WooCommerce to Shopify migration: what moves, what breaks, what it costs

What moves cleanly and what does not

WooCommerce is the easiest platform to leave for Shopify, and that is not a compliment to either side. Shopify’s own Store Importer app lists WooCommerce among the platforms it supports directly, alongside Amazon, Clover, eBay, Etsy, Lightspeed, Square and Wix (checked 12 August 2026). Ablestar’s WooCommerce Importer is free to install, carries the Built for Shopify badge and a 4.9 rating from 27 reviews (4 September 2026). Matrixify, a paid app, goes further: products, with trashed products arriving as archived; categories as collections; customers; orders filtered by status and date; coupons as discounts; blog posts and pages; and a redirect list generated from the old product, category, post and page links.

So the rows and columns move. What does not move is anything WooCommerce modelled in a way Shopify does not: the shape of the catalogue, the plugin data attached to it, and the parts of a customer record that live at a payment gateway rather than in the store.

Every URL changes

WooCommerce inherits WordPress permalinks, so you control the whole path: the default is /product/ and /product-category/, but a shop base gives /shop/blue-parka or /shop/jackets/blue-parka, and a custom base gives anything at all. Shopify fixes the prefixes on every plan, Plus included: products at /products/{handle}, collections at /collections/{handle}, pages at /pages/{handle}, articles at /blogs/{blog-handle}/{article-handle}. You can choose the handle. You cannot change the prefix, and no app or theme changes that.

That means a complete redirect map, old URL to new URL, for every product, category, page, post, tag and archive that ranks or has links, validated before cutover and again after. The blog is the part everyone forgets, because the product export does not contain it. How to build and check that map, and what the ranking dip normally looks like afterwards, is the whole subject of our WordPress to Shopify SEO guide.

Subscriptions, saved cards and passwords

Three things every importer leaves behind, because they were never in the WooCommerce database in a usable form.

Passwords. They are stored as hashes that Shopify cannot read, so customers arrive without one. Plan the activation email as a campaign, not a system notice: deduplicate the list first, send it in batches after launch, and expect a support spike from customers who do not remember buying from you.

Saved payment methods. WooCommerce stores a token that points at a card held by your gateway, not the card itself. The token only works from the account that created it. Whether those saved methods survive depends on the gateway, not on Shopify: Stripe, for example, documents a process for migrating saved payment data between accounts on request. Ask your gateway before you set a launch date, because the answer changes the plan.

Active subscriptions. WooCommerce Subscriptions renewals are those same gateway tokens on a schedule. The subscription plan, the next billing date and the price move as data into whichever Shopify subscription app you choose; the payment method has to come across through the gateway migration above, mapped to the right customer, or every subscriber is asked to re-enter a card. Run this as its own workstream with its own test: one real renewal on the new platform before cutover.

The order to run it in

Audit and export first: a full URL crawl of the live site, the product, customer and order exports, and a list of every plugin with what it actually does for revenue. Clean the product data before anything is imported, because Shopify will faithfully import six years of inconsistently typed attribute values. Build the theme on Shopify while the data is being cleaned, with separate owners. Map URLs and load redirects before launch, not after. Rebuild coupons, shipping rules and tax settings, then run the gateway and subscription migration. QA on real devices with live payment methods. Cut DNS over at a quiet hour, keep WooCommerce running read-only for at least ninety days, and read the coverage report and error logs every morning for two weeks. The phase-by-phase version, with owners and timings, is our Shopify migration checklist.

What a WooCommerce to Shopify migration costs in Canada

Done yourself with Shopify’s Store Importer or the Ablestar app, the software costs nothing and the bill is your time plus whatever the redirect map misses. Matrixify is a paid app that earns its fee on large catalogues and order histories. With an agency, EVDEV publishes fixed-price Shopify migrations from CA$2,000 for a small catalogue on a near-stock WooCommerce store moved onto an adapted theme; the ten drivers that move the number above that floor are ranked in our Shopify migration cost guide, and the migration services page explains what we need to quote yours fixed. Ontario agencies add 13% HST.

Set against that what stops: hosting, WordPress and plugin maintenance, security patching, and the developer hours that went into keeping a self-hosted store upright. For most stores the trade is a fixed monthly fee in exchange for giving up control below the theme and app layer. Whether that is a good trade is the real question, and it is answered by your requirements, not by the platform comparison.

Common questions

Does WooCommerce integrate with Shopify?

Not as a two-way integration. The Store Importer, Ablestar and Matrixify are one-way importers that copy data from WooCommerce into Shopify. You can run both stores for a short overlap while the redirects settle, but orders placed on one do not appear on the other, which is why the cutover is a single scheduled event rather than a gradual one.

How much does it cost to migrate a WooCommerce store to Shopify?

Nothing in software if you use Shopify’s Store Importer or the free Ablestar importer and do the work yourself. With EVDEV, fixed-price migrations start at CA$2,000 for a small catalogue on a near-stock store with an adapted theme, and rise with source customisations, a custom theme, integrations, catalogue complexity and the size of the redirect map. Shopify’s plan fee, CA$49 to CA$517 a month below Plus, is billed separately.

Is WooCommerce as good as Shopify?

They are good at different things. WooCommerce gives you the whole stack: your URLs, your database, your checkout code, and the hosting, patching and plugin-conflict bills that come with owning them. Shopify takes the stack away and charges rent for it, with a fixed URL structure and a checkout you customise through extensions rather than edit. Merchants who need control below the theme layer are better on WooCommerce; merchants who want to stop maintaining a platform are better on Shopify.

Should the WordPress blog move to Shopify too?

It can stay on WordPress, on a subdomain or subfolder, or move into Shopify’s blog at /blogs/. Both work. What does not work is forgetting it: the article, tag, category and archive URLs are not in the product export, so they never reach the redirect map unless someone adds them. The options and the trade-offs are in the WordPress to Shopify SEO guide.