WooCommerce to Shopify: what moves and what does not

Products and customers move. Orders move with help from a third-party tool. Reviews do not move at all — Shopify's own migration guide says so in as many words, on the same page where it lists reviews among the data you "might want to migrate". And every web address changes, which is the expensive part. Here is what actually transfers, quoted from that guide rather than from the migration agencies whose blogs dominate this subject.

Our interest, stated up front: StoreLenz makes competitor-research tools that only work on Shopify stores, so we profit if you migrate. That is exactly why this article leads with the losses.

What Shopify's own guide saysLink to this section

The page lists the data you "might want to migrate from WooCommerce" as:

• products
• customers
• historical orders (orders that have already been fulfilled)
• reviews

And then, on the same page: "You can't export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce to Shopify."

Both of those are on Shopify's own documentation, which is a useful reminder that even first-party guidance needs reading properly rather than skimming. Take the second sentence as the operative one.

Taking it item by itemLink to this section

Products — yes, with gaps. These move via CSV. Shopify's export documentation, describing the format in the other direction, notes that "the images associated with each product aren't included in the CSV file" — so product images are handled separately, and you want a plan for them rather than a surprise.

Customers — yes, with an important limitation. Shopify's guide states: "There is no data mapping support for customer CSV imports." So the fields have to line up with what Shopify expects, and you do the lining up. Names, emails, addresses and phone numbers are the fields it describes.

Customer passwords — no. Not listed as transferable anywhere on that page, and this is the one that generates support email on launch day. Every customer with an account will have to set a new password. Plan a message telling them so before they discover it at checkout.

Historical orders — yes, but not natively. The guide explains exporting them and then says you need "third-party migration apps from the Shopify App Store" to bring them in. So budget for a tool, and expect imported orders to be records rather than live, reportable history.

Reviews — no. Stated plainly. If reviews are a meaningful part of why people buy from you, this is the single largest loss in the migration, and the honest options are: collect them again, or use a reviews tool that can import from your old one, which is a question for that tool's makers rather than for either platform.

Subscriptions — not addressed on that page, and hard. A subscription is a live payment authorisation on a schedule, not just a record. Assume it does not move cleanly and ask specifically before committing.

Addresses and rankings — these change. Which is the expensive part and its own article.

Your theme, plugins and customisations — no. None of it transfers. Everything visual is rebuilt, and every plugin needs a Shopify equivalent or doing without.

The honest summary tableLink to this section

The order to do it inLink to this section

1. Export everything first and keep it, before touching anything. Products, customers, orders, and **your images

separately**. This is your safety net and it costs an hour.

1. Build the redirect map before you launch, not after. Old address to new address, for every product and category.

This is the single most important task in the whole project.

1. Import products, then check a sample by hand. Variants and images are where things go wrong quietly.
2. Import customers, having aligned the fields yourself.
3. Decide about orders — whether a third-party tool is worth it, or whether a read-only archive of the old data is

enough. For many shops it is.

1. Decide about reviews before launch, because the product pages will look bare without them.
2. Tell customers about passwords before they find out.
3. Launch, then watch search coverage closely for several weeks.

How to check the import actually workedLink to this section

Imports fail quietly, in ways a success message does not reveal. Four checks, by hand, before you launch:

Pick five complicated products and open them. Not the simplest ones — the ones with the most variants, the longest descriptions and the most images. Check every variant is there, priced correctly, with its own image where it should have one.

Count. Products in the old shop against products in the new one. A mismatch of three is a rounding error you want to find now; a mismatch of three hundred is a failed import that reported success.

Check a product in each category, and confirm it appears in the right groups. Category assignment is a common silent casualty.

Search your own shop for five things customers search for. If the results are wrong, something about the import or the indexing needs attention before anybody else sees it.

Do these before the redirects go live, because fixing an import is much easier than fixing an import while customers are arriving.

What to decide before any of thatLink to this section

Whether to migrate at all. This article describes how; it does not argue that you should. When not to migrate and how to decide whether it is worth the disruption are the questions that come first, and for an established shop with earned rankings the answer is often "not yet".

What this does not tell youLink to this section

What third-party migration tools can do. Some do considerably more than the native tooling. We have not tested any and name none.

How long it takes. It depends on catalogue size and how much was customised.

Whether your rankings will recover. Depends almost entirely on the redirects.

The same journey in reverse — what you lose leaving Shopify has its own list.

The rest of this series: moving between platformsLink to this section

This article covers what transfers. The rest of the set covers whether to do it at all, and what it costs:

• The SEO cost of changing platforms, and how to limit it
• What you lose migrating off Shopify
• When not to migrate your store to another platform
• How to decide whether a migration is worth the disruption

Related readingLink to this section

• The SEO cost of changing platforms, and how to limit it
• When not to migrate
• How to decide whether a migration is worth the disruption

SourcesLink to this section

• Shopify Help Center, Migrating from WooCommerce — lists "products, customers, historical orders (orders that have already been fulfilled), reviews" as data you "might want to migrate", and also states "You can't export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce to Shopify", "There is no data mapping support for customer CSV imports", that importing orders requires "third-party migration apps from the Shopify App Store", and that "Shopify's link structure for individual pages is likely different from your previous service, meaning that old links to specific pages likely won't load for customers" — https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/migrating-to-shopify/migrating-from-woocommerce — read 2026-10-02
• Shopify Help Center, Exporting products — "the images associated with each product aren't included in the CSV file" — https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/export-products — read 2026-10-02
• No migration app is named or recommended, and no figure is given for how long a migration takes