Since it’s founding 12 years ago Shopify has grown into one of the largest e-commerce platforms on the internet. Backed by state-of-the-art infrastructure, Shopify easily handles spikes in traffic volume and provides endless customization options. If you’re currently using WooCommerce and thinking of switching, keep reading. In this article we’ll cover all the steps for your WooCommerce to Shopify migration.
Before you Begin: Create a Shopify Account
If you don’t already have a Shopify account you can create one for a free 14-day trial. No credit card information is required and you’ll have up to two weeks to preview Shopify before making the switch.
Step 1: Copy your Products from WooCommerce to Shopify
Now that you have a Shopify account it’s time to move your products over. You can do this manually by copy-pasting the text over but this can take days for larger sites. The quickest way to migrate the products is to use the Ablestar WooCommerce Importer App.
In order for the app to work you’ll need to create an API key for your WooCommerce site. If you’re unsure how to do this we’ve written a guide creating the API keys.
Once you have the API keys click the button below to get the app, enter your API keys when prompted and you’re all set! The app will copy all your products, variations and images to Shopify. The app is free for the first 50 products and very reasonably priced for larger sites.
[wpi_designer_button id=4884]
Step 2: Design your Store
The next step in the WooCommerce to Shopify migration is making your shop look good. Like WooCommerce, there’s a large ecosystem of themes for Shopify. The best place to find themes is at https://themes.shopify.com/ where you can search for free or paid themes. Since some themes can get expensive it’s probably worth trying a free theme first. If you want to customize a theme or develop your you can see a list of design experts at https://experts.shopify.com/designers.
Step 3: Website Redirects
You can use your existing domain with Shopify but the URLs to your products on Shopify might be different than the URLs on WooCommrece. For example:
- WooCommerce URL: http://www.example.com/iphone-7-plus
- Shopify URL: http://www.example.com/products/iphone-7-plus
This means that anyone who has a link to your old site (ie, Google) won’t be able to find your products.
Fortunately Shopify has the ability to create redirects for any of your products. For more details on creating redirects you can view their support page at https://help.shopify.com/manual/migrating-to-shopify/url-redirect.
If you’ve used our Woo Importer app to import products you can also use it to create redirects for your WooCommerce site in Shopify.
You’ll only need to do this if you actually decide to go through with your WooCommerce to Shopify migration but it’s an important step to keep in mind. Otherwise you risk loosing your hard-earned SEO.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far you’ve setup a Shopify site with all your WooCommerce products, made it look good, and created product redirects. There’s still many ways to customize Shopify, including thousands of apps in their App Store, but you’re well on the way to joining the hundreds of thousands of active shops on Shopify.