Anyone here migrate from WooComerce? What would you do if you had to do it again

Retired Boards Appdev Store Design
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Are you a Shopify store owner who has migrated from another platform?

I’m Alan, and I run www.homeandroost.co.uk, and I’m going to jump ship to Shopify.

I’ve got some questions below; I’d love to know people’s experience migrating to and using Shopify.

I’ve made a questionnaire in case this might be easier for you to answer. https://form.typeform.com/to/bTO7bAoM, or you can reply here.

I really appreciate any help you can provide.

Preparation and Planning

  • What were the main reasons you decided to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify?
  • How did you handle migrating product data, customer information, and past orders?

Date Migration

  • How did you handle migrating product data, customer information, and past orders?

  • Did you use any specific tools or services to assist with the data migration?

SEO and Traffic Preservation

  • What steps did you take to preserve your SEO rankings during the migration?
  • How did you handle redirects from old URLs to new ones on Shopify?
  • Did you experience any loss in traffic or rankings, and how did you mitigate this?

Customer Experience

  • Were there any improvements in sales, customer satisfaction, or conversion rates after moving to Shopify?

Costs & Expenses

  • How did the total cost of migration (including any downtime) compare to your expectations?
  • How much ongoing maintenance and technical support have you needed since migrating?

Business Performance

  • Have you seen any changes in conversion rates, average order value, or other key performance indicators?
  • How has the migration impacted your overall business performance?

Personal Experience and Advice

  • Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently during the migration?
  • What was the most surprising aspect of the transition for you?
  • What advice would you give to someone considering the same move?

Thats it. Thanks! Alan

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Hi Alan,

We do have some info on migration from Woocommerce to Shopify here, and there are apps like Matrixify that will make this process easier. I’ve also shared this post with some members of the Shopify developer community and asked them to submit advice via your form.

Best of luck!!

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Hey Alan,

Welcome aboard to Shopify, you’ll love it!

I’m just finished helping migrate a client from Woocommerce to Shopify so I should be able to help.

So for migrating the data I used database exports and build out tools to transform data and rest api calls to put them into Shopify, because of WP based page builders some page content was a mess so had to be transformed and allowed us to take advantage and see a full scope of all data before we made the jump. I created a sandbox site so we could test migrations, check data and if it wasn’t correct dump the entire site and try again.

To protect SEO it was a case of make sure data was moved over 1:1 or better, Meta titles, meta descriptions etc copied over, again with above it also gave us the ability to check content like h1s and the like were in place and in the right order.

With redirects, when we build a page, product or collection with the Shopify API we’d log the information sent back to build out a list of 301s that we’d add into Shopify especially with how unique WPs slugs can be products with multiple slashes become hyphenated etc (it’s a nightmare!)

As for downtime I always say 1 full day, this is typically mitigated with doing a migration a few days before and then downtime is only a few minutes/hours but I like to put realistic timelines out there, I prefer to under promise and over deliver.

As long as the sandbox is checked over thoroughly there shouldn’t be any maintenance or support data wise going forward, it’s typically just improvements to the site alongside the companies ambitions.

I can’t really answer the business questions, that’s down to you as a company depending on what you see as the advantages as a simple answer Shopify is (typically) faster, more robust and is constantly updating.

My advice would be to look at your data with a fine tooth comb, take this as an opportunity to dot your i’s and cross your t’s because when it’s migrated it’s done.

Diolch,
Ben

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We did a 30,000 product, 5,000 customers, and 10,000 + orders migration from WooCommerce to Shopify earlier this year. Our team uses Matrixify as a tool for migration. Would highly recommend them.

The migration went super smooth and took us less than a day to complete. No real advice other then the tool. It will even handle 301 redirects which is a huge concern with migrations from Woo to Shopify’s format.

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Hi Alan,

Welcome to Shopify! I’m an app developer and one of our apps is the Ablestar WooCommerce Importer. Over 10,000 stores have used the app to move data to Shopify so while I can’t answer all your questions there are a themes we’ve seen over the years that might be helpful.

You’ll probably need to move your data over more than once

In the time between when you first copy products or orders to Shopify and when you make the final switch, the data on WooCommerce will have changed and you’ll need to incrementally update what you have in Shopify. However you choose to bring the data over, keep notes so you can easily repeat the steps and make sure you don’t overwrite data that’s already been brought over to Shopify.

A common workflow we’ll see is:

  1. Copy over the product data to Shopify and edit them to be sure they’re looking correct
  2. Migrate the orders/customers next, so the historical orders can be linked to specific products in Shopify
  3. As you’re getting the theme and integrations set up on the Shopify side, you’ll have new products and orders in WooCommerce. Do one or more incremental updates (not overwriting the products you’ve already edited in Shopify) of this data
  4. Launch your Shopify store (yay!)
  5. Bring over any final orders that might have been placed between the last incremental update and the launch

Some data won’t transfer over exactly

WooCommerce is very customizable so it’s possible that you have a WooCommerce plugin that stores some data that Shopify doesn’t support. Even if you’re just using a plain WooCommerce installation, there’s some product fields like ‘short description’ that Shopify doesn’t have (although they could be stored in a metafield). Also, if your product descriptions have links to URLs or images, make sure those will still be accessible when you move your domain to Shopify.

With our app, after you import products, we also provide a CSV file of you WooCommerce data along with the corresponding product IDs in Shopify. This allows you to do a spreadsheet edit with our Bulk Product Editor app to selectively update fields that didn’t come through as expected.

Phone numbers and emails in orders

Shopify is also more strict when it comes to validating data. When you’re importing orders for example, WooCommerce will accept invalid phone numbers, or emails from domains that don’t exist, but Shopify will reject those. If you still need that information, one option is to import it into the order notes.

Related to that, if you have a number of invalid emails a tempting solution is just to replace them with an email address to your store, like admin@mystore.com. This will allow them to be imported to Shopify but since they all have the same email, Shopify will create a single customer for all these orders. That can affect your reporting.

A work around, if you use Google for your email, is to set the invalid emails to something like admin+1234@mystore.com, where 1234 is the order number. Google will ignore everything from the plus sign onwards, but they’ll still have a unique email address and customer in Shopify.

Historical order data might not match exactly

You can migrate the orders but it’s more to be able to look up old orders than to get exact historical reporting. WooCommerce is more lenient that Shopify and lets you have orders where the math just doesn’t work (eg, the line items don’t add up to the subtotal). It depends a lot on your WooCommerce setup but it might not be possible to match the numbers up exactly.

Be careful when importing orders (!)

Importing orders will trigger other apps that handle orders which can have unintended side-effects. For example, if you’ve hooked up an app to Shopify that sends new orders to a fulfillment service (like ShipStation), it might see the migrated orders being created in Shopify and start trying to fulfill old orders. Make sure these integrations are disabled before migrating.

Be especially careful for this if you’re doing one final incremental order migration after you’ve launched your Shopify store.

When you migrate orders I’d recommend starting with a few test orders that were placed with an email address you have access to. Check the email, or any other 3rd-party fulfillment apps after you migrate the order to make sure there’s nothing unexpected.

This isn’t as important but by default Shopify will also send the store owner an email when an order is created. You can disable these notifications in the Shopify admin and that will prevent you from receiving hundreds of emails when you migrate the orders.

Making the DNS switch

When you actually make the switch to Shopify you need to update your DNS records to point from your WooCommerce store to Shopify. This change will take a while to spread through the internet because different servers will cache the values for your domains.

The DNS records have a field called TTL which gives guidance on how long a server should cache DNS records. About 24 hours before you move your domain, you can lower your TTL to a value like 300 (this is in seconds, so 5 minutes). This will allow your changes to propagate faster when you actually make them. Once everything’s set up and you’re happily on Shopify you can increase it again.

This is optional but might help decrease downtime during the switch.

SEO Redirects

On the SEO side, since the URL structure is different in Shopify, you’ll need to create redirects in Shopify for your old WooCommerce URLs. For example: redirecting /product/t-shirt to /products/t-shirt (product becomes plural in Shopify). Depending on your setup, you might also need to create redirects for URLs that contain the category in them. Unfortunately Shopify doesn’t support wildcard redirects so you’ll either need to use Excel to create the possible permutations (and upload them in the Shopify admin) or use a 3rd-party app (we have a free integration with our Link Manager app to do this)

Keep access to your WooCommerce store

Before launch your store on Shopify make sure that you can access your WooCommerce admin from an alternate URL. This could be a subdomain of your store (Eg, oldwoocommerce.mystore.com). This way, when you point your domain to Shopify, you can easily log into WooCommerce to check data.

Depending on the cost, I’d keep the WooCommerce hosting up for several months at least and have a way to retrieve the data afterwards if you really need to.

Hopefully some stuff in here helps when it comes to the data migration from WooCommerce. Happy to answer any of questions in more detail,

Daniel

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Ablestar Woocommerce Importer 100%. I wish it was this easy migrating from all other platforms.

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Well, for starters you have made a great decision moving to Shopify: more secure, easier to use/manage, develop against, etc.

We have performed several WooComm to Shopify migrations, some involving A LOT of data (products, orders, pages, etc). We typically try to use the Shopify API to move as much as we can (redirects, products/images, automate collection builds, etc) - but tools like Matrixify can help for sure. The thing that can be tricky, most certainly requiring creative dev, are customizations in the old site (powered by code or an app) that need to be transferred/rebuilt into Shopify.

In terms of your important SEO one to one redirect mapping is extremely important, but what a lot of people forget to do is set redirects for all important/high authority back links sending your pages traffic. Don’t forget those!

Happy to help if you have any more questions!

Cheers.

WhiteWater Web

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Thanks for the feedback.

Have any of your clients moved Trust Pilot integration over?

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This is great, thanks Daniel

Have any of your clients moved Trust Pilot integration over?

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Yes. Are your reviews stored in a WordPress database, or within TrustPilot (or both)?

WhiteWater Web

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Thanks everyone for their contributions to this conversation! So many great insights and recommendations shared!

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Trustpilot stores all the reviews, I believe.

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Did you have any tips on changing out the links in product descriptions, links that go to collections, products, blogs, etc? Woo does not always have /products/ or /collections/ in their URL links like Shopify does. So a copy/paste option in excel is not an option. How did you handle this?

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Matrixify is the best when migrating. How did you handle updating links in product descriptions without updating each link 1x1? This is not updated by Matrixify, only images have this privilege.

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Asking you as well, any secret methods of updating links inside product descriptions without doing this 1x1. Woo does not always use /products/ or /collections/ etc in their URLs, so copy/paste is a risky option. Thanks for this post.