Moving a WooCommerce store to Shopify is mostly a data job with three traps: things that cannot move at all, things that move but break on the way, and URLs that change shape. This guide covers all of it, from the WooCommerce export to the day the domain switches, with every limit checked against Shopify’s, WooCommerce’s and Stripe’s own documentation on 7 October 2026.
Key takeaways
- Products, customers and orders move. Passwords, review “verified” badges, lifetime-value totals and tax settings do not, and subscriptions need their own project.
- Shopify’s free Store Migration app handles WooCommerce products from the native product CSV. Customers, orders, blog posts and gift cards need a migration app or Shopify’s APIs.
- Every WooCommerce URL changes: /product/ becomes /products/ and /product-category/ becomes /collections/. Redirects are the difference between keeping your rankings and starting again.
- Your customers do not need new passwords. Shopify’s current customer accounts sign in with an email code, so an imported customer can log in on day one.
What moves, and how
| Data | How it moves to Shopify | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Products | WooCommerce product CSV, imported with Shopify’s Store Migration app or a migration app | More than 3 options per product are dropped by Shopify’s app; weights must be converted from pounds to grams |
| Customers | Customer CSV (rewritten to Shopify’s column headings) or a migration app | Passwords never move; Total Spent and Total Orders are ignored |
| Order history | Migration app or Shopify’s APIs only (no CSV) | Turn off staff order notifications first, or every imported order emails your team |
| Reviews | A review app’s importer (Judge.me, Loox, Yotpo, Okendo template) | Imported reviews can lose their “verified” status |
| Subscriptions | Payment-method migration, then contracts recreated in the new subscription app | Cards saved with Stripe Link and PayPal billing agreements cannot be moved this way |
| Gift cards and store credit | Migration app or the GiftCard API | Store credit needs Shopify’s current customer accounts |
| Blog posts | Migration app or the Blog/Article APIs | Shopify has no WordPress XML import |
| Taxes | Set up again in Shopify | Shopify calculates destination-based tax; filing stays with you |
Step 1: Export from WooCommerce
WooCommerce exports products natively (Products, then Export), including custom fields as meta columns. Customers and orders are a different story: WooCommerce core only offers them as Analytics report downloads, which are summaries rather than import-ready records. A full customer and order export needs a plugin: the Customer / Order / Coupon Export extension on WooCommerce.com is listed at $79 a year, and Shopify’s guide names the Import Export Suite plugin. Export tax rate tables too, even though Shopify will not import them: they are your checklist for setting tax up again.
Check variations before you export. WooCommerce’s exporter can drop attribute values from variation names, and Shopify caps a product at three options and 2,048 variants. A product with a fourth option needs restructuring, an app or theme work before it moves.
Step 2: Choose the import route
Shopify’s first-party tool is now called Shopify Store Migration (it replaced Store Importer). It is free, imports WooCommerce products from the unchanged product CSV, and returns a report of what imported and what did not. Shopify’s WooCommerce guide still marks it as early access and desktop-only, so do not plan around it for anything beyond products.
For customers, orders, blog posts and redirects, Shopify’s own guide points to third-party apps. The four we see most, with the pricing each publishes on its listing:
| App | What it moves from WooCommerce | Published pricing (7 Oct 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Matrixify | Products, categories, coupons, customers, orders, blog posts and pages; reads WooCommerce directly and generates redirects | Free demo (10 items per file); $20, $50 or $200 a month |
| LitExtension | Products, customers, orders and more, self-service or as a managed service | Priced by entity count on a calculator; free demo |
| Cart2Cart | Products, customers, orders, categories and images, with SEO URLs and 301 redirects | Priced by store size and options |
| Ablestar WooCommerce Importer | Products, orders and customers, with activation links, reviews and redirects | First 20 products free, then per volume |
Import in this order: products, then customers, then orders, so each order links to products and customers that already exist. Our migration tools comparison goes deeper on choosing between them.
Step 3: Customers and logins
Shopify does not accept password hashes from another platform, and WordPress 6.8 moved to its own bcrypt-based format, so passwords cannot come across by any route. That matters less than it used to. Shopify’s current customer accounts are passwordless: a customer enters their email and a six-digit code, and every imported customer profile already counts as an account. Older password-based accounts are deprecated, and Multipass single sign-on is closed to new stores, so there is no case for building a login bridge. Tell customers in your launch email that they sign in with a code now.
Two details from the customer import: Shopify’s customer CSV has no column mapping, so the WooCommerce export has to be rewritten to Shopify’s headings, and each file is capped at 15 MB.
Step 4: Orders, reviews, gift cards and blog posts
Order history only moves through an app or Shopify’s Order and Transaction APIs. Before you run it, switch off new-order notifications for your staff: Shopify sends one email per imported order to everyone subscribed.
Reviews do not export from WooCommerce natively. Judge.me’s WooCommerce app has been retired (its support team exports reviews on request), reviews it imports lose their verified status and stay out of the Google Shopping reviews feed, and Okendo takes WooCommerce reviews through its CSV template. Gift cards can be recreated with their original codes and expiry dates through the GiftCard API. Store credit needs Shopify’s current customer accounts and is capped below $15,000 per customer. Blog posts need an app or the API; WordPress’s own XML export cannot be uploaded to Shopify.
Step 5: Subscriptions
Subscriptions are the part of a WooCommerce migration most likely to go wrong, because the subscription itself is easy to recreate and the saved card is not. Shopify’s subscription import only accepts contracts from apps already integrated with Shopify Checkout, so WooCommerce Subscriptions data has to be rebuilt: the payment methods first, then the contracts.
- Token migration (no raw card numbers) is open on every Shopify plan and is done with your new subscription app. If your WooCommerce store uses the official Stripe extension, it already stores the Stripe customer and card IDs that this route needs.
- Raw card-number migration is a paid Shopify Professional Services job, available on Plus and Enterprise only. Stripe exports card data only to a PCI DSS Level 1 processor, leaves out subscriptions and payment history, and excludes cards saved with Stripe Link.
- The slow route keeps your old gateway connected as a secondary gateway and moves each card as the customer updates billing details. Shopify says that can take months.
Pause billing on the old system before contracts go live on the new one, or customers are charged twice. Recharge, Skio and Loop all document WooCommerce migrations; Recharge and Loop both say historical data does not come across. Our subscription apps comparison covers the apps themselves.
Step 6: Redirects and SEO
This is where rankings are kept or lost. Shopify’s URL prefixes are fixed; only the handle after them can change.
| WooCommerce default | Shopify |
|---|---|
| /product/blue-shirt/ | /products/blue-shirt |
| /product-category/shirts/ | /collections/shirts |
| /product-tag/linen/ | A filtered collection, or a redirect to the closest collection |
| /about/ (a WordPress page) | /pages/about |
| /2026/03/post-name/ or /post-name/ | /blogs/news/post-name |
Build a redirect for every old URL that has traffic or links, and import them in bulk from a CSV (Content, Menus, URL redirects, Import). Shopify allows up to 100,000 redirects, or 20 million on Plus. Three limits catch people: a redirect only fires when the old URL returns a 404 on Shopify, Shopify cannot redirect from its own fixed paths, and URLs with query strings, such as WooCommerce’s plain permalinks (?product=111), may not redirect reliably. Set the redirects up before you move the domain.
Shopify generates its sitemap at /sitemap.xml; submit it in Search Console after the switch, in place of WordPress’s /wp-sitemap.xml or your SEO plugin’s. Shopify ships a default robots.txt, and changing it means adding a robots.txt.liquid template that replaces Shopify’s version entirely and that Shopify Support does not help with. Our guide to migrating without losing SEO covers the post-launch checks.
Step 7: Payments, taxes and launch
On Shopify’s US pricing page, plans are $25 (Basic), $65 (Grow) and $399 (Advanced) a month billed monthly, or $19, $49 and $299 billed yearly, with Plus from $2,300 a month. Using Shopify Payments as your only payment provider removes Shopify’s third-party transaction fee; keeping another card processor alongside it adds a 1.25% premium on Shopify Payments transactions. On stores created since 12 May 2025, gift card and store credit redemptions carry third-party transaction fees too. If you are unsure which plan you need, the Plus vs Advanced comparison works through it.
Taxes are set up rather than migrated: Shopify calculates destination-based tax automatically, Shopify Tax covers the US, EU, UK and Canada, and filing stays with you. When you move the domain, disconnect it from the old host first, or the certificate can fail during the switch.
What it costs, and when to get help
A small catalogue with no subscriptions can move with a migration app over a few weekends. The cost rises with order history, subscriptions, custom fields and the number of URLs worth keeping. Our migration cost breakdown prices the common cases. If the store earns from search or runs subscriptions, a managed platform migration plans the redirect map, the payment-method move and the cut-over date for you, priced as one number in writing.
Sources: Shopify’s WooCommerce migration guide, customer accounts, URL redirects, subscription payment-method migration and pricing; WooCommerce’s product exporter and permalinks documentation; Stripe’s card data export; and the App Store listings for Shopify Store Migration, Matrixify, LitExtension, Cart2Cart and Ablestar. All checked 7 October 2026.
