Stores outgrow Shopify’s constraints — transaction fees, app costs, customisation ceilings — and WooCommerce is the natural landing place. The migration itself is a solved problem, but only if it is run as a parallel build with a planned cutover, never an in-place swap.
1. Build in parallel, sell throughout
Stand up the WooCommerce store on hosting of its own while Shopify keeps trading. Theme, plugins, payment and shipping configuration, all tested with real product data — with zero pressure, because nothing is live yet. The migration deadline stops being a cliff and becomes a switch you flip when ready.
2. Move the data in the right order
Export from Shopify: products (with images and variants), customers, then orders. Purpose-built migration tools map Shopify’s structure onto WooCommerce’s — worth it above a few hundred products. Two gotchas: customer passwords cannot migrate (hashing differs — plan a friendly “set your new password” email at launch), and Shopify variant structures need checking after import; spot-check your most complex products by hand.
3. Map every URL
Shopify’s paths (/products/slug, /collections/slug) differ from WooCommerce’s (/product/slug, /product-category/slug). Every indexed URL needs a 301 to its new equivalent — export the old URL list, build the map, and implement redirects at the server or with a redirect plugin on the new site. This map is the difference between keeping your rankings and starting SEO from scratch; the full method is in our redirects guide.
4. Re-establish payments and email
Payment gateways are re-created fresh: new Stripe/PayPal connections on WooCommerce, tested with real transactions on staging. Subscriptions, if you have them, are the hard case — recurring billing tokens need a gateway-supported migration path; confirm it with your gateway before promising dates. Also set up transactional email properly (SMTP or an email API) — WooCommerce, unlike Shopify, leaves deliverability to you.
5. Cut over on a checklist
Pick a low-traffic window. Freeze changes on Shopify, run a final delta import of new orders/customers, point DNS at the new store, confirm redirects and checkout with a live test order, then watch the first hours’ orders like a hawk. Keep the Shopify admin in read-only reach for reference until the accounting year closes. Done this way, customers notice a faster store and nothing else — which is exactly the outcome our migration engagements are scoped around.