How to Migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce
Custom Product Variations: If you’re selling products with multiple sizes, colors, or other attributes, WooCommerce offers a very comprehensive variation management system.
Custom Checkout Fields: Should you need more details from your customers at checkout, like special delivery instructions or their preferred delivery time slot, you can easily add custom fields to your checkout page with WooCommerce.
Product Add-Ons: Let’s say you’re selling a product that offers personalized engraving, gift wrapping, or other add-ons. With WooCommerce, you can easily set this up.
Dynamic Pricing: With dynamic pricing, you can set up the most complex pricing rules with ease. You can establish discounts based on product, category, quantity, user role, and more.
Geolocation and Currency: If you’re selling internationally, WooCommerce has in-built geolocation features. It can auto-detect your customer’s location and display prices in their local currency, making the shopping experience more intuitive.
Freedom with Costs:
While Shopify has a set monthly fee, with WooCommerce, you only pay for what you need. This means you can control costs much more closely, which can be beneficial for startups or small businesses with tight budgets.
Complete Control Over Data:
With WooCommerce, you have complete control over your data. You’re not bound by third-party terms and conditions, so you can ensure your data is handled and stored as you wish, essential for data-sensitive businesses or those in regulated industries.
How to Move from Shopify to WooCommerce:
- Backup Everything: Before starting the migration process, always back up all your Shopify data.
- Select a Host: Since WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, you’ll need a hosting provider. Choose one that offers good support and has experience with WooCommerce.
- Install WordPress: Once your hosting is set up, install WordPress.
- Install WooCommerce: Within your WordPress dashboard, install and activate the WooCommerce plugin.
- Migration Process: Use plugins like Cart2Cart or LitExtension for an automated migration process. These tools can help transfer your products, customers, and order data from Shopify to WooCommerce.
- Design Your Store: Choose a theme that aligns with your brand. There are thousands of WooCommerce-compatible themes available, both free and premium.
- Extensions and Plugins: Install any additional extensions or plugins that you need to match the functionality you had on Shopify or to add new features.
- Test Your Store: Before going live, test all functionalities – product searches, filtering products, the checkout process, payment gateways, etc.
- Go Live: Once you’re confident everything is working correctly, you can make your WooCommerce store live.
Conclusion:
Transitioning from Shopify to WooCommerce can unlock a world of flexibility and customization for your online store. While the move requires careful planning and a bit of effort, the potential benefits in terms of cost savings, enhanced control, and scalability can make it a worthy endeavor for many businesses.
Here are just a few examples of businesses using WooCommerce:
- Phi Phi Pirate Boat – a party boat touring company that offers bookings for themed trips around the Thai islands of Phi Phi.
- Mike’s Organic Delivery – a sustainable, healthy food subscription service with weekly delivery to customers.
- PHLearn – a membership program with access to a library of design templates and tutorials
- TipoType – a font foundry selling licenses to digital files.
- It Gets Better Project – a nonprofit that sells physical products and accepts online donations.
View even more examples in the WooCommerce Showcase.
When it comes to designing your eCommerce site, the integration between WordPress and WooCommerce provides a big benefit. Thanks to the free WordPress block editor, you can create virtually any design you want for landing pages, blog posts, categories, and more. Add elements like text, images, videos, galleries, and columns (to name just a few) in a couple of clicks without needing to know any code or hire a developer.
There are also endless website themes that range from customizable designs to drag-and-drop layouts for niche stores. Block Shop, for example, was designed specifically for WooCommerce, and helps you align your online store with your brand’s style.
Your site design can be as simple or as complex as you’d like it to be. Here are a few examples of stores using WooCommerce to create beautiful designs:
- AeroPress incorporates custom animations and graphics into their homepage.
- Good Dye Young has a blog experience that’s as unique as their brand.
- Flwr uses beautiful typography to make a statement.
- ShadowTrader has clean, effective landing pages for each of their trading options.
- Green Dinner Table provides a branded, easy-to-use FAQ page for their customers.
- Magna-Tiles showcases product images in a fun, unique way.
More control over pricing
Both WordPress and WooCommerce are free, so you’ll just be responsible for your domain name, hosting, and any extensions that you’d like to use. You can choose any provider and mix and match extensions based on your needs. This flexibility prevents you from paying for functionality that you don’t use.
Read our WooCommerce Pricing post for a clear idea of how much it costs to run a WooCommerce store.
If you use Shopify, you’re charged for the following:
- Monthly plans. Depending on which Shopify plan you have, you could be paying between $29.99 and $299 a month. The more features you want, the more you have to pay. For example, if you’d like to offer live shipping rates, you need to use the Advanced Shopify plan.
- Add-ons. Many Shopify add-ons that provide additional functionality require monthly fees. For example, if you want to offer waitlists for your products, you would need to pay an additional $14.99 a month ($179.88 a year). This can quickly add up! Many WooCommerce extensions are free, and paid extensions often charge a yearly fee that can save you money. For example, waitlist functionality would cost just $49.00 a year.
- Transactions. If you use an external payment gateway, Shopify takes between 0.5% and 2% per transaction, in addition to any fees your payment gateway charges. It doesn’t take long for these fees to add up! Even if your store only processes a few transactions a day, you could lose thousands of dollars in profit each year. With WooCommerce, however, you’re not charged any additional transaction fees. This means you keep more money in your pocket.
Shipping costs and tools
Shopify does allow merchants to charge shipping fees and print labels from their account. It also includes discounted pricing from USPS, UPS, and DHL. However, in order to show live rates from carriers, you must have an Advanced plan, which comes at the hefty price of $299 per month.
WooCommerce offers an extension — WooCommerce Shipping — that also allows for easy label printing from your dashboard and negotiated discounts with USPS and DHL. In addition, WooCommerce allows you to display real-time shipping rates from carriers for only $79 a year.
One of the biggest differences to note, however, is that WooCommerce is all about supporting their community of entrepreneurs and small business owners. Though their core platform is completely free, they still offer additional resources and tools like WooCommerce Shipping at no cost.
When you’re starting or scaling your eCommerce business, it’s important that you keep as much money in your pocket as possible. WooCommerce helps you invest your money in the areas that will grow your business and make it the most successful.
Unlimited variations
Product variations are the options offered to customers for each product. For example, if you sell t-shirts, you might offer red, blue, green, and yellow in sizes XS – 3XL. The combination of colors and sizes would create 28 variations.
Depending on your products, variations can quickly add up. After all, you want your customers to be able to choose the right product for their needs!
Shopify limits variations on each product to 100. If you sell men’s shoes that are available in three widths (narrow, regular, and wide), standard sizes 6-15 (including half sizes), and three colors, you’d have 153 variations. This would exceed Shopify’s limits. However, with WooCommerce, you can offer as many product variations as you need.
Access to a close-knit community
Using WooCommerce means that you’ve joined a community of people who want to learn and grow with you. Every year, hundreds of thousands of developers and site owners meet up virtually and in over 400 cities around the world. Find out about WooCommerce meetups in your area.
For each WordPress update, hundreds of volunteers contribute their time, simply because they’re passionate about creating great software that powers the web. There are frequent Contributor Days, both online and in-person, where developers and users work together to constantly improve the platform.
This community is also behind the excellent support forums for both WordPress and WooCommerce. There, you can submit a question and get responses from a variety of perspectives. It doesn’t matter how basic or complicated your situation is; someone’s there to help you out!
WordPress is all about community over competition — they all want one another to succeed. So welcome to the WordPress family. You’ll love it here!
How to migrate to WooCommerce from Shopify
If you already have a store on Shopify and want to move to WooCommerce, you might feel overwhelmed. After all, you don’t want to lose existing customer data and orders, and you want the process to be as easy and seamless as possible.
First, you need to choose a hosting plan, install WordPress, and set up WooCommerce. Learn how to do this in our five-step getting started guide.
It’s important to note that none of these methods recreate your website design and content. However, many free and premium themes are available to help you build anything that you want! The Storefront theme, for example, is both intuitive and flexible, and offers a variety of child themes for specific niches.
If you don’t want to design your website on your own, hire one of our experts.
There are a few ways that you can migrate store data from Shopify to WooCommerce safely and securely.
1. Manual import/export
Although it may seem a little time-consuming, manually migrating your products is free and relatively straightforward.
- Export and download your product data from Shopify.
- In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce → Products.
- Select Import at the top. There, you’ll find a built-in product CSV importer that will make the process easier.
- Click Choose File and select the CSV file that you want to import. Click Continue.
- You’ll see the Column Mapping screen, where WooCommerce automatically attempts to match the column name of your Shopify CSV file to WooCommerce product fields. You may need to map some of these on your own; do so using the dropdown menus to the right of each row.
- Select Run the Importer and wait until the import process is finished.
If you’d also like to import your customer and order data from Shopify, we recommend using either the Migrate & Import Shopify to WooCommerce or Customer/Order/Coupon CSV Import Suite extensions.
2. Hire an expert
If you don’t want to migrate store data yourself, you can always hire a professional to take care of this for you.
We’ve put together a database of WooExperts, all of which are hand-selected, high-quality developers that work with WooCommerce regularly. You can filter by country and view a profile for each expert where you’ll find samples of their work and information about their pricing and experience.
3. Use Cart2Cart
The Cart2Cart extension helps you migrate your store to WooCommerce with just three easy steps. You can even test the process with a free Demo Migration, which illustrates exactly how the transfer will work.
Not only does the migration process happen without any required technical knowledge – your Shopify store can still run in the background. Don’t worry about missing out on any revenue!
Here’s some of the data that can be migrated:
- Product data, like names, SKUs, descriptions, prices, weights, and variants.
- Product category information, including names, descriptions, and URLs.
- Customer names, emails, and addresses.
- Order information, like dates, IDs, statuses, quantities, discounts, and shipping details.
- Coupon names, codes, and discounts.
- Blog post information, such as titles, descriptions, dates, URLs, content, and images.
- Page titles, dates, URLs, and statuses.
View all available migration data.
For an additional cost, Cart2Cart can even create 301 redirects for all of your URLs, which is extremely beneficial to maintaining search engine rankings.
How to use Cart2Cart
You can complete your data migration in just a few steps:
- Connect your Source Cart which, in this case, would be Shopify. Simply provide your current URL and API details.
- Connect your Target Cart, WooCommerce. You can install the required Connection Bridge on your WordPress site manually or automatically.
- Choose the data you want to migrate. Select the data types that you want to move and match them to the corresponding WooCommerce fields.
Simply launch your migration, wait for it to finish — which can vary in length depending on the size of your website — and you’re done! That’s all there is to it.
What about security?
Of course, you want to be protective of your order and customer data. But Cart2Cart works hard at making the migration process as secure as possible. For example, migrations are performed on a separate dedicated server using SSL encryption to protect your information.
Only authorized employees of Cart2Cart can view your login details, and none of that information is stored after your migration is complete. Plus, they guarantee that your data isn’t disclosed to third parties or used for any other purposes.
View the full Cart2Cart security policy.
How much does it cost?
Exact pricing depends on the size of your store and the data you want to be migrated. However, the starting price is $69.00, which includes migrating up to 1000 products, 500 customers, and 500 orders. This price can increase depending on the size of your store.
There are also upgrades available that provide any additional functionality you want, like 301 redirects and blog post migration.
Get a custom estimate from Cart2Cart.
Start the migration process
Whether you migrate yourself, hire an expert, or use Cart2Cart, you can quickly and efficiently move your store from Shopify to WooCommerce. It’s a good choice that both your customers, and your wallet, will appreciate.
