Migration · Shopify → WooCommerce

Shopify to WooCommerce without losing a single order.

Shopify charges rent on your own revenue — subscription tiers, app fees, and transaction cuts unless you use their payments. WooCommerce ends that: open source, no platform tax, unlimited customisation. The migration is a solved problem when it is run as a parallel build with a planned cutover — which is exactly how we run it.

Get a migration plan See the gotchas

Products, variants, customers and order history migrated and verified
Every /products/ and /collections/ URL 301-mapped — rankings intact
Cutover in a planned low-traffic window; the store sells throughout

Why switch

Why people leave Shopify.

The platform tax

Monthly tiers, paid apps for basics, and transaction fees on top. WooCommerce takes no cut of your sales — ever.

Customisation ceiling

Checkout and platform behaviour are locked except at Shopify’s highest tiers. On WooCommerce, everything is code you control.

App dependency

Each app is a monthly bill and a data silo. WordPress plugins are typically one licence — and often one-time.

Data on their terms

Your store lives on Shopify’s infrastructure under Shopify’s rules. WooCommerce puts the asset on hosting you own.

What moves

What comes with you, and how.

Scope your migration ↗︎

Products — with images, variants, SKUs, inventory and collections mapped to Woo categories
Customers — accounts and addresses (passwords cannot migrate — a reset flow handles it cleanly)
Order history — brought across so support and accounting keep their context
URL map — /products/ and /collections/ patterns 301-redirected to WooCommerce permalinks
Payments — gateways re-established fresh (Stripe/PayPal), tested with live transactions
Apps — mapped to WooCommerce equivalents, or retired where WordPress does it natively

The Shopify specifics

The gotchas we plan for.

Every platform has traps that generic migration checklists miss. These are the Shopify-specific ones — the difference between a clean move and a rescue job.

Customer passwords cannot move

Password hashes are not exportable from Shopify. Accounts migrate; passwords do not. A friendly set-your-new-password email at launch handles it — plan the comms, not just the data.

Subscriptions are the hard case

Recurring billing tokens live at the gateway. Whether they can transfer depends on your gateway’s migration path — confirm it before promising dates, or renewals break.

Variant structures differ

Shopify’s option/variant model maps to Woo variable products, but complex option sets need checking product by product. Spot-check your messiest products first.

Liquid does not port

The Shopify theme is Liquid; nothing of it runs on WordPress. The storefront is rebuilt as a WooCommerce theme — a feature, since it removes years of app-injected cruft.

Email leaves with Shopify

Transactional email that “just worked” on Shopify must be set up properly on WooCommerce (SMTP or an email API), or order emails land in spam.

Process

How the move runs.

Our full process ↗︎

Every migration is a parallel build: your Shopify site keeps running while the new WooCommerce site is built and verified beside it. The switch is a planned window, not a leap.

Audit and inventory. Content, URLs, rankings, integrations — everything that must survive gets listed before anything moves.
Parallel build. The WooCommerce site is built and the data migrated on staging, while the live site trades on untouched.
Verification. Content counts, redirect map, metadata parity, forms, payments and a live test order — checked against the inventory.
Cutover. DNS switches in a low-traffic window; the old site stays reachable to us until everything is confirmed.
Aftercare. We watch Search Console, 404s and the numbers for the following weeks and fix what the real world surfaces.

Questions

Shopify migration questions.

If your situation isn't covered here, send us the details and we'll reply with a straight answer.

Ask your question ↗︎

Can you migrate our order history?

Yes. Orders export from Shopify and import into WooCommerce so customer service and accounting keep their history. On large stores we do it with migration tooling and verify counts and totals against Shopify’s reports before cutover.

What happens to our Shopify apps?

Each app maps to one of three outcomes: a WooCommerce plugin equivalent, functionality WordPress does natively, or — surprisingly often — something you no longer need. We audit the app list early and price the plugin equivalents into the plan, so there are no surprise subscriptions.

Will checkout be as reliable as Shopify’s?

Yes, provided it is built and hosted properly — that means hosting sized for uncached checkout traffic, a hardened payment setup tested with real transactions, and monitoring on the checkout path. That is standard scope in our store migrations, not an optional extra.

Can we keep selling during the migration?

Yes — that is the point of the parallel build. Shopify keeps trading while WooCommerce is built and tested. At cutover we freeze changes, run a final delta import of the newest orders and customers, switch DNS in a quiet window, and verify with a live test order.