WooCommerce to Shopify migration

Many brands start on WooCommerce because WordPress was already there. The store then grows plugin by plugin: one for payments, one for translations, one for German legal texts, one for tracking. A WooCommerce to Shopify migration moves all of that, and the store is only one part of it. What the store does today is the sum of WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme, the functions inside the theme and every other plugin.

The inventory therefore starts with the plugin list. For every active plugin we record which function it performs, which data it stores and whether another plugin depends on it. After that it is settled what is standard in Shopify, what an app takes over and what is built as a custom extension. The page on our work as a Shopify migration agency describes the method for every source system. If you want to know before the project which plugins are critical, the migration audit comes first.

NICCOS has been a Shopify Plus Partner since April 2022 and holds 19 reviews with a 5.0 rating in the Shopify Partner Directory. Nine of our 13 published case studies describe a move from another shop system to Shopify Plus.

Languages and currencies are the first group. In WooCommerce a multilingual plugin holds translations and a second one often handles currencies. In Shopify both belong to Shopify Markets and are managed in one admin, together with domains and prices per country. The page on Shopify internationalisation lists what that includes.

Legal information is the second group. For the German market, plugins usually handle unit prices, delivery times, tax notes and the wording of the order button. In Shopify those tasks are split between admin settings, the theme and apps. For the lowest prior price under the Price Indication Ordinance (PAngV) we publish our own app, Best Price Indicator (PAngV), in the Shopify App Store. Shopify runs the checkout and allows extensions at defined points, and the further-reaching ones require Shopify Plus. The page on Shopify checkout explains what can be extended.

Tracking is the third group. In WooCommerce it usually runs through plugins that send events to Google Analytics, Google Ads and Meta. Before the move we record which events arrive today and rebuild them in Shopify with consent management. At Olakala, server-side tracking on Shopify Plus recorded 30% more sessions. The page on tracking setups explains the structure.

WooCommerce stores products as WordPress posts with custom fields. Variations are separate entries under the product. Attributes exist in two forms: global as a taxonomy and individual per product. Shopify has products, variants and metafields. Before the export we decide for every attribute whether it becomes a variant, a metafield or a filter, and merge attributes of the same name from both forms.

Customers in WooCommerce are WordPress users and sit in the same table as editors and subscribers. Orders sit in the post tables or in dedicated order tables, depending on the version. We pull both from the database, separate customers from other users and import orders with the original order number. Passwords cannot be transferred. Customers receive an invitation to activate their account.

Subscriptions need their own review. Running subscriptions from WooCommerce Subscriptions depend on payment details stored with the payment provider. Whether they move without new consent from customers is clarified with the provider before a date is fixed. The page on Shopify subscriptions covers what subscriptions need on Shopify.

In WordPress you define the address structure yourself. Products, product categories, tags, attachment pages and blog articles have their own paths depending on the settings, and a multilingual plugin adds a language folder or a domain per language. Shopify keeps products, collections, pages and blog articles under fixed paths. Almost every address changes in the move, including those of blog articles.

Many WooCommerce stores win their visitors through content. We record all addresses from the sitemap, Search Console, analytics and our own crawl and map each one to a target with the same content in the same language. Titles, descriptions and canonicals from the SEO plugin move as well. Kanela, a migration from PrestaShop, shows how large such a list can get: 147,753 legacy URL mappings from four language versions were set up and read back. The page on Shopify SEO describes the work on visibility afterwards.

Content from page builders and shortcodes cannot be copied because its structure is tied to the plugin that produced it. We rebuild it in Shopify as theme sections and metafields, so that your team maintains pages in the theme editor. Nobody can promise unchanged rankings after an address change. We are responsible for no address ending in an error page.

We advise against it when the website consists mainly of content and the store is a small part of it. WordPress is a content management system, and for a magazine with a few products it keeps doing its job. We also advise against it when your business depends on a function that reaches deep into cart and order and could only be rebuilt in Shopify with great effort.

In both cases the comparison is the more honest first step. You find it under Shopify vs. WooCommerce. If the store stays and only the connection to ERP or shipping causes trouble, the work starts with system integration.