Woocommerce has long been a favourite ecommerce platform for us because it’s so easy to use, highly extendable and totally free.
If you have a WordPress website and you want to sell online then Woocommerce is a no brainer.
However, over the last 3-5 years Shopify have really upped their game and given many people the ability to set up online stores quickly and easily.
We have found recently that a number of clients using Woocommerce have considered moving their stores to Shopify, hence this article.
Why move from Woocommerce to Shopify
Woocommerce is great.
It’s an open source tool (it’s free in other words) and it has literally hundreds of plugins to do with all kinds of things from gift cards, integrations, online bookings, multiple payment gateways and all kinds of other cool things.
For this reason we have loved using it and recommending it to our clients.
The main issue is that you have to manage hosting and things like updating plugins, keeping WordPress up to date and in some cases fixing bugs and conflicts.
One of the biggest problem users find is server related, with many store owners suffering from slow sites and loss of revenue – and then struggling to fix these problems.
This is why many people consider moving to Shopify.
The main reason to move to Shopify
One of the biggest reasons to migrate your store to Shopify is that things like the server and scalability are all baked-in so you don’t have to worry about them.
In addition to this Shopify have other features built into their platform such as abandoned cart messages, detailed analytics, and a good level of security.
Taking this into account many store owners decide to migrate their Woocommerce stores to Shopify, and once and for all resolve these problems.
When moving is not a good idea
Of course, moving is not always a good idea and the grass is not always greener.
We find that if you have done a lot of customisations on your Woocommerce store then moving to Shopify can be more complex and in some cases not worth it.
The power of WordPress and Woocommerce is that you can easily dig into the code and tweak and alter it to fit your use case.
Although you can edit Shopify templates and even create custom apps, other areas like the cart are locked off.
Shopify also has some limitations when it comes to variations (for example it’s 100 per product, although we have read this was going to be increased at some point).
So before moving you should really do an indepth analysis of what critical features your store has and whether Shopify can even support these.
Building your Shopify store
When you first decide to move over to Shopify you will be greeted with a fairly smooth set up process.
It takes a few minutes to set up your development store and you (or your webdevelopers) can easily get started on design after that.
There is no complex coding or setting up a server or anything like that, just register and away you go.
You may want to look at Shopify themes when you begin and there are now a solid range of professional themes available, although they can be more expensive than Woocommerce.
We find that Shopify’s theme builder is easy to get to grips with and once you know how templates work you can create some decent designs with the right theme.
As you build your pages you should notice that page load speed is pretty good (depending on the complexity of your site), and Shopify also does things like compress and convert your images when you upload them.
How to migrate content from Woocommerce to Shopify
The biggest hurdle you will face is actually migrating your content from Woocommerce to Shopify.
This means your pages, blogs, products, images and categories, and in some cases customers and orders too.
Doing this manually can be frustrating and time-consuming unless you are very diligent with your CSV file uploads.
We have used a variety of tools and we actually find that the MigrationPro app is one of the best ones we have used.
Their chat support is great, and connecting your old store to the new one is very simple too.
Using an app will save you considerable headache.
Obviously bear in mind that categories are called collections in Shopify, and they aren’t hierarchical like in Woocommerce.
There are a few other idiosyncracies but with the support from MigrationPro it should make your life somewhat easier.
301 redirects
One other thing many people forget is ensuring your old store URLs redirect to your new store.
Links like products and pages may have different URLs in your Shopify store.
This requires you to create 301 redirects which instructs your website where to redirect visitors using the old links to.
This prevents broken links (404 errors) and makes sure things like your SEO is not affected too badly and so on.
Luckily, Shopify has this feature built in which means it’s not so bad to do this – and MigrationPro mentioned above also offer this service.
Get help from a professional team
If you are thinking of moving your Woocommerce store to Shopify, and you have no idea where to begin then get in touch with us!
We have completed a few migrations now, of various complexities, and we can build and manage the entire process for you.
Our main aim is to create a good looking, modern ecommerce store on Shopify, whilst making sure you don’t lose important data from Woocommerce.
Doing a professional migration will save you time and money, and allow you to focus on more interesting things such as new site design and getting more customers.