Moving From WooCommerce to Shopify: What Comes Across, and What Does Not

Moving a store from WooCommerce to Shopify is one of the more common migrations we are asked about, and one of the more predictable. The products come across. The orders come across. What goes wrong is almost always one of five things, and they are the same five every time.

Here they are, in the order they tend to bite. If you are still deciding whether to move at all, start with WooCommerce vs Shopify for Australian retailers.

1. Every URL changes

This is the one that costs money. WooCommerce puts products at addresses like /product/blue-shirt/ and categories under /product-category/. Shopify uses /products/ and /collections/, and you cannot change those prefixes. Blog posts and pages move too.

So almost every URL that Google has indexed, that customers have bookmarked and that other sites link to will change. Each one needs a redirect to its new address. Shopify’s URL redirects feature takes a CSV import, so the mechanics are easy. The hard part is the inventory: every URL Google actually has, not just the ones in your sitemap, including discontinued products that still have links pointing at them.

Get this right and rankings dip briefly during reindexing and recover. Get it wrong and you throw away years of search equity on launch day. This is the step we treat as a deliverable, not a task. When we moved this site off WordPress, the build failed unless every legacy URL still resolved or redirected. More on that in our e-commerce migration work.

2. Customer passwords do not come across

WordPress password hashes cannot be imported into Shopify, so customer accounts arrive without passwords. That used to mean a mass password-reset email and a wave of confused regular customers.

Shopify’s new customer accounts soften this considerably: customers sign in with a one-time code sent to their email, so there is no password to reset. It is still worth an email before launch explaining the change, because a regular customer who suddenly cannot log in the way they used to will assume something is broken.

3. Plugins become apps, settings or custom work

A mature WooCommerce store is usually running a long list of plugins, and each one has to land somewhere on Shopify:

• Built in. Some things you needed a plugin for on WooCommerce, Shopify does natively.
• An app. Most common needs have a Shopify app. Check its monthly cost, because a dozen small app subscriptions add up.
• Custom work. Plugins carrying business-specific logic, subscriptions with unusual rules, wholesale pricing, bookings, often need a custom Shopify app or Functions.

Make the list before choosing anything, in business terms: “trade customers see a different price”, not the plugin’s name. The plugins with business logic in them are what decide the timeline.

4. Product structure may need rethinking

Shopify now allows up to 2,048 variants per product, which removed an old headache. It still allows only three options per product, such as size, colour and material. WooCommerce stores with products configured across four or more attributes need to restructure: split them into separate products, or move some attributes into metafields. Decide this early, because it affects the storefront design, the filters and the URLs.

5. Payments and fees change

WooCommerce lets you use almost any payment gateway without the platform taking a cut. Shopify charges an additional transaction fee on orders processed through third-party gateways instead of Shopify Payments, which is available in Australia: from 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus. The full table is in Shopify pricing in Australia. For most Australian stores moving to Shopify Payments is the sensible default, but if you have a negotiated gateway rate or a reason to stay with your current provider, run the numbers with the extra fee included.

Tax is worth checking at the same time. Australian prices are shown inclusive of GST, and getting the tax settings right on day one is easier than fixing orders afterwards. We wrote up the GST and shipping mistakes Australian stores make.

What moves easily

For balance, the parts that are usually straightforward:

• Products, with descriptions, images, prices, variants and inventory.
• Customers, as records, just without passwords.
• Order history, brought in through the Admin API so customers can still see past orders.
• Content, blog posts and pages, though every one needs its redirect.

Customer accounts and passwords, step by step

Shopify’s customer CSV import needs only an Email column, and the file must be 15 MB or smaller, so a large list is split across files. Shopify is explicit about passwords: you “can’t migrate customer passwords from another online store using a CSV”. Customers have to be brought in as profiles and then get back into their accounts.

Here is how that plays out:

• Import the customers first, with their addresses, tags and marketing consent. Matching is on email address or phone number, and the overwrite option replaces all existing customer data for a match, so test it on a few records before running it on the lot.
• With new customer accounts, a customer who already has a profile signs in with the email on that profile. They enter their email, receive a one-time 6-digit code, and no password is needed. Someone who signs in with an email that has no profile gets a new one created automatically.
• With classic accounts, you send each customer an account invite from the admin. The email prompts them to create a password, and Shopify says the invitation is only valid for 30 days. Shopify’s import page says imported customers must be invited before they can register, so the import alone does not activate anyone. This is the version that produces support tickets.

Either way, send a plain email before launch saying the sign-in has changed and how it now works. Also check what the old store held beyond the login: saved addresses, wishlists and loyalty balances live in plugins, and they are not part of a customer CSV.

Order history, variants and redirects at import

Order history. Past orders can be created through the Admin API’s order creation mutation, which Shopify describes as suited to importing orders from an external system. Plan for the details that make history useful: original dates, the customer each order belongs to, line items that match the new variants, and the receipt options. The mutation’s sendReceipt and sendFulfillmentReceipt options control whether the customer is emailed, so check they are off before thousands of customers get an old order confirmation. Shopify notes that development and trial stores can create only five new orders per minute, so a large back-catalogue is a job for the live store or a paid plan, not a trial.

Product variants. Shopify supports up to 2,048 variants per product and three options. Map WooCommerce attributes to options before the import file is built, and flag anything with a fourth attribute. A product that needs a fourth option has to be restructured, and Shopify warns that some third-party themes, apps and sales channels do not support more than 100 variants, so test the largest products in the theme you are launching with.

URL redirects. Import your redirect map as a CSV from the URL redirects page. A store can hold up to 100,000 URL redirects (20 million on Plus), which is more than most WooCommerce stores will ever need, but a store with years of tag, attribute-filter and pagination URLs should still count before assuming. Redirects can point to a full URL on another domain, but a relative path only works inside your primary domain.

What a WooCommerce to Shopify migration costs

We do not publish a number, because the effort is driven by a handful of things, and a store can sit at either end of each one:

• Plugins with business logic. Subscriptions, wholesale pricing and bookings need an app or custom work. This is the largest single driver.
• Data quality. Messy attributes, duplicate customers and orders with no clean product match all need cleaning before import.
• Order history depth. Importing five years of orders properly takes more effort than starting the new store with recent ones and keeping the rest in an archive.
• URL volume. More indexed URLs means a bigger inventory, map and verification pass.
• Integrations. Accounting, inventory, shipping and marketing tools each need reconnecting and testing.
• Design. A theme with light changes is a different job from a bespoke storefront.

The ongoing cost also changes shape: hosting and plugin maintenance go away, and platform and app subscriptions replace them. Our Shopify pricing in Australia guide covers the platform side. For a broader view of the work, see our e-commerce replatforming checklist. Coming from Magento instead? See Magento to Shopify migration.

A WooCommerce to Shopify migration checklist

1. Inventory the store. Products, variants, customers, orders, pages, posts, plugins and integrations.
2. Pull every indexed URL from Search Console, your sitemap and your analytics, not only the sitemap.
3. List each plugin as a business function and decide: built in, app or custom.
4. Restructure products that exceed three options, and clean attributes and images.
5. Set up the Shopify store with plans, markets, tax settings (GST inclusive pricing) and shipping rules.
6. Choose the payment setup, with the third-party transaction fee included in the numbers.
7. Import products, then customers, then orders, in a development or staging store first.
8. Build the redirect map, import it and test a sample of old URLs.
9. Rebuild or connect integrations: accounting, inventory, shipping, email marketing.
10. Test the whole path with real orders: discounts, tax, shipping, refunds and emails.
11. Plan the cutover: content freeze, final delta import of new orders and customers, DNS switch.
12. Watch after launch: crawl errors, redirects, rankings and conversion over the next weeks.

Is it worth it?

Often, yes. A WooCommerce store whose owners are tired of plugin updates, hosting and security patching usually gets exactly what it wanted from Shopify: someone else runs the platform. The trade is less freedom to customise and ongoing app and platform fees in place of hosting and maintenance.

Where it is not worth it: a store whose value sits in deep WordPress content, or in custom logic that would need rebuilding piece by piece. For those, fixing the WooCommerce store is often the better spend, and our WooCommerce developers in Sydney do that too.

Three of our developers hold Shopify certifications, and we plan migrations around the URLs, data and integrations first and the storefront second. More on our Shopify development work.

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Sources: Shopify Help Center: customer accounts, the product variant limit is now 2048 (Shopify developer changelog), Shopify Help Center: import and export customers, URL redirects, setting up and managing legacy customer accounts, adding variants, Shopify Admin API: orderCreate, and Shopify Help Center: third-party transaction fees, all checked November 2026.