Getting data out of WooCommerce is the easy part – Shopify even has its own migration tool for it. The real work is elsewhere: in what your plugins hold, and in URLs you can’t work out from behind a desk.
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Unlike most hosted platforms, getting the data isn’t the problem. Finding out what you actually have is.
I went through fifteen live WooCommerce stores and found six different patterns for product URLs and six for categories: /product/, /products/, localised bases and fully custom ones – several of them still running on the English defaults even though the store itself was in another language. The structure can’t be worked out from behind a desk. So on every store I measure it first and build the redirect map afterwards, never the other way round.
WooCommerce writes its URL bases into the database the first time it’s installed and treats them as settled from then on – it doesn’t change them even if you later switch the whole site to another language. That’s how it’s written in its own code. A store installed in English keeps /product/ for good, even if everything on it is now in German or French. In practice, the language of a store tells you nothing about its URLs.
Wholesale pricing, subscriptions, loyalty points, B2B customer groups – none of it is in WooCommerce itself, all of it comes from plugins. Each one stores its logic its own way, and rarely do two agree. The numbers come out easily; the rules that drive them don’t – more on why below.
Compared with hosted platforms this is the pleasant part of the migration – but it has two places where data quietly goes missing. And one more thing: "you can export it yourself" only means getting the data out, not a finished migration. Converting it into Shopify’s format and matching it up is my job.
The first quiet loss is variants. The built-in CSV export handles them (a parent row plus one row per variation), but WooCommerce structures them differently from Shopify, which caps a product at three options. So some get lost not in the export but in the mapping to Shopify. And watch for the trap: filter the export to the "Variable" type and leave out "Variations", and you get products with no variants at all. Which is why I check them item by item after the import.
The second: the product list is often taken from the sitemap, but a sitemap answers what the store wants indexed, not which addresses exist. Hidden and sold-out products return a perfectly normal page today – after a move to Shopify they would become error pages (404). So I read the catalogue through the API, not from the sitemap.
The table shows the default English installation. On your store it may look different – which is exactly why I build it only after the audit.
| WooCommerce | Shopify |
|---|---|
| /product/name/ | /products/name |
| /product-category/name/ | /collections/name |
| /shop/ | /collections/all |
| /brand/name/ | /collections/name |
| /post-name/ | /blogs/news/post-name |
| /about/ | /pages/about |
| /shop/page/2/ | /collections/all?page=2 |
Scroll for the full table
Look at the last row: WordPress doesn’t translate its own URL bases, so a store in German or Polish still paginates with /page/2/. The same goes for blog categories, which default to /category/ in any language – while WooCommerce’s own bases, like the product category, do get translated when the store is installed in another language. One store can therefore mix a translated base with an English one, and the map has to account for both.
This is the core of a WooCommerce migration budget – and the place where quotes most often part company with reality.
Out of the box, WooCommerce knows only a regular and a sale price per product. Price tiers by customer type come from a plugin – and every plugin does it completely differently: the rules live in its settings and appear in no product or customer export. The numbers come out, the rules don’t. So I rebuild the pricing structure on Shopify.
Running subscriptions don’t move as a file. On Shopify they’re handled by an app, and saved payment cards can only be transferred on higher plans and only from selected gateways. On a store with active subscriptions, this is the first thing I look at in the audit – not the last.
Points balances live in the plugin’s database, not in the store. That’s true on both sides: Shopify has no loyalty programme of its own either, and it’s handled by an app. The transfer is agreed with that app’s provider and is a separate line item, not part of the data migration.
Updates to the core, plugins and theme, backups, certificates, PCI compliance and watching for vulnerabilities. On WooCommerce that’s your job, or the job of someone you pay for it. On Shopify it’s nobody’s job – and added up, that’s typically the part that pays for the migration.
Every quote therefore includes a plugin inventory: what Shopify does natively, what an app covers, and what has to be built. Out of five plugins there are usually two that nobody actually uses – those simply get dropped.
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WooCommerce is an open platform – your own code, your own server, WordPress underneath. These are the situations where I’ll talk you out of migrating.
And plainly: if staying works out better for you, I’ll say so in my reply to your enquiry – pushing you into a move that doesn’t pay for itself does me no good in the long run.
No URL disappears into nothing. Every old address gets a permanent (301) redirect to the matching new one, so external links and the SEO signals you have collected point at Shopify rather than at a 404.
Old address
/old-url
301 (permanent)
redirect
New on Shopify
/products/…
Both the visitor and Googlebot land on the right new page – not on a 404.
Real stores from my desk – some built from zero, some heavily rebuilt. Proof that Shopify holds up under demanding traffic.
Aniball
Minimalistick × Soulbabes
The export is only the first step, not the migration. A file from the admin won’t tell you which addresses actually exist, won’t build a new design or product pages, won’t create the redirect map, won’t carry over the logic from your plugins or connect your carriers, feeds and invoicing – and it won’t check whether prices, stock and variants still add up after the import. For a small catalogue with no history and no rankings, I’ll talk you into doing it yourself. For a store whose revenue rests on organic search, the cost of a mistake usually runs higher than the cost of the migration.
Because on WooCommerce the URL structure can’t be predicted. I measured fifteen stores and found six different product URL patterns – including stores in other languages running on the English defaults, and one with no prefix at all. WooCommerce also baked its URLs in at installation and never recalculates them, so not even the store’s language gives anything away. So I build the map after the audit, once I know what I’m working with.
How I handle SEO in a migrationI go through them and sort them into three groups: what Shopify does natively, what an app covers, and what needs to be built again. The third group is the expensive one, so I deal with it at the very start rather than halfway through the project. Experience says that of twenty plugins, five are used by nobody, ten are replaced by native features or a single app, and only the rest is real work.
The prices do, the rules don’t. The numbers themselves are stored on the products and come out. But the logic – which group gets which tier, from what quantity, with what global discount – lives in the plugin’s settings, and that’s in no product or customer export. On Shopify I rebuild it with the native B2B features, which have been available on every plan since April 2026. It’s a separate line in the quote, not something that rides along with the data.
They don’t transfer automatically, and that isn’t reluctance on my part – Shopify says so explicitly in its own documentation and points to review apps. In practice I pull the reviews out of WooCommerce and import them into the review app you choose on Shopify. Store ratings on Trustpilot or Trusted Shops aren’t affected by the migration; they stay where they are.
On hosting, yes – but that isn’t the main saving. On WooCommerce you pay for hosting, certificates, a backup solution and the time of whoever watches core updates, plugin updates and security patches. On Shopify you pay for the plan and all of that is inside it. Work out how many hours a month currently go on upkeep – for most stores that’s a larger item than the plan itself.
I won’t promise a number, because I would be promising something that depends on your store. What changes is structural: on Shopify the server stops being a variable, and server response time is where self-hosted WooCommerce most often struggles – it’s set by the hosting you pay for and by how the cart and checkout get cached. But speed is also the theme, the images and the number of apps. So I watch it during the build and measure it on real traffic after launch.
A link to the store, the number of products and the plugins you care about is enough. Within 24 hours you get it in writing: what the migration involves, roughly what it costs and how long it takes (typically 2–8 weeks).
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