WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: The Complete Guide (Products, Orders, Customers)

Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify moves your products, customers, orders, and collections onto a hosted platform without the plugin maintenance WooCommerce requires. The safest method connects directly to the WooCommerce API instead of exporting and re-importing CSVs by hand, since a direct connection reduces the formatting errors that cause data loss.

The method you choose matters less than understanding, upfront, what actually survives the move automatically, what needs manual rework, and what won't transfer at all. That's where most migrations run into trouble, and it's what this guide covers in detail.

What Actually Migrates (and What Doesn't)

Most migration guides gloss over this part. Here's the honest breakdown before you start:

Keep this table nearby. Every section below expands on one row.

Choosing the Best WooCommerce to Shopify Migration Method

There are four practical ways to do this, and they trade off cost, effort, and how much data integrity you keep.

For most small-to-mid stores, a direct WooCommerce API connection is the sweet spot. It's the same underlying approach whether you use Portway, Matrixify, or LitExtension, and it avoids the two biggest sources of migration errors: manually reformatting CSVs, and images that break because they were linked to your old WordPress server.

WooCommerce to Shopify Migration Checklist: Before You Start

Migrations that go wrong usually go wrong here, not during the actual transfer.

• 1

  Back up everything. Full WooCommerce database and file backup before you touch anything.

• 2

  Audit your data. Document your product count, custom fields, customer groups, and any non-standard order statuses. This defines your migration scope.

• 3

  Record your SEO baseline. Crawl your current site (Screaming Frog or a similar tool) and save every URL, meta title, and meta description. You'll need this list to build redirects later, since you can't fix what you didn't record.

• 4

  Check your WooCommerce API access. If you're using an API-based migration tool, confirm your WooCommerce REST API is enabled and you can generate API credentials. This is a common early blocker.

• 5

  List your active plugins. For each one, note what it does and whether Shopify has that feature natively or needs an app.

• 6

  Set up your Shopify store. on a plan that suits your catalog size, and pick a theme. This can happen in parallel with everything above.

How to Migrate WooCommerce Products to Shopify

Products are the most reliable part of any migration, and most tools handle this well. Here's how the core fields map:

How to Migrate WooCommerce Customers to Shopify

Customer records (names, emails, addresses, order counts) move over cleanly. One thing does not, and it's the detail almost every migration guide buries or skips:

What else to know about customer data

• Total Spent and Total Order Count are read-only fields Shopify calculates itself from orders placed on Shopify. You can't import historical totals from WooCommerce directly into those fields. They'll rebuild over time as customers order again.
• Order history doesn't come with a plain customer import. If you're using Shopify's basic customer CSV import, orders need a separate import step, or a migration tool that handles both together in one job.

How to Migrate WooCommerce Order History to Shopify

Order history migrates as historical records for reporting and customer service, not as live, active orders. This matters because it changes what you can expect post-migration:

• Migrated orders won't trigger real payment captures, since there's no live payment session to reconnect to your old transactions.
• Fulfillment status, refunds, and order notes typically carry over as data, but won't re-trigger shipping or accounting workflows.
• Order numbering may not continue seamlessly from your WooCommerce sequence. Check this before you migrate if order number continuity matters for your accounting or customer service records.

None of this is a flaw in any specific tool. It's how order migration works on any platform, because payment processor tokens and live transaction states genuinely can't move between systems. The practical takeaway: treat migrated orders as your historical archive, and make sure your team knows not to expect live order actions (like reissuing a refund through the original payment method) to work on them without your payment processor's own records.

Migrating WooCommerce Coupons to Shopify Discounts

This is the part almost no migration guide breaks down properly, and it's where expectations most often go wrong.

WooCommerce's native coupon system supports four types: percentage discount, fixed cart discount, fixed product discount, and free shipping. Shopify's native discount system supports four different types: amount off products, amount off order, Buy X Get Y, and free shipping. The basics map cleanly both ways.

Where it gets more complicated: many WooCommerce stores run advanced discounts (BOGO deals, auto-apply cart-threshold discounts, store credit, subscription discounts, category-based combos) through a third-party plugin, because WooCommerce doesn't support those natively either. Here's how that translates:

The reassuring news: your basic discounts and even standard BOGO deals move to Shopify's native tools without needing an app at all. The coupons that need real planning are the complex, plugin-built ones. Audit your active WooCommerce coupons before migrating and sort them into \"native Shopify handles this\" versus \"I need to pick a Shopify discount app for this one.\"

What Won't Migrate Automatically

A few things need manual rebuilding no matter which method or tool you use:

• Product reviews: No migration path moves these directly. You'll need a dedicated reviews app on Shopify and either a manual re-entry or an app-specific import.
• Your theme and site design: WooCommerce runs on WordPress themes; Shopify uses its own templating language (Liquid). Nothing carries over here. This is a rebuild, and worth treating as a chance to fix any UX issues you'd been living with.
• Legal pages (privacy policy, terms of service, refund policy): These need to be added manually in Shopify's settings. Shopify provides templates to start from, but the content itself doesn't transfer.
• Tax and shipping configuration: Reconfigured from scratch to match your Shopify plan and the markets you sell into.
• Plugin functionality: Each active WooCommerce plugin needs its own Shopify App Store equivalent. Some functions are native to Shopify already, which reduces your app count; others aren't.

How to Protect Your SEO During a WooCommerce to Shopify Migration

Losing search rankings is the single most common regret after a platform migration, and it's almost always preventable.

• 1

  Map your old URLs to their new Shopify equivalents before launch, using the crawl you did in the pre-migration checklist.

• 2

  Set up 301 redirects in Shopify Admin under Online Store, Navigation, URL Redirects. Some migration tools generate these automatically for products and collections. Verify this rather than assuming it, and scan for gaps with a crawler before going live.

• 3

  Preserve your meta titles and descriptions Don't let them reset to Shopify's defaults during import.

• 4

  Keep your old site accessible on a subdomain for a short window after launch (many practitioners suggest 30 to 60 days) as a safety net in case something was missed.

• 5

  Recheck your baseline metrics (traffic, rankings, conversion rate) a few weeks after launch to catch any regressions early.

How Long Does a WooCommerce to Shopify Migration Take?

This varies more than most guides admit, and it depends far more on your catalog size and how thoroughly you test than on the transfer itself:

• Small stores (under ~500 products): Often a few hours of actual data transfer, but plan 1 to 2 weeks total once you include testing and DNS cutover.
• Medium stores (500 to 5,000 products): Roughly 2 to 4 weeks, with most of that time going to verification, not the migration job itself.
• Large or heavily customized stores: 1 to 3 months, particularly if custom fields, complex discount logic, or large order histories are involved.

The consistent theme across real migrations: the data transfer itself is usually the fast part. Testing, SEO verification, and customer communication take longer, so budget your time accordingly.

Post-Migration Checklist for a Smooth Shopify Launch

Before you point your domain at Shopify and call it done:

Frequently Asked Questions

Wrapping Up

A WooCommerce to Shopify migration is a data project first and a technical project second. The tools handle the heavy lifting of moving products, customers, and orders. What actually determines whether the migration goes smoothly is the planning you do before you start: knowing which coupons need manual rebuilding, telling customers ahead of time that they'll need to reset their password, and mapping your old URLs before your rankings have a chance to slip.

Get those three things right, along with a direct WooCommerce API connection instead of hand-edited CSVs, and the rest of the migration is largely mechanical. Tools like Portway, Matrixify, and LitExtension all take that API-first approach, and the difference shows up afterward in fewer broken images and less manual cleanup.