Migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce: what actually has to move

Shops move platform for good reasons: transaction fees at volume, a requirement the platform cannot meet, or wanting to own the stack. The migration itself is a project with a specific set of traps.

What has to move, in order of difficulty

1. Products. CSV export and import. Variants and images need care but this is routine.
2. Customers. Exportable, but passwords are not. Everyone will have to reset — plan the email that tells them why before they discover it at checkout.
3. Orders. Historical orders matter for support and accounting. Import them or keep a read-only archive; do not simply abandon them.
4. Subscriptions. The hardest. Payment tokens are held by the gateway and are not always portable between platforms. Talk to your payment provider before committing to a date.
5. URLs. Shopify's structure (/products/, /collections/) will not match WooCommerce's by default. Every one needs a 301.

The URL map is the whole SEO project

Export every indexed URL first. Map products, collections, pages and blog posts one by one to their new address. Redirect each directly — no chains, no blanket redirect to the homepage. This single spreadsheet is the difference between a smooth move and losing a quarter of your traffic.

Reviews

Frequently forgotten and painful to lose. If reviews live in a Shopify app, check whether it exports. Some do not, and rebuilding social proof from nothing takes a year.

Run in parallel

Build the WooCommerce store fully on a staging domain and place real test orders through the live payment gateway in test mode. Only then switch DNS. Keep the Shopify plan active for a month afterwards so you can still read historical data.

Be honest about what you are taking on

Shopify patches itself. After the move, updates, backups, security and uptime are yours. Budget for maintenance from month one — that cost is precisely what the Shopify subscription was buying, and forgetting it is why some migrations look cheap and are not.