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.

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 we 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.

---

Sources: Shopify Help Center: customer accounts, the product variant limit is now 2048 (Shopify developer changelog), and Shopify Help Center: third-party transaction fees.