What doesn't move in a WooCommerce to Shopify migration (and what we do about it)

Most migration pitches tell you what comes over. Products, customers, orders, done. The useful list is the other one: what can't come over, no matter who you hire, because the platform won't accept it or the data was never yours to begin with.

We write this list into our terms. Here's the plain-words version, with what we do about each item.

Things that cannot move, on any platform

Customer passwords

Passwords are stored as one-way hashes on your old platform, and Shopify can't read them. Nobody can. Any migration service that says it moves passwords is either wrong or doing something you don't want done with your customers' credentials.

What happens instead: your customers' accounts come over with their name, email, addresses and order history attached. The first time they sign in on the new store, Shopify sends a one-time code to their email. No reset link, no "forgot password" dance. Most shoppers don't notice the difference.

Payment and refund records on past orders

Past orders come over as records. The order, the line items, the totals, the customer, the date. What doesn't come over is the money. The transactions happened on your old payment processor, and Shopify has no connection to them.

That means you can't refund an old order from the Shopify admin. If a customer asks for a refund on something they bought before the migration, you handle it through the old processor or by hand. Keep access to that account for as long as your return window runs.

Products with more than three options

Shopify caps a product at three option types. Size, color, material is fine. Size, color, material, finish is not. WooCommerce has no such limit, so stores that have been running a while usually have a few products that break it.

We find them before the migration starts and flag them to you. There are two fixes: restructure the product (often a fourth option is better as a separate product anyway), or we handle those few by hand. Either way you know which ones they are before anything moves.

Duplicate customers

Shopify's importer skips a customer whose email or phone number already matches another record. If your old store has the same person twice, with two accounts under one email, only one comes over. We send you the list of skipped records so nothing disappears silently.

Your search rankings, for a little while

Even with every redirect in place, Google has to crawl and reindex your new URLs. Rankings can move for days or weeks while that happens. We set up and verify 301 redirects for every product, collection and page against your old sitemap, which is the whole of what anyone can do about it. Nobody can promise your rankings won't shift, and we don't.

Things that can move, but not as part of a standard migration

These depend on which apps you were using, so they're outside the standard scope unless we've agreed them in writing.

• Product reviews. Reviews live in your reviews app, not in WooCommerce or Shopify. Moving them means exporting from the old app and importing into a new one, and whether that works depends on the two apps involved.
• Subscriptions. Active subscriptions have payment methods attached, and those tokens belong to the old processor. Moving them needs the old and new subscription providers to cooperate, and sometimes needs the customer to re-enter a card.
• Gift card balances and store credit. These can be recreated on Shopify, but the data has to come out of whatever plugin held it.
• Blog posts. Moveable, but formatting rarely survives cleanly, so it's a separate job.
• Anything an app stored. Wishlists, loyalty points, custom fields from a plugin. If it wasn't a core WooCommerce object, it needs its own plan.

If you need any of these, say so up front and we'll quote them. What we won't do is quietly leave them behind and let you find out after launch.

What does move, and how we check it

Up to 500 products with variants, images and metafields. Customer accounts. Order history as records. Collections, pages, redirects, payments setup, shipping zones, taxes and your domain.

Before we start we take a full backup export of your old store. After we finish, we check products, customers and redirects against that export, and the delivery report lists every exception. Your old store stays live, with its backup, until you've approved the new one.

Two things to do before you book a migration

Export everything yourself first. Even if you hire us, keep your own copy of your old store's data. It costs nothing and it's the one thing that makes every problem on this page recoverable.

Clean up before you move, not after. Data comes over the way your old platform exports it. Duplicate products, half-finished drafts, customers with no email. All of that moves too. An hour of cleanup on the old store saves you from paying someone to do it on the new one.