options map to attributes, and facets build from them.
• Synonym lists retire. Our query interpretation and typo correction handle what the lists were patching.
• Redirects get fewer. A handful of semantic redirects can replace a long list of exact-phrase ones.
• Campaigns get re-keyed, not copied. We rebuild the pins and boosts that encode a real merchandising call, and drop the ones nobody remembers setting.

How does the migration work?

The switch is staged. We build it on a draft theme and you prove it there before a shopper sees it, then we publish and move template by template, with your old theme one revert away and Boost removed last.

1. Export and map first. Download Boost's synonym, stop word, redirect, suggestion dictionary, and analytics files, screenshot your filter trees and campaigns, and list the URLs that must stay put. Those URLs live in your theme routes, so they hold.
2. Install Layers and sync the catalog. Installing the app imports your catalog, keeps it current through webhooks, and runs the onboarding bootstrap. Nothing shopper-facing changes yet.
3. Build search and collections into a draft theme. Our team wires search, autocomplete, collection grids, and facets to our SDK, with sort orders and facets read from Shopify metaobjects. Every template gets a Shopify fallback.
4. Validate before you publish. Check merchandising on your live storefront with live preview, test search on the draft theme, and confirm crawlers still see product links on collection pages.
5. Retire the tuning debt. Drop the synonym lists, set up the few semantic redirects you need, and re-key the campaigns that reflect a real decision.
6. Publish, and cut over template by template. Publish the draft theme and switch search and collection templates one at a time. Our app embed starts tracking automatically, and revenue is read from your native Shopify order data.
7. Prove each surface, with rollback ready. Validate ranking changes with sort-order A/B experiments (in beta) or a matched before-and-after read.
8. Remove Boost last. Run Boost's Theme Revert before you uninstall, then un-hide any theme product grids its blocks replaced. Older installs also leave boost-pfs or boost-sd snippets to delete by hand.

How do we de-risk the switch?

It is an engineering project, and we run it end to end, from the theme build to the cutover, so it does not land on your team. Onboarding, catalog sync, and theme implementation are all managed by us.

We implement every brand on Layers ourselves, and we put a Shopify fallback in place for everything that could go wrong. Nothing gets slapped over your theme as an app.

If our app were pulled from the App Store tomorrow, some automatic tracking might degrade. Your collection pages and search would keep working.

You prove each surface on a draft theme before it goes live, and your previous theme is one revert away, so a bad change is a click to undo.

Rainbow Shops moved to Shopify from Salesforce Commerce Cloud and came to us from Algolia, not Boost, but the outcome is the one that matters here: a merchandising team that got its control back.

In the words of David Cost, their VP of eCommerce and Digital: "Layers was the first time we were able to create some customization and essentially create the same kind of sort-orders that we were used to having in Salesforce. And we could see a pretty immediate impact on the conversion rate."

What does Boost do better, and what do we do better?

Credit where it is due: Boost has some of the deepest faceted filtering on Shopify, it serves every Shopify plan, and its entry price is low enough for a store just getting started. We win on architecture, languages, and pricing.

Boost's newest version also ships a fallback that shows your theme's own product list during a service disruption, and stores without it are the ones hit hardest on October 17.

It also bundles tools we do not build, like back-in-stock alerts and pre-order setup. If those live in your search app today, plan where they go before you switch.

What we do that Boost does not: we assume Shopify Plus from the ground up.

• Search and collections that live in your theme, with Shopify fallbacks, so an app listing would not take them down.
• One index across 100+ languages for every Market.
• Merchandising a non-engineer can run, with nothing gated behind a higher tier.
• Ranking on your own sales and inventory metrics, queryable in LayersQL.

The trade-offs are real. We only serve Shopify Plus, our review history is shorter than Boost's, and we do not do email or marketing personalization.

What does this cost?

Boost bills on GMV, so the price rises as you sell more, plus an overage above each plan's limit. We price on your traffic with no overage, and if you are on Accelerate or higher, we honor or beat your current Boost price.

Boost's pricing page lists Launch from $29 a month and Convert from $299, while Accelerate starts at $699 a month for up to $650K in GMV and climbs to $1,499 at $2.5M, with custom Enterprise pricing above that.

Above your plan's limit, Boost charges $2 for every additional $1,000 in GMV, so a record month raises the bill.

We price on your last 12 months of collection page views and total search requests, up to 40% below legacy platforms, with no overage charges and no feature gating.

Email jake@uselayers.com with your current plan, and we will put the price match in writing.

FAQs

Can I export my configuration from Boost? Partly. Synonyms, stop words, redirects, the suggestion dictionary, and analytics export as files from Boost's admin.

Filter trees do not export, and we found no export for merchandising rules, so we document both during scoping and rebuild the ones that encode a real decision.

Your collections already live in Shopify, so there is nothing to export there.

What if Boost comes back online? Then your store gets its filters back, but the dependency is still there.

If your search and collections vanished with an app listing once, they can again. Moving them into your theme removes that dependency.

What happens to my Boost data when I uninstall? Boost's uninstall guide says your data is deleted if you do not reinstall within 7 to 10 days. Export first, then run Boost's Theme Revert, then uninstall.

Can I use Shopify's native filters while we migrate? Yes, if your theme supports storefront filtering. The free Search & Discovery app can add basic filters to collection and search pages while we build your Layers templates on a draft theme.

Do my Boost analytics carry over? Not into Layers itself. Export Boost's reports as CSV or Excel to keep a before-and-after baseline, and we start tracking at cutover, with revenue read from your native Shopify order data.

Will I lose my search rankings when I switch? Not if you plan for it. Your search and collection URLs live in your Shopify theme routes, so they stay put, and we check that crawlers still see product links on every collection page before cutover.

Map your redirects up front and confirm your sitemap, robots.txt, and canonical tags are unchanged through the cutover.

How long does the migration take? A standard theme often goes live in around a week, and a heavily customized one takes longer.

The gate is the theme build and QA, and we scope the timeline against your theme before you commit.

Do I need engineers on my side? No. Theme implementation, SDK wiring, and cutover are handled by our team. Your developers only get involved if they want deeper control through the REST API, SDK, and MCP servers.

Does Layers support Shopify Markets, B2B, and mobile apps? Yes. Markets, per-country pricing, and B2B catalogs are read natively from one index, and we sync and merchandise mobile apps like Tapcart, Fuego, and Canvas.

Ready to move off Boost?

We will sync your catalog, build on a draft theme, show you Layers running on your real products, and hand you the staged migration plan before you decide anything. If you are on Accelerate or higher, you keep your current Boost price or better.

Email jake@uselayers.com, or book a managed migration, and we will do the heavy lifting.