How to Migrate Your Product Catalog From WooCommerce to Shopify

Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify (or the other direction) is mostly a data-format problem: the products, variants and prices you already have are fine — they just need to be expressed the way the new platform expects. Here's a practical order of operations that avoids the most common failed-import headaches.

1. Export your WooCommerce catalog

Products → All Products → Export, including variations, to get a full product CSV. Make sure the export includes variation rows, not just parent products — a common mistake is exporting a simple product list and then wondering why the Shopify import shows no variants.

2. Convert the format

WooCommerce and Shopify structure a product CSV very differently — different column names, and a fundamentally different way of representing variant options (WooCommerce's attribute columns vs. Shopify's option1/option2/option3 structure). Run your export through the Shopify ↔ WooCommerce CSV Converter, which detects the source format automatically and restructures products, variants and image references to Shopify's expected format.

3. Clean up variant data before you import, not after

If your WooCommerce catalog has accumulated inconsistent variant values over time — "Red" vs "red," "S" vs "Small" — this is the right moment to fix it, because you're about to review an import preview anyway. Our variant cleaning guide covers grouping and standardizing these values in a CSV before you convert formats. Migrating clean data once is considerably less work than migrating messy data and then cleaning it up again on the new platform.

4. Handle images before you lose access to the old URLs

WooCommerce product images are typically hosted on your own WordPress media library, which means the URLs keep working during the transition — but confirm this before you cancel or change hosting for the old site. If any images are hosted through a CDN or plugin that stops resolving once WooCommerce is deactivated, re-host or re-upload those images as part of the Shopify import rather than after.

5. Import into Shopify and check the preview

Shopify's Products → Import shows a column-mapping preview before committing anything. Check that:

• Variant options mapped correctly (Color/Size showing up as actual Shopify variant options, not stuck in a generic text field).
• Prices came through in the right currency and with the right number of decimal places.
• Image URLs resolved (a broken image URL in the CSV shows as a blank image in the preview, not an error — it's easy to miss on a quick scan).

6. Set up redirects from old URLs

Shopify and WooCommerce use different URL patterns by default. Any existing backlinks, bookmarks or search-engine-indexed pages pointing at your old WooCommerce product URLs will 404 once the migration is live unless you set up redirects. Shopify's admin has a built-in URL redirect tool for exactly this — map your most-visited old URLs (check Google Search Console for your top-performing pages) to their new Shopify equivalents before you fully cut over.

What doesn't come across in a CSV migration

Be realistic about what CSV export/import does and doesn't cover: customer reviews (need a dedicated reviews app and its own import), order history (Shopify doesn't import historical orders from another platform), and custom metafields or plugin-specific data (anything stored by a WooCommerce plugin outside the standard WooCommerce product schema needs its own export/import path, if one exists at all).

Doing the conversion

Start with the CSV Converter — drop your WooCommerce export, confirm the detected direction, and download a Shopify-ready CSV. Our step-by-step guide covers the conversion itself in more detail, including what to check in the converted file before you import.