You open your Shopify bill one morning, do the math, and realize you're paying somewhere between $79 and $299 a month — before apps, before transaction fees, before the annual price hike you almost missed in an email. That moment is usually when the idea of moving to WooCommerce stops feeling like a project for "someday" and starts feeling pretty urgent.
If that's where you are right now, good news: migrating Shopify to WooCommerce is genuinely doable without a developer on retainer. Thousands of store owners have done it, and the stores that plan the move carefully lose almost no data and almost no revenue during the switch. This guide walks you through the whole process in plain language, with real numbers and honest trade-offs.
Why Bother Moving at All?
Let's be direct. WooCommerce is free software that runs on WordPress, so your baseline platform cost drops to hosting — typically $10–$30 a month for a managed WordPress host like Kinsta, SiteGround, or WP Engine's entry tier. Add a quality theme ($50–$100 one-time) and the plugins you actually need, and most small stores land well under $100 a month total.
Shopify's Basic plan runs $39/month, but the moment you want features like advanced reporting, third-party calculated shipping rates, or lower transaction fees, you're on the $105 or $399 plan. If you're processing $30,000 a month on Basic, Shopify's 2% transaction fee (when you don't use Shopify Payments) adds $600 in fees alone. WooCommerce doesn't charge a percentage of your revenue — ever.
That said, WooCommerce puts more responsibility on you. You manage hosting, updates, and security. If that trade-off sounds fine, keep reading.
What You Need Before You Start
Before you touch a single export file, get these four things in order:
1. A WordPress hosting account. Pick a managed WordPress host. Managed hosts handle server-level caching, automatic WordPress core updates, and daily backups, which matters a lot when you're mid-migration. Budget $20–$30/month for a plan that can handle your traffic.
2. A fresh WordPress install with WooCommerce active. Most hosts offer a one-click WordPress install. Once WordPress is up, install WooCommerce from the plugin directory — it's free. Run through the setup wizard; it takes about ten minutes.
3. A migration plugin. The two most-used options are Cart2Cart (paid, starts around $69 for a one-time migration) and the WooCommerce Cart Migration plugin. Cart2Cart handles products, customers, orders, categories, and coupons in a mostly automated way. If your catalog is under 200 products, you can also do a manual CSV import and skip the paid tool entirely.
4. A staging environment. Do the migration on a staging URL first, not your live store. Most managed hosts give you a one-click staging site. This is non-negotiable — you want to verify everything looks right before you flip DNS.
Exporting Your Shopify Data
Shopify makes it reasonably easy to export your core data. Here's what to grab:
Products: Go to Products → Export in your Shopify admin. Choose "All products" and export as CSV. This file includes titles, descriptions, prices, SKUs, variants, and images (as URLs). Keep in mind that Shopify's product CSV format doesn't map perfectly to WooCommerce's format, so if you're importing manually, you'll spend 30–60 minutes adjusting column headers in a spreadsheet.
Customers: Go to Customers → Export. You'll get names, emails, and addresses. Note that Shopify does not export customer passwords — passwords are hashed and can't be transferred. Your customers will need to create new passwords on your WooCommerce store. A simple email explaining this, sent the day you go live, handles it gracefully.
Orders: Go to Orders → Export. Historical orders matter for accounting and for customers checking order history. WooCommerce can import these, but the formatting requires some cleanup.
Blog posts and pages: If you have a Shopify blog, export posts manually or use a tool like the WordPress importer. This part is tedious but usually a one-afternoon job.
One thing Shopify doesn't export easily: your URL structure. Shopify product URLs look like /products/your-product-name. WooCommerce defaults to /product/your-product-name (singular). That one-letter difference will break any backlinks or bookmarks pointing to your old pages. Set up 301 redirects — more on that in the next section.
Running the Migration Step by Step
Here's the sequence that tends to cause the fewest headaches:
Step 1: Import products first. Whether you use Cart2Cart or a manual CSV import via WooCommerce's built-in importer (Products → Import), get your catalog in and verify it. Check that variant pricing is correct, that images loaded, and that categories are assigned. Spot-check at least 10% of your products manually.
Step 2: Import customers and orders. Cart2Cart handles this automatically. For manual imports, the free Customer / Order / Coupon Export plugin (by WebToffee) can import WooCommerce-formatted order CSVs. Expect to spend an hour or two cleaning up the data.
Step 3: Set up your theme and configure payments. Choose a WooCommerce-compatible theme — Storefront (free, made by WooCommerce), Astra, or Kadence are all solid starting points. Then connect a payment gateway. Stripe and PayPal both have free WooCommerce plugins. If you were using Shopify Payments, you'll need to re-enter your banking details with your new processor.
Step 4: Recreate your redirects. Install a redirect plugin like Redirection (free) and map your old Shopify URLs to your new WooCommerce URLs. At minimum, redirect every product page, every collection page, and your homepage. This protects your SEO — Google has indexed those old URLs, and a 301 redirect passes roughly 90–99% of the link equity to the new page.
Step 5: Test everything on staging. Place a real test order. Check that confirmation emails fire. Verify that tax calculations are correct for your shipping zones. Test on mobile — more than 60% of e-commerce traffic is mobile, and a layout that looks fine on desktop can break on a 375px screen.
Step 6: Go live. Update your DNS to point your domain to your new host. DNS propagation takes anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours depending on your registrar and TTL settings. Keep your Shopify store active (don't cancel yet) for at least 30 days in case you need to reference anything.
A Quick Real-World Example
Take a candle store doing about $15,000 a month in revenue, running on Shopify's Basic plan. Their monthly costs looked like this: $39 Shopify plan + $45 in apps (reviews, subscriptions, upsell) + roughly $300 in transaction fees (using a third-party processor). That's around $384/month.
After moving to WooCommerce on a $25/month managed host, they replaced their paid apps with free or low-cost WooCommerce equivalents — WPForms for contact, a free reviews plugin, and WooCommerce Subscriptions ($199/year, about $17/month). Total new monthly cost: roughly $67. That's a saving of about $317/month, or $3,800 a year — enough to fund a solid paid ads budget.
The migration took one weekend. They used Cart2Cart for products and orders, spent Saturday afternoon fixing image URLs, and went live Sunday evening with zero downtime because they kept Shopify running until DNS fully propagated.
Three Things to Do Today
If you're convinced this is the right move, here are your three concrete starting actions:
1. Export your Shopify data right now. Don't wait until you have a WordPress site ready. Download your product, customer, and order CSVs today and save them somewhere safe. This costs you nothing and means you have a clean snapshot of your store at this moment.
2. Spin up a WordPress staging site. Most hosts let you start a staging environment in under five minutes. Install WordPress, activate WooCommerce, and just poke around. Getting familiar with the admin before you start importing data removes a ton of anxiety from the actual migration.
3. Audit your Shopify apps. Make a list of every app you're paying for and look up its WooCommerce equivalent. You'll likely find that half of them have free WordPress plugins that do the same job. Knowing your future plugin stack before you migrate means you can test everything together on staging.
A Few Honest Cautions
This guide would be doing you a disservice if it didn't flag the real friction points.
WooCommerce requires more active maintenance than Shopify. You'll run plugin updates, keep an eye on your hosting dashboard, and occasionally troubleshoot a conflict when two plugins don't play nicely. Budget about 30–60 minutes a month for this kind of housekeeping.
Customer passwords don't migrate. This is a minor but real inconvenience. Write a friendly email explaining that customers need to reset their passwords, and include the reset link. Most customers understand.
Some Shopify apps have no direct WooCommerce equivalent. If your store relies heavily on a Shopify-specific feature — like certain POS integrations or a very niche fulfillment app — verify a WooCommerce replacement exists before you commit to the move.
And if your store is doing north of $500,000 a year, the calculus gets more complex. At that scale, the cost of developer time, security hardening, and infrastructure starts to close the gap with Shopify's higher-tier plans. This guide is aimed at stores in the $0–$300K range where self-managed WooCommerce is almost always the better financial decision.
You've Got This
Migrating Shopify to WooCommerce sounds like a big deal, and honestly, it is a project — but it's a manageable weekend project, not a months-long overhaul. Store owners with no technical background do this every week. The tools are better than they were even two years ago, and this guide on effective internal linking strategies can help you preserve your SEO during the transition. The documentation is excellent, and the community forums are full of people who've solved whatever problem you'll run into.
Start with that data export today. Get your staging site up this week. By this time next month, you could be running a store that costs you a fraction of what Shopify charges and gives you complete control over your stack.
Your next step: head to your Shopify admin right now, click Products → Export, and download that CSV. Everything else follows from there.