The store works, orders come in, and yet every month you look at the Shopify bill, the app charges and the fee on each order and wonder whether a store you own outright would make more sense. Or you need something Shopify’s apps cannot quite do, and you have been told WooCommerce would handle it. Either way, you are now asking what it really takes to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce without losing sales, search rankings or customers along the way.
It is entirely doable. It is also more than an export and an import. This post walks through a move in the order it should happen, with the parts people most often underestimate called out at each stage.
Should you migrate Shopify to WooCommerce at all?
Moving a working store is a project with real effort and some risk. It makes sense when you have a clear reason that will still be true in two years, for example:
- the combined subscription, app and per-order platform charges have become a real drag on margin;
- you need features, such as B2B pricing, complex product options or deep content, that are awkward on Shopify;
- you want the store and your main WordPress site in one place under one login;
- you want full control of your hosting and data.
It makes less sense if the main complaint is one app or one design issue that could be fixed where you are. WooCommerce brings its own responsibilities, chiefly hosting, updates and security, so check that trade-off honestly first. Our comparison of WooCommerce and Shopify for Indian sellers sets it out.
Step 1: make an inventory of the Shopify store
Before you build anything, list what the current store actually contains and does. Go through the admin section by section and write down:
- number of products, and how many have variants;
- collections, and whether they are manual or automated by rules;
- pages and blog posts;
- every installed app and the job it does;
- discount codes still in use;
- gift cards or store credit with balances;
- shipping zones and rates, tax settings, and payment methods including COD;
- email notifications you have customised;
- any code changes in the theme.
Every plan to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce should start from this list, and the app list is the most important item on it. Each app is a feature you will need to replace in WooCommerce with a plugin, a setting or custom work, and some apps hold data, such as reviews or loyalty points, that has to be exported from the app itself.
Step 2: map the data from Shopify to WooCommerce
Shopify’s admin lets you export products, customers and orders as CSV files. WooCommerce has a built-in product CSV importer. Customers and orders need a dedicated import plugin or a migration service, because WooCommerce does not import those on its own.
| Shopify data | Where it goes in WooCommerce | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Products and variants | Products, with attributes and variations | Shopify options become WooCommerce attributes; check every variant’s price, SKU and stock |
| Collections | Product categories or tags | Automated collections have no direct equivalent; recreate the logic as categories |
| Product images | Media library | Image order and variant-specific images |
| Customers | Customer accounts | Passwords cannot be moved; customers must set a new one |
| Orders | Order history | Needed for records and customer accounts, not for running the new store |
| Pages and blog posts | WordPress pages and posts | No simple CSV export in the Shopify admin; copy across or use a tool |
| Reviews, loyalty, gift cards | Matching WooCommerce plugins | Exported from each app separately, if the app allows |
Migration services and plugins exist that move several of these at once. They save time on large catalogues, but always check the result product by product on a sample, not just the totals.
Step 3: build the new store alongside the old one
Build WooCommerce on a staging address or a temporary subdomain while the Shopify store keeps selling. In this stage:
- Set up hosting suitable for a store, not the cheapest shared plan.
- Install WordPress, WooCommerce and your chosen theme.
- Import products and check a sample carefully: titles, descriptions, every variant, prices, sale prices, stock, weights and images.
- Recreate shipping zones, tax settings, and payment methods. Your gateway will treat the new site as a new integration, and may want to review it.
- Replace each Shopify app with a plugin or setting, and test each one.
- Rebuild your email templates for order confirmation, shipping and refunds.
Keep the plugin count sensible. Replacing twelve apps with twelve plugins recreates the same clutter on a platform where you are now responsible for updating all of it.
Step 4: plan redirects so search traffic follows you
This is the step that is easiest to get wrong. Shopify uses URL patterns such as /products/item-name, /collections/category-name, /pages/about and /blogs/news/post-name. WooCommerce uses different ones by default, for example /product/item-name/. Every old address that has links, rankings or ads pointing at it needs a permanent (301) redirect to its new equivalent.
Build a spreadsheet with every old URL in one column and the new URL beside it. Products, collections, pages and blog posts all need rows. Then load the redirects on the new site before launch, using a redirect plugin or server rules. After launch, watch for missing pages; our guide to finding and fixing 404 errors after a site change covers the checks.
Step 5: switch over
Choose a quiet day. A sensible order of events:
- Pause new product changes on Shopify a few days before the move.
- Run a final import of anything that changed since your first import, especially stock levels and recent orders.
- Point the domain to the new hosting. If the domain was bought through Shopify, you can either transfer it to a registrar or update its DNS records from Shopify’s domain settings.
- Check that SSL is active on the new site.
- Place real test orders with each payment method.
- Email customers to explain the change and how to set a new password.
Keep the Shopify plan running for a short overlap. You may need to look something up, and it is reassuring to have a fallback while the new store settles.
Step 6: after the move
- Watch Search Console for crawl errors and fix any missing redirects.
- Check that analytics and any ad conversion tracking are firing on the new checkout.
- Download final exports of everything from Shopify, including orders, before closing the account.
- Cancel apps on Shopify, then the plan itself, once you are sure nothing is still needed.
- Set up a routine for WooCommerce updates and backups from the first week. If you would rather not do that yourself, ongoing WooCommerce support can cover it.
Telling customers before and after
Returning customers notice a new store quickly, so tell them before they find out by accident. A short email a few days before the switch, and another on the day, is usually enough. Say what is changing, what stays the same, and what they need to do. The most important line is the password reset. Their account details and order history may have moved, but they will need to set a new password the first time they log in.
Put the same information on a small notice on the new site for the first weeks, with a link to the password reset page. Ask your support team, or whoever answers WhatsApp, to expect questions about logins, saved addresses and gift card balances.
Search details beyond redirects
Redirects carry most of the weight, but a few other details help search engines treat the new store as the same business:
- keep product titles and descriptions the same at first, and rewrite them later if you want to;
- carry across meta titles and descriptions from Shopify’s search listing fields;
- submit the new sitemap in Search Console once the site is live;
- keep image alt text, which is easy to lose in an import;
- check that product structured data is being output by your theme or SEO plugin.
Common mistakes when moving a store from Shopify
- Treating it as a copy job. The data moves; the behaviour of every app has to be rebuilt.
- Skipping redirects. A store that loses its old product URLs can lose search traffic it took years to earn.
- Forgetting gift cards and store credit. Customers with balances will expect them to work.
- Moving during a sale season. Busy weeks are the worst time to discover a checkout issue.
- Underbudgeting the build. The move is effectively a new store build plus data work. When you weigh the shopify development cost already spent against a rebuild, count the new hosting and maintenance too.
Where we fit
Shopify to WooCommerce moves are covered by our WordPress migration service, and the redirect map and product checks above belong in that scope. If you are planning it yourself, start with the inventory in Step 1. The length of that list tells you how big the job really is.
Next in this series: Shopify GST Setup in India: Settings, Invoices and Tests
