WooCommerce to Shopify Product Migration
By Selling Fee Tools team ·
Moving a store from WooCommerce to Shopify starts with the product catalogue. Both platforms export and import products as CSV files, but the columns, the way variations work and the way categories are stored are different. This guide walks through moving products with our free converter, which runs in your browser, so the file never leaves your computer.
1. Export your products from WooCommerce
In WordPress, go to Products → Export, leave “all columns” and “all products” selected, and click Generate CSV. The export includes simple and variable products, variations, prices, stock, weights, images, categories and tags. If you use Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO, their meta title and description columns come with it.
Exports from other plugins also work if they use the same English column names. If a column has a different name, you can pick it in the converter’s mapping table.
2. Convert the file
Drop the CSV into the WooCommerce to Shopify converter. It detects the delimiter and the encoding, including the Windows-1252 encoding Excel uses when it re-saves a CSV, and turns each product into Shopify’s format:
- Simple products become one Shopify product with a single variant called Default Title.
- Variable products become one Shopify product with a variant for each variation, all sharing the same Handle. Variation attributes such as Size and Colour become Option1 to Option3. A variation set to “Any Size” becomes one variant for every size listed on the parent, because Shopify has no “any” option.
- Handles are made from the product name, so “Hoodie with Logo” becomes hoodie-with-logo.
- Sale prices that are running become the Variant Price, with the regular price as Compare At Price. Scheduled or finished sales are left out, because a Shopify CSV can’t schedule one.
- Stock turns on Shopify inventory tracking, and “backorders allowed” becomes “continue selling when out of stock”. Weights are converted to grams.
- Categories: the first category becomes the product’s Collection and Type, and every category name is added to Tags, so you can build automated collections for the rest.
3. Read the warnings
Some things can’t move as they are, and the converter lists each one with its row number:
- Skipped: grouped and external products, variations whose parent isn’t in the file, disabled variations, and products with more than three variation attributes. Shopify has no way to hold these, so recreate them by hand or change the source.
- Warnings: missing images, empty prices (Shopify would import them at 0.00) and WordPress shortcodes left in descriptions.
To double-check the result, or any Shopify product CSV, run it through the Shopify CSV validator. It checks required columns, handles, prices, inventory numbers, image URLs and option consistency, and can fix the safe problems for you.
4. Import into Shopify
Upload the converted file with the product import in your Shopify admin. A few things to know:
- Images travel as URLs, not files. Shopify downloads each image during import, so keep your WooCommerce site online until the import has finished.
- Large catalogues: if the file is over Shopify’s 15 MB import limit, the converter splits it into several files without breaking any product apart. Import them one at a time.
- Collections named in the file are created by Shopify during import if they don’t exist yet.
5. Keep your search rankings
Product addresses change: WooCommerce uses /product/name and Shopify uses /products/handle. Add URL redirects in Shopify from each old address to the new one, so search rankings and links from other sites carry over. SEO titles and descriptions from Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO are moved by the converter; plugin variables such as %%title%% are left out because Shopify doesn’t read them.
What a product CSV doesn’t move
Customers, orders, reviews, blog posts and pages use different files and need their own migration. The product CSV covers the catalogue: products, variants, prices, stock, weights, images, tags and SEO fields.
Before you switch
Shopify charges a monthly plan and card fees on every order. The Shopify fee calculator shows what each plan costs per order at your sales volume, with versions for the UK, Canada and Australia. Moving the other way? The Shopify to WooCommerce converter does the reverse.