How to Migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify Without Losing Important Store Data

Yes, but not with a single button. Products and customers move with Shopify's tools or a CSV, while order history, reviews, subscriptions and redirects each need their own plan. The data most at risk is the data nobody listed: product attributes beyond Shopify's three options, reviews, active subscriptions, and the URLs that earn search traffic. Map every type of data to its Shopify home before you import anything, replace plugins deliberately, and treat redirects and the cutover as a project of their own.

This checklist is for WooCommerce store owners who have already chosen Shopify. For the general process from any platform, see the step-by-step Shopify migration guide. If you have not yet decided on a platform, start with the platform migration checklist.

Shopify's own documentation and its App Store listing describe the first-party Store Migration app differently. The Shopify Help Center guide to migrating from WooCommerce says the app imports products from a WooCommerce product CSV, is in early access, and is only available for certain stores on desktop. The Store Migration app listing says it moves product and customer data from WooCommerce and other platforms. Plan as if only products are covered, and treat anything more as a bonus you confirm on your own store.

Shopify's guide exports products with WooCommerce's built-in CSV export, and customers and orders with a WooCommerce export plugin. The customer CSV needs editing to match Shopify's format. For history, reviews and larger catalogs, most stores use a third-party migration app or a bulk CSV tool, and very large or unusual catalogs may need a script against Shopify's Admin API. This is the part of a Shopify migration project where most of the planning time goes.

Use this table as the migration inventory. Add a column for your record counts and an owner for each row, and do not start importing until every row has a decision.

Shopify raised its limit from 100 to 2,048 variants per product in October 2025 (Shopify changelog), and Shopify's variants documentation keeps the limit of three options per product. The same page warns that some third-party themes, theme app extensions, public apps and sales channels might not support more than 100 variants. So a product that imports cleanly can still break a product page, a feed or a reviews widget.

Before import, list every variable product with more than three attributes or more than 100 variations. For each one, choose to drop an attribute that does not change stock or price, move it to a metafield or line-item property, or split the product. Then check your theme, feeds and key apps against the largest products you have.

Older migration advice says to import customers and email them an invitation to set a new password. That advice describes Shopify's legacy customer accounts. On 26 February 2026 Shopify deprecated legacy customer accounts, which are no longer available to new stores (Shopify changelog). With the current customer accounts, customers enter their email address and receive a one-time code, and Shopify says a password isn't required. Customers who already have a profile in your admin can sign in with the email on that profile (Shopify Help Center).

In practice, imported customers should be able to sign in with their email and see their imported history, without a reset campaign. Do not rely on that until you have tested it: import a handful of real customer records into a development store, sign in as them, and check that addresses and any imported orders appear. Then write a short notice for the launch email and the account page explaining the new sign-in.

WooCommerce stores usually run on plugins. List every active plugin, what it does for the business, and whether anyone still uses it. Then choose a replacement in this order: a native Shopify feature, an app, custom work, or nothing at all.

WooCommerce and Shopify use different URL structures, so most product and category URLs will change. Shopify recommends setting up redirects before you transfer the domain. Shopify can redirect only from URLs that are broken on the new store, URLs with query strings might not redirect as expected, and standard plans allow up to 100,000 redirects (20,000,000 on Plus), per the URL redirect documentation. Use Shopify's sample redirect CSV as the template, so the column names match.

The cutover is the window when orders could land on the wrong system. Plan it as a sequence with named owners. The timing below assumes a store of moderate size with a delta sync of new orders and customers; adjust it to your volumes.

This example is hypothetical. A homeware brand on WooCommerce has 900 products, some rugs with four attributes (size, colour, material and pile), a reviews plugin, a subscription plugin for refills and a blog that drives a share of organic traffic. Its mapping table shows the rugs would lose an option, so pile becomes a metafield shown on the product page. Reviews are imported through a review app, and refill subscriptions move to a subscription app after the payment provider confirms how saved cards can be transferred. The team builds a redirect file covering product, category, tag and blog URLs, runs a trial import two weeks before launch, and tests customer sign-in on a development store. On cutover day it imports only the orders and customers created since the trial, imports redirects, and moves the domain.

Shopify suits most product catalogs, but the migration is harder than it looks when the store depends on things Shopify handles differently. Pause and scope carefully if your products need more than three options that each change price or stock, if your checkout relies on custom WooCommerce code that you can't recreate with Shopify's checkout extensibility, if subscriptions make up much of revenue and your payment provider can't move saved payment details, or if a peak trading period is weeks away. If you sell to trade buyers, check Shopify's B2B plan limits before committing. In those cases, a later launch date, a phased move or a different platform can be the better call.

Shopify Help Center: Migrating from WooCommerce; Importing WooCommerce data; Adding variants; Customer accounts; URL redirects.

Shopify changelog: Product variant limit increased to 2,048 (15 October 2025); Legacy customer accounts are now deprecated (26 February 2026).

Shopify App Store: Store Migration (vendor listing).

Accessed 14 October 2026. Shopify's tools, limits and account features change; check the current documentation before you migrate.

A WooCommerce to Shopify migration keeps its data when every type of data has a decision before import: what moves, how, and what changes shape on the way. Start with the mapping table, fix products that exceed three options, line up apps for reviews, history and subscriptions, test customer sign-in, and build the redirect map before the domain moves. For the data-cleaning side in more depth, see ecommerce data migration.

Next steps: fill in the mapping table with your record counts, list your plugins against the checklist, and run a trial import into a development store.