Shopify is a great place to start an online store — and a frustrating place to grow one if your needs stop matching its rules. Monthly fees stack (platform + apps + transaction fees on external gateways), customization hits walls, and you never truly own your store. Moving to WooCommerce trades those constraints for control: you own the code, the data, and the hosting. Here’s what the migration actually involves, based on migrations we’ve done for real stores.
What transfers cleanly — and what doesn’t
Products, categories, customers, and order history all transfer, either via CSV export/import or a migration tool like Cart2Cart. What does not transfer automatically:
- Your theme and design. Shopify themes are Liquid; WordPress doesn’t speak it. The store gets rebuilt — which is also your chance to fix everything you disliked about it.
- App functionality. Every Shopify app needs a WooCommerce equivalent (usually a plugin, often free where Shopify charged monthly).
- Customer passwords. They’re hashed and can’t move. Customers reset passwords on first login — plan the email announcement around this.
- URL structure. Shopify forces
/products/and/collections/paths. WooCommerce uses its own. Without 301 redirects mapping old URLs to new ones, your SEO takes a real hit. This is the step DIY migrations most often botch.
The migration sequence that avoids downtime
The store keeps selling on Shopify while the WooCommerce build happens on a staging site. Products and content migrate first, the design gets rebuilt and tested, then a final delta sync pulls the orders and customers that arrived during the build. Only then does DNS switch. Done right, the cutover happens overnight with zero missed orders. Done wrong — building live, migrating once, hoping — you get a gap where orders land in the old store after the export.
What it costs — honestly
A straightforward catalog (under ~500 products, standard pages) is typically a 2–4 week project. Complex stores — subscriptions, bundles, multi-currency, thousands of SKUs — take longer, and anyone quoting a flat “$300 full migration” for one is quoting for the CSV import only, not the rebuild, redirects, and testing that make it a migration rather than a data dump. We’ve broken down the full ownership costs in our guide to what a WooCommerce store really costs.
After the switch: what changes for you
You gain full control — any feature is buildable, hosting is yours to choose, and the monthly app-fee treadmill largely disappears. You also inherit responsibility: updates, backups, and security are now yours (or your developer’s) to manage. For most growing stores the trade is worth it; for a two-product side hustle it may not be. An honest developer will tell you which one you are.
Considering the move? Send us your store URL — we’ll tell you what your specific migration involves, what it costs fixed-price, and whether it’s actually worth doing.