How to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify

A WooCommerce store can be moved to Shopify, and Shopify publishes its own guide to doing it. Products and customers go across as CSV files. Past orders need a migration app from the Shopify App Store or Shopify's order API. Pages and blog posts go by an app, by Shopify's APIs, or by hand.

Three things do not move at all: customer passwords, your WordPress theme, and whatever your plugins did for the store. Your old addresses also stop working unless you redirect them, because Shopify's address patterns are fixed and differ from WooCommerce's.

What moves and what does not

Before you start

Take a full backup of the WooCommerce site. WordPress's documentation says a site has two parts, the database and the files, and that you need both to restore it. Keep this copy after the move: it is your record of the old store. If you have no backup tool yet, see WordPress backup plugins compared.

Write down every address the store answers at. Each product, category, page and blog post, and any address you have used in ads, emails or print.

List what each plugin does for the store. Payments, shipping rates, tax, subscriptions, reviews, email, product options. Each line needs an answer on the Shopify side before you switch.

Decide three things.

• The theme. A new Shopify store starts with a default theme. Shopify's own themes are free, and paid themes come from the Shopify Theme Store.
• The payment provider. Shopify says it charges a third-party transaction fee on orders paid through a third-party provider, at a rate that depends on your plan, and that orders processed through Shopify Payments do not carry it. Shopify Payments is available in certain countries.
• Past orders. You may need them inside Shopify, or only on file. WooCommerce's report tables have a "Download" link that saves the data as a CSV file.

If you have not settled whether to move at all, read when to switch between WooCommerce and Shopify first.

Move the store, in this order

Shopify's guide gives the order: products first, then customers, then past orders, so that each order can be connected to its products and its customer.

Shopify's guide says to remove the WooCommerce columns that have no place in its file.

Redirect your old addresses

Shopify's guide says its link structure is likely different from your previous one, so old links to specific pages likely will not load. That covers every link from a search engine, another site, an old email or a bookmark.

Shopify calls /products and /collections fixed paths. You cannot keep /product/ as it was.

To make the redirects, build a CSV file with two columns, "Redirect from" and "Redirect to". Put each old path in the first and its new path in the second. In the Shopify admin go to Content, then Menus, open the URL redirects and select "Import". A store can hold up to 100,000 redirects.

Three limits come from Shopify's documentation. Know them before you commit to the move.

• Some prefixes cannot be redirected. Shopify says you cannot redirect an address that begins with /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /services or /shop. WooCommerce's shop page is at /shop/ by default, and with the "Shop base" permalink setting product addresses begin with the shop page's name too. A site with pages under /services/ has the same problem.
• Only broken addresses redirect. Shopify redirects from an address only when it would otherwise show a "Page not found" error.
• Query strings might not work as expected. That matters if your store uses plain permalinks such as example.com/?product=111.

Shopify's guide says to set the redirects up before you move the domain, so that they are in place the moment it points at Shopify. As soon as it does, put a sample of old addresses of each kind into the redirect checker, which follows a redirect and shows each hop. Each should reach its new page in one hop.

Check before you switch the domain

• Product, customer and order counts match what WooCommerce shows.
• A product with variants shows every option, with the right price and stock for each.
• Product images load from Shopify's addresses, not from your WordPress site.
• Pages and posts read correctly, and the links inside them point to Shopify addresses.
• Shipping rates and taxes come out right for an order to each region you sell to.
• A test order goes through with each payment method, and the confirmation email arrives.
• The redirect import finished, and its count matches your list of addresses.

Then make the store public and connect the domain. Shopify says you might need to disconnect the domain in your previous platform's settings first, and that you might see SSL certificate errors if you do not. A domain bought elsewhere is connected by changing DNS records at your domain provider. Shopify says the change usually takes effect within two hours and can take up to two days.

Where it goes wrong

• Passwords. Shopify says customer passwords cannot be migrated from another store, and that imported customers are invited to create new ones. Its current customer accounts ask for no password: a customer signs in with a six-digit code sent by email. Find out which kind of account your store uses, and tell customers before the switch that signing in will look different.
• Variants. A product with more than three options does not import with its options. Find these before the export and decide how each will be sold on Shopify.
• Images that still live on the old site. The product import copies product images into Shopify. Images in page and post text that you pasted across can still point at your WordPress site, and they break when that hosting is canceled.
• Missing redirects. The usual gaps are categories, tags, blog posts and addresses that begin with a prefix Shopify will not redirect.
• Forms and email. Contact forms were a WordPress plugin, so they are set up again. Mailboxes kept at your WordPress host do not move with the store.
• Subscriptions and saved cards. Saved payment methods do not travel with the customer file. Shopify treats moving them as a separate payment method migration, arranged with its support team.

If you would rather hand the work over, our WooCommerce to Shopify migration service moves the products, customers, past orders, pages, blog posts and redirects for a quote in writing.