The catalogue is the easy half. Orders, customers and the URL structure your product pages rank on are where a Shopify move is won or lost.
Products export easily. Everything that makes the store a business needs its own decision.
Shopify options and WooCommerce variations model the same idea differently. A straight CSV import produces a catalogue with the wrong structure, which is painful to unpick later.
Order history is not in the product export. How much of it to carry is a decision worth making before the move rather than discovering afterwards.
Shopify's /products/ and /collections/ paths differ from WooCommerce's, and product pages are usually the best-ranking URLs the store has.
Liquid is Shopify's own template language. There is nothing to convert, so the storefront is rebuilt in a WooCommerce theme.
Shopify apps are hosted services. Each one needs a counterpart identified before launch, not noticed missing when an order fails.
A store is the one migration where cutover has to be rehearsed: checkout, tax, shipping and payment all need to work before the DNS points anywhere new.
WooCommerce checkout is uncacheable by nature, so its speed comes from the database and the object cache. Both are ours to configure, which they were not before.
Everything here follows from a store being a business rather than a website with products on it.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Product catalogue | Options mapped to attributes and variants to variations before import | The two platforms model product options differently, so an unmapped CSV import creates a structure that has to be rebuilt by hand later. |
| Orders and customers | Migrated separately, with an agreed amount of history | Order history is absent from the product export, and it is the thing most often assumed to come along automatically. |
| URL structure | /products/ and /collections/ mapped to the new paths | Shopify's fixed paths differ from WooCommerce's, and product pages are usually the best-ranking URLs the store owns. |
| Storefront theme | Rebuilt rather than converted | Liquid is Shopify's own template language with no WordPress counterpart, so there is nothing an importer could translate. |
| Apps | Each matched to a plugin before launch | Shopify apps are hosted services rather than code in your store, so every one is a gap until something is chosen to fill it. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, variants mapped properly, and a checkout tested before anything switches.