WooCommerce to Shopify: the complete migration guide for fashion brands

WooCommerce to Shopify migrations are one of our most common project types. Here is a clear picture of what the process looks like and where the risks are.

What transfers cleanly: products, variants, images, customer records, and order history all migrate with high fidelity using Shopify's import tools or a migration app. For stores with up to 5,000 products, this is typically straightforward.

What requires manual work: custom product attributes and metafields need to be remapped to Shopify's metafield system. WooCommerce has a flexible attribute system that does not map 1:1. For fashion stores with complex size/material/care attribute setups, this remapping can take several days.

The SEO question is the one that causes the most anxiety — and it is legitimate. WooCommerce and Shopify use different URL structures. A product at /shop/product-name in WooCommerce needs to become /products/product-name in Shopify, and a 301 redirect needs to be in place before you go live. We set up all redirects before DNS cutover, and we have never had a client lose significant organic traffic from a migration we managed.

The DNS cutover itself is the highest-risk moment. We handle this by: keeping WooCommerce live and read-only during the migration, doing a full QA pass on the Shopify store at a preview URL, then cutting DNS over on a low-traffic day (typically Tuesday or Wednesday morning). The window between DNS update and full propagation is 2–24 hours.

Timeline: a typical WooCommerce to Shopify migration with 500–2,000 products takes 3–4 weeks from kickoff to launch. Larger catalogues or complex data structures extend this.