Ecommerce

Migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce: the complete step-by-step guide

By José Marcos

Shopify charges a monthly fee and up to 2% per sale. WooCommerce does not. Migrating can save you thousands of euros per year — if done correctly. This guide covers everything.

Why more stores are migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce

Shopify's Basic plan costs 29 USD/month. The Standard plan is 79 USD/month. On top of that, if you use a third-party payment gateway (like Stripe in many European countries), Shopify charges a transaction fee of 0.5–2% per sale. For a store doing 10,000€/month in sales, that could be 200€+ in fees before any other costs.

WooCommerce is free. You pay for hosting (10–50€/month for quality managed hosting) and any premium plugins you need, but there are no transaction fees and no platform lock-in. For most European SMEs, the saving is significant after 12–18 months.

What you can migrate from Shopify

A complete migration can transfer: products (with images, variants, prices, inventory), customers (name, email, address, purchase history), orders (historical orders with status), collections/categories, pages and blog posts, discount codes, and SEO data (URLs, meta titles, descriptions).

Tools to migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce

For simple stores (products only, no order history needed): use WooCommerce's native CSV importer after formatting your Shopify export. For complete migrations including orders and customers: Cart2Cart and LitExtension are the most reliable paid tools — they handle field mapping, image transfer and data validation automatically.

How to preserve SEO during migration

SEO preservation is the most critical and most often neglected part of a migration. Before migrating: crawl your Shopify store with Screaming Frog and export all URLs with their ranking data. After migrating: set up 301 redirects from every old Shopify URL to the corresponding WooCommerce URL. A URL that changes without a redirect loses all its SEO equity immediately.

Also: submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console, update any external backlinks you control, and monitor Google Search Console for 404 errors in the first 30 days post-migration. Catching and fixing redirect errors quickly prevents permanent ranking loss.

Real costs: Shopify vs WooCommerce over 3 years

Shopify Standard plan over 3 years: ~2,844 USD in platform fees alone, plus transaction fees (0–2% per sale if not using Shopify Payments). WooCommerce over 3 years: 1,080–1,800€ in hosting + ~300–600€ in premium plugins = ~1,380–2,400€ total, zero transaction fees. For most SMEs, WooCommerce is 30–60% cheaper over 3 years.