How to Check When a Shopify Domain Expires

Shopify-managed domains are straightforward to check, with one offset you need to know about and one surprise waiting in any WHOIS lookup.

Method 1: In your Shopify admin

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings → Domains.
2. Click the domain you want to check.
3. Find the Renewal section.

That section shows the renewal date and contains the auto-renew checkbox, labelled "Auto-renew this domain every year." A Renew now button appears there as well, available starting 30 days before expiration.

The 14-day offset

Here's the detail that matters: Shopify states that the renewal date is 14 days before the end of the registration period.

So the date in your admin is a charge date, not the expiry date — the domain actually expires about two weeks later. That's a safety margin working in your favour, not against you, but it means the number you see and the number in the registry don't match, and you shouldn't plan a transfer or a handover from the admin date alone.

For the registry's own date, use a public lookup — our free domain expiry checker reads it directly with no login. See how to check when a domain expires for the general method.

Why WHOIS says Tucows, not Shopify

Look up a Shopify-managed domain and the registrar will come back as Tucows Domains Inc., not Shopify. That's correct and expected: Shopify is a reseller, not a registrar.

Shopify documents this in two places — its help centre notes that Tucows is the parent company of OpenSRS, the service that Shopify uses to resell domains to merchants, and its Domain Registration Agreement is explicitly between Tucows Domains Inc. and you, "as offered through Shopify, the Reseller."

Practically, that means: Tucows is the registrar of record, Shopify is the interface, and the underlying lifecycle rules follow OpenSRS. Shopify's own docs point users at the OpenSRS TLD reference chart for per-TLD periods.

Auto-renewal quirks

• .de and .at domains have auto-renew forced on. Shopify's documentation states the setting "is automatically activated and can't be manually deactivated from your Shopify admin" — disabling it requires submitting compliance forms to Shopify Support.
• The grace period is 40 days for most domains, during which the owner can still renew for another year. Some TLDs have shorter periods or skip straight to redemption.

The transfer lock that catches people out

If you're planning to move a Shopify domain elsewhere, note the 60-day ICANN transfer lock. It applies after you purchase a domain through Shopify, transfer one in, or change contact information — and it's that last trigger that surprises people. Updating a registrant email address, something you might do as routine admin, starts a fresh 60-day lock during which the domain can't be transferred out.

Once a transfer is authorised there's a 30-day window to complete it; miss that and the domain locks again. Transfers themselves take up to 7 days.

Some TLDs can't be transferred out from the admin at all and need Shopify Support: .be, .co.uk, .de, .ec, .eu, .se and .ph.

Don't rely on a single dashboard

The Shopify admin is fine for the domain that runs your store. The problem is everything else — the .co you bought defensively, the campaign domain redirecting to a landing page, the old brand name registered somewhere else entirely. None of those appear in Settings → Domains, and they're the ones that lapse.

Tracking expiry independently of the platform covers the gap: one place holding every domain wherever it's registered, reading the registry's expiry date rather than a billing date, and emailing you weeks ahead. That's what DomainChest does. See also why registrar renewal reminders aren't enough and why auto-renew fails.