Swan 
If you’ve decided to move your online store from Shopify to WooCommerce, you’ve made the right decision. With the number of tools, flexibility, economy, and scalability of WordPress for websites, it becomes the best choice. No matter how your online store is built, whether it’s in Shopify, developed in Prestashop or Magento, migrating to WooCommerce is a beneficial solution like migrating your site under WordPress.
Do you think migrating your store is a complicated process? The truth is that it’s not, as long as you follow a clear methodology.
How to Migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce ?
The migration from Shopify to WooCommerce can be done in two different ways: manually or automatically through an extension.
Do you want to secure your WooCommerce migration?
Manual Method
Generally, it is done in six steps :
Step 1: Engage a Web Hosting Service
It is crucial to choose a secure and reputable company that works in the long term.
Step 2: Install WordPress and WooCommerce
After acquiring your hosting service, you need to install WordPress.
Step 3: Export Your Shopify Data
The data you need to export from Shopify includes: products, orders, and customers. Here’s how you should export the three CSV files from your Shopify store:
- Open your Shopify dashboard
- Go to the “Products” tab.
- Then, click on the Export button
Step 4: Importing Your Data from Shopify to WooCommerce
Once you have the Shopify CSV file, you now need to log in to this URL: wordpress.com. Then, go to the WooCommerce menu. At the top of this screen, there is a button that says import products, you need to click on this button and import the csv file.
Step 5: Design Your Store’s Layout
It is now time to design your target store.
Step 6: Integration of a Payment Gateway
To work properly with WooCommerce, you need a payment gateway. PayPal is the most used platform in France and even in the world.
Automated Method
WooCommerce has an extension that offers users an easy way to migrate all Shopify content data to a new store, named Cart2cart.
It’s important to note that fully automated migration of the Shopify store to a WordPress store using Cart2cart is not free. However, this extension gives you an opportunity to perform a test migration.
Weaknesses of Shopify
Like Prestashop and Magento, Shopify is a popular online store creation platform with over 1 million users for several reasons, especially the ease of creating your e-commerce site. Despite these advantages, Shopify also has some drawbacks:
- It is not an open-source platform: this means that no one can access the software’s source code, study it, modify it, and redistribute it. Moreover, its updates can take time. In addition, its cost is higher.
- Payment is in advance: you have to make a payment (depending on the plan you choose), whether you sell a product or not.
- There are fees and additional payments: after paying your fees to have your online store on Shopify, you will have to make additional deposits for each transaction, for the costs of credit cards you offer to your customers for payment (depending on the plan you have chosen).
- There are always email issues: Shopify does not provide hosting service, but you can set up email forwarding through a third-party service.
- Products and templates are limited: on this e-commerce platform, you can sell anything, giving the user options for size, color, and material. But if you need to explain other properties of your product or service to the customer, you will have to opt for third-party applications (or custom design). The same goes for choosing one of their templates for the design of your Shop.
- Few features in SEO: Not all pages of your online store are indexed (so some do not appear in search engines). This can become an SEO issue, as more than half of an online store’s visitors typically come from organic traffic and affiliate URLs.
- You cannot create multilingual stores: Shopify offers you some third-party applications to implement it, at an additional cost.
Strengths of WooCommerce
The WooCommerce plugin has become a formidable competitor among e-commerce platforms. It effectively meets important requirements for any online activity and offers immense customization capacity, not to mention its large community. It has many strengths:
- WooCommerce is an open-source platform;
- It offers numerous possibilities for improvement, customization, and features;
- It has a very attentive and limitless community;
- It offers a wide choice of WordPress themes;
- The choice of WordPress plugins like WooCommerce is free, but you need a place to store all the data.
Why Migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce?
The reasons for migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce are very diverse, but it is undoubtedly a much more complete and independent platform.
You’re probably asking yourself this question because lately, you see a lot of people creating online stores on Shopify, and this is due to only two reasons:
- They invest a lot in advertising.
- Although it limits you in the long term, in the beginning, it’s one of the quick and easy options for having an online store.
However, neither of these two reasons indicates that it is the best platform for creating online stores. They simply benefit from a good marketing strategy.
Other Types of Migrations to WordPress
