Shopify to WooCommerce Migration: What Moves, Cost and SEO

A Shopify to WooCommerce migration moves your products, customers and order history to a store you own, rebuilds the design and the features your apps provided, and redirects every old address to its new one so search rankings carry over. The data is the easy part. Customer passwords, the theme, app data and saved payment details do not transfer, and the redirects are what decide whether your traffic survives the move.

This article is for store owners who are weighing the move or have decided on it. It covers the honest reasons to migrate and the reasons not to, what transfers and what must be rebuilt, how SEO is protected, and what the work costs and how long it takes. Shopify prices are from its India pricing page as of November 2026.

#Why stores move from Shopify

Stores leave Shopify when its convenience starts to cost more than it saves. That point arrives at different times for different businesses, and for some it never does.

The most common trigger in India is the fee on payments. Shopify Payments is not offered here, so stores use a third-party gateway and Shopify adds its own fee on top. As of November 2026, Shopify India's pricing page (opens in a new tab) lists that fee at 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, with Basic at ₹1,499 a month billed yearly. On ₹5,00,000 of monthly online sales, 2% is ₹10,000 a month before the plan fee.

The second trigger is apps. Each feature beyond the basics tends to be a monthly subscription, and a store with eight apps has eight bills and eight companies holding pieces of its data. The third is control: prices that follow your own rules, a checkout with your own fields, invoices in your accountant's format, or a link to your stock system.

#When staying on Shopify is the better decision

Moving is not always right, and I say so when it is not. Stay if your sales are modest and the fee is small in rupees, if nobody on your team wants to think about hosting and updates, or if the store works and the only complaint is a vague sense that WooCommerce is cheaper.

WooCommerce replaces a platform fee with responsibility. Hosting, backups, updates and security become yours, either through your own time or a maintenance plan. My full comparison is in WooCommerce vs Shopify for Indian businesses.

#What moves and what does not

Most of your data moves; most of your set-up does not. Knowing the difference early prevents the unpleasant surprises that turn a three-week project into a three-month one.

WooCommerce's own guide on how to migrate from Shopify (opens in a new tab) confirms the hard limits: customer passwords do not transfer from Shopify, payment information is not transferred because of privacy and security restrictions, and a Shopify theme cannot be reused directly. Shopify's help page on exporting products (opens in a new tab) adds that the images themselves are not included in the product CSV file, which is why the original store has to remain available during the import.

#The three ways to transfer the data

There are three routes, and the WooCommerce guide describes all of them: a manual CSV export and import, a migration extension that connects the two stores, and hiring a developer. The guide itself notes that plain CSV imports are fine for small stores or tests, and less so where complete history matters.

The choice matters less than the checking afterwards. Whatever tool is used, someone has to compare counts and spot-check records: the number of products, a sample of variants and prices, a customer with several addresses, an order with a discount and tax.

#Subscriptions and active mandates

Stores with recurring billing need extra care. A customer's payment mandate belongs to the gateway and the subscription app, not to Shopify's export files, so active subscriptions rarely move across untouched. Plan either to keep them running where they are until they lapse or to ask subscribers to sign up again. My article on selling subscriptions on WooCommerce in India explains the mandate rules behind this.

#Protecting your search rankings

Redirects protect your rankings, and they are the part of a migration most often skipped. Shopify and WooCommerce build addresses differently. A Shopify product lives under /products/, while WooCommerce uses /product/ by default, and collections become product categories with their own pattern. Without redirects, every link Google has indexed leads to a "page not found".

Google's guidance on site moves with URL changes (opens in a new tab) sets out the method:

1. Map every old URL to its new one. Build the list from the sitemap, analytics and server data, not from memory.
2. Use permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308) from each old URL straight to its final destination, avoiding chains.
3. Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year.
4. Expect ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes. Google says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move.

A redirect map is more than products. It should cover collections, blog posts, policy pages, any address with links pointing at it from other sites, and the addresses used in your ads and email campaigns.

Redirects are necessary but not sufficient. Page titles, meta descriptions and product descriptions should move across unchanged at first, image alt text should be kept, and the new store must be at least as fast as the old one. Changing the platform, the design and all the copy on the same day makes it impossible to tell which change caused a drop. I go into this in why redesigns lose SEO traffic, and the launch-day checks are in my website launch SEO checklist.

#What gets rebuilt

Everything that made the Shopify store behave the way it does has to be recreated, and this is where most of the hours go. A migration quote that mentions only "data transfer" is leaving out the larger half.

• Design. The look is rebuilt on a WooCommerce theme. This is also a chance to fix what never worked, but keep the page structure familiar for returning customers.
• App features. List every app and what it does for you. Some map to free WooCommerce features, some to paid extensions, and a few are better done as small custom features.
• Payments. Your gateway account stays, but it connects through a WooCommerce plugin and must be tested again from scratch.
• Shipping and tax. Rates, zones, COD rules and GST settings are set up fresh.
• Emails and invoices. Order emails, GST invoice format and numbering.
• Tracking. Analytics, ad pixels and conversion events, so your marketing data does not go blind on launch day.

#Cost and timeline

A migration costs about what a new WooCommerce store of the same size costs, because apart from data entry the same work is done. As a planning estimate from my own projects, a typical WooCommerce store takes 120 to 250 hours, which at my rate of USD 10 to 15 an hour is about USD 1,200 to 3,750, as set out in WooCommerce store cost in India. For a defined scope I give a fixed written quote.

Savings should be weighed over a year or two, not a month. Add up twelve months of Shopify plan, transaction fees and app bills, then compare with the migration cost plus a year of hosting, licences and maintenance on WooCommerce. If the gap is small, the move is about control, not money, and that is a legitimate reason as long as you know it.

On timing, a small store with few apps can move in a few weeks, and a larger one in a couple of months, with the owner's time for checking data and approving the design as the usual bottleneck. Pick a launch date away from your busiest season, and avoid switching in a sale week. My article on website development timelines explains what stretches a schedule.

#Do it yourself or hire help

A store with under a hundred simple products, no subscriptions and little search traffic can be moved by a patient owner using a migration extension. Run it on a test site first, compare the counts and build the redirect list yourself.

Hire help when search traffic brings a real share of your sales, when the catalogue or history is large, or when apps carry business logic. Lost rankings and mismatched orders are expensive to fix after the fact. A migration is a normal WooCommerce development project with a data and redirect phase added, and afterwards the store needs the care described in what a WooCommerce maintenance plan covers.

#A simple next step

Make three lists this week: every app on your Shopify store and what it does, your top 50 pages by search traffic, and twelve months of Shopify fees and app bills.

The first list tells you how big the rebuild is, the second tells you which redirects matter most, and the third tells you whether the move pays for itself. With those in hand, any developer can give you a firm quote instead of a guess.