WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: What Moves, What Breaks, What It Costs

Most guides to moving a store from WooCommerce to Shopify are written by the companies selling the migration tool, and they all end in the same place: install our app, click the button, you are done. The click part is genuinely easy. What the tool does not tell you is which parts of your store will not come across at all, and which decision — made before anything is imported — determines whether you keep the search traffic you spent years earning.

This is the version written by people who do the migration rather than sell the app.

What actually moves, and what doesn't

Shopify's own migration documentation is the authority here, and it is more candid than the app marketing. Three things move cleanly. Several do not.

Moves reliably: products, customers, and historical orders that have already been fulfilled.

Does not move, and this is the list that surprises people:

• Product reviews. Shopify states plainly that you cannot export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce. Years of accumulated social proof do not transfer with the products they belong to. The workaround is a review app — Judge.me, Loox and Yotpo all offer import paths — but it is a separate job with its own export step, and it has to be planned rather than discovered on launch day.
• Customer passwords. Shopify's documentation is explicit: "Because passwords are encrypted outside of Shopify, you can't migrate customer passwords from another online store using a CSV." Accounts come across; the credentials do not. After import, "you need to invite your customers to create new passwords so that they can register their accounts." Plan that email, because your customers will otherwise meet a login that does not recognize them.
• A fourth product option. Shopify allows three product options per product. Its migration guide warns that "products with greater than 3 options won't have their options imported" — the product arrives, the structure does not. If you sell anything configured on four axes, audit that before you start.
• Clean customer field mapping. Shopify notes there is no data mapping support for customer CSV imports, so the columns have to match its format before you upload rather than being reconciled during.

One piece of old advice worth retiring: the variant ceiling is no longer 100. Shopify raised the product variant limit to 2,048 for all merchants, so catalogs that genuinely could not fit before now do. Guides still citing a 100-variant wall — and there are many — are describing a constraint that no longer exists.

The four ways to do it

They are not ranked. They suit different stores.

Shopify's own Store Migration app. First-party, currently in early access, and built to import WooCommerce products in a few clicks. It is the cleanest starting point if your catalog is straightforward, and it costs nothing to try.

CSV import. Shopify's documentation recommends CSV wherever it is available, and for a small, tidy catalog it is genuinely the fastest route. The trade is that you own the formatting: columns must match Shopify's template before upload, and images generally need handling separately.

A third-party migration app. LitExtension Store Migration, Matrixify and Ablestar WooCommerce Importer all handle WooCommerce. These earn their money on volume and edge cases — large catalogs, historical orders, odd data shapes. Pricing is usually tied to record count rather than a flat fee, so get a quote against your actual catalog rather than a headline number.

An agency or Shopify Partner. Worth it when the migration is not really a data transfer — when the catalog needs restructuring, the theme is being rebuilt, subscriptions or wholesale pricing are involved, or the URL mapping is large enough that getting it wrong is expensive. The honest test: if the only job is moving 200 simple products, you do not need us. If the job is moving a store that ranks, you probably do.

The order that prevents rework

Import order matters, because records reference each other. Products first, then customers, then historical orders — orders point at both of the others, and importing them into an empty store produces records with nothing attached. Doing it out of sequence is the most common reason a migration has to be unpicked and run twice.

Everything before that is preparation. Export your WooCommerce content to XML from Tools > Export so you have a rollback, stand up the Shopify store with its basic settings, and — this is the step people skip — pull a complete list of your existing URLs while the old site is still up. You cannot map redirects from a site you have already turned off.

The part that actually costs you traffic

Data migration is the visible job. URL mapping is the one that decides whether the migration is invisible to Google or a six-month setback.

WooCommerce and Shopify structure URLs differently. Shopify puts products under /products/ and categories become collections under /collections/, so effectively every address on your site changes. Every one of them needs a 301 redirect to its new equivalent, and that mapping is built during the migration, from the URL list you exported while the old store was live — not discovered afterwards from a crawl of 404s.

Matrixify can generate redirects for products and collections automatically during import, which covers the bulk. What it will not cover is the long tail — blog posts, custom pages, filtered category URLs, anything you built by hand. That list is manual, and it is usually where the traffic is.

This is the single highest-consequence part of the job, and it is the part every tool-vendor guide treats as a footnote.

What it costs

Four separate lines, and only one of them is the subscription.

• Shopify's plan. Basic is $29/month on annual billing ($39 month-to-month), Grow $79 ($105), Advanced $299 ($399), and Plus starts at $2,300/month. Hosting, SSL, PCI compliance and updates are included at every tier — costs you were carrying separately on WooCommerce.
• The migration itself. Free if you use the first-party app or CSV and your catalog cooperates. Priced by record volume if you use a third-party app.
• Rebuilding the theme. Design does not migrate. Your WooCommerce theme has no Shopify equivalent, so the storefront is rebuilt rather than moved. For most stores this is the largest line, and it is also the opportunity — it is easier to fix a weak product page during a rebuild than to schedule fixing it later.
• Replacing plugin functionality. Every WooCommerce extension needs a Shopify equivalent, and the mapping is rarely one-to-one. Inventory this before you commit, not after: it is the most common source of a nasty surprise late in a project.

Timeline is driven by catalog complexity and how much of the storefront is being rebuilt, not by the data transfer, which is usually the shortest part of the whole exercise.

Before you point the domain

Check the data first: product descriptions, images, variants and options, customer records, and order history against the originals. Then confirm the redirect map resolves — every old URL landing on its intended new one, not on the homepage, which is the lazy fallback that Google reads as a soft 404.

Then place real test orders through every payment method and shipping option you offer, check the store on a phone rather than a desktop browser window, and send the customer account activation emails so people can get back into their accounts on day one rather than emailing you about it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO?

Yes, if the redirects are mapped before launch rather than after. Products, customers and fulfilled orders all transfer. Rankings are lost when URLs change without 301s pointing old addresses at their new equivalents — so export the full URL list while the old store is still live and build the map during the migration. Expect some short-term movement while Google recrawls even when the mapping is complete.

How long does a WooCommerce to Shopify migration take?

The data transfer itself is usually the fastest part. What sets the schedule is catalog complexity, how much of the storefront is being rebuilt, and how many WooCommerce plugins need Shopify replacements. A small catalog on a stock theme is a different project from a 5,000-product store with subscriptions and wholesale pricing.

Will I lose my product reviews?

Not if you plan for them, but they do not come across with the products. Shopify states you cannot export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce. Judge.me, Loox and Yotpo all provide import routes, so the reviews need exporting from WooCommerce and importing into your chosen review app as a separate step in the project.

Do my customers need to create new passwords?

Yes. Shopify cannot import passwords because they are encrypted outside its system, so customer records arrive without credentials. Shopify's guidance is to invite customers to create new passwords after import. Send that invitation deliberately, with an explanation, rather than letting customers discover it at checkout.

Is it worth moving from WooCommerce to Shopify?

It depends what is actually wrong. If your WooCommerce store works and you have the capability to maintain it, migrating a functioning store costs money and carries risk for no clear return. The case for moving gets strong when you are spending more time on plugin conflicts, hosting and update anxiety than on selling — at which point the maintenance you are absorbing costs more than a subscription. If you are still deciding, our WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison covers the platform trade-offs in full.

The bottom line

The data migration is the easy part, and every tool on the market can do it. The parts that decide whether the project succeeds are the ones no app handles for you: knowing that reviews, passwords and fourth product options will not come across, replacing your plugin stack deliberately rather than discovering gaps at launch, and building a complete redirect map from a URL list you exported while the old site was still running.

Get those three right and the migration is invisible to your customers and nearly invisible to Google. Get the redirect map wrong and you will spend the next two quarters earning back traffic you already had.

We have done this migration for real stores — Helen Milan, a sustainable homeware boutique, came off WooCommerce onto Shopify with a rebuilt catalog and a mobile-first storefront. If you want the mapping and the rebuild handled together, that is what our Shopify migration services are for.