Same store, from WooCommerce to Shopify, free move

We move your WooCommerce store to Shopify for free, usually in about 2 weeks. Products, customers, orders and reviews come across, coupons become Shopify discounts, and every /product/ address redirects to its new page. After the move there's no hosting, no plugin updates and no security patches to manage. You pay your Shopify plan, from $49 a month in Canada ($37 billed yearly), and any paid apps you choose.

What WooCommerce can export on its own

WooCommerce's built-in exporter handles products only. It's a good one: it includes prices, stock, categories, attributes, variations and custom product fields. Orders and customers are a different story. WooCommerce core doesn't export them, so we use an export plugin, either one you already have or one we install for the move and remove afterwards. The customer export matters more than it looks: the default data leaves out full addresses, and we want those for repeat orders.

What comes across, and how

Two smaller things to know. Scheduled sale dates don't import, so active sales are set up again by hand in Shopify. And customer passwords never move between platforms. On Shopify, customers sign in with their email and a one-time code.

Plugins become apps, or disappear

A typical WooCommerce store runs on a stack of plugins: payments, tax, shipping rates, SEO, caching, security, backups, wishlists, product add-ons. Before we start, we go through yours one by one. Many have no Shopify equivalent because Shopify already does the job: hosting, caching, security, backups, the checkout and tax calculation are part of the platform. For the rest we pick a Shopify app, favouring free ones, and tell you the price of any paid app before you decide. Caching and image-compression plugins simply go away: Shopify serves your images through its own content delivery network.

Redirects and SEO

WooCommerce's default product address is /product/your-product/, though many stores change the base. Shopify's is /products/your-product, and that prefix can't be changed. We build a redirect for each product, category, page and post from your actual permalink settings. If you use Yoast or a similar SEO plugin, we carry over your custom page titles and meta descriptions too, so the pages you've worked to rank keep their wording. We also redirect tag pages and the old shop page, which people tend to forget and search engines remember.

What we'll ask of you

A WooCommerce move goes fastest when we have four things on day one: a temporary admin login for WordPress, the list of plugins you pay for (so we know which subscriptions to cancel later), the name of your payment provider, and your GST/HST and QST numbers if you're registered. We also ask you not to add or edit products during the final export, usually a single afternoon. Orders can keep coming in; we pick up the last ones just before launch. Everything else, from the export plugin to the redirect list, is our job.

Payments and tax

If you used Stripe or another gateway on WooCommerce, the simplest switch is Shopify Payments. With an outside payment provider, Shopify charges an extra fee on each sale: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. We set up GST/HST and QST from your registrations and test an order to each province you ship to.

How the move goes

1. Plugin review and exports of products, customers and orders.
2. Product and customer import, variants rebuilt, collections created from your categories.
3. Theme customization, payments, taxes and shipping.
4. Order history, reviews, coupons, posts and pages.
5. Redirects, your review, transfer of the store to you, then launch.

When you shouldn't switch

• Your store depends on heavily custom WordPress code, such as a bespoke configurator or member pricing engine. It can be rebuilt on Shopify, but that's quoted work, not part of the free setup.
• You're mainly a content site with a small shop. WordPress may be the better home.
• You need to host the code yourself, for example for a policy reason. Shopify is a hosted platform.

For a wider view, read what Shopify costs in Canada and our guide to GST/HST and QST on Shopify. When you're ready, send the request form with "WooCommerce" as your platform. The full offer is on the free Shopify setup page.