WooCommerce To Shopify — Migration Guideline
By Litextension
The popularity of online shopping has led to a rising number of eCommerce platforms. At the moment, there are two giants that are gaining the most attention from merchants, which are Shopify and WooCommerce.
According to BuiltWith, WooCommerce and Shopify are now the biggest two in the industry with the usage distribution of 27% and 22% respectively.
As we all know, WooCommerce has been dominating the market for quite a long time. However, the market share of Shopify is gradually growing. One evidence to this is that Shopify’s usage distribution has grown from 21% to 22% in only 1 month (from April to May 2020) as we collected from BuiltWith.
Apart from that, the figures on Google trends also indicate that people are paying more attention to Shopify than WooCommerce in the last 12 months.
As you can see from the graph, people are looking up for the keyword “Shopify” almost 3 times more than the keyword “WooCommerce”.
From all the above-mentioned figures, we came to the conclusion that Shopify has been attracting more interest than WooCommerce these days. To understand why so many people have been choosing Shopify over WooCommerce, visit our comprehensive comparison between the two.
If you are someone who has already had a WooCommerce store and finds that it can no longer meet your requirements, you should think about switching to another platform like Shopify. However, re-platforming to Shopify is a very complicated procedure as WooCommerce and Shopify have completely different database structures. Therefore, make sure you have considered thoroughly all the elements of a migration process.
In this article, we will be presenting to you a step-by-step guide to transfer data from WooCommerce to Shopify.
WooCommerce to Shopify migration flow chart
In order to help you visualize the whole migration process better, we summarized all the steps that you need to take and put them into this migration guide flow chart.
Basically there are 6 steps that you need to follow to complete migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify as shown above. It might seem daunting to you at first but it is actually very easy to handle with the help of LitExtension automated migration tool.
Now, let dive into each step to see what you have to do!
Step 1: Backup database of WooCommerce store
When migrating your data with LitExtension, you don’t have to worry about any distortions of your data because we will not, in any way, edit anything on your Source Store. Therefore, it is not compulsory for you to back up all of them before migration.
In case you still want to backup your data, here is how to do it:
- Go to your WooCommerce store back-end, navigate to “Tools” -> “Export”. From there you can export all of your site content such as your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, etc. to XML files. If you, on the other hand, don’t want to export all of your content, you can just choose the specific fields you want to export.
- Click “Download Export File” to download the XML files and save them.
Step 2: Set up a new Shopify store
After backing up your files successfully, it’s time to create a new Shopify home and further begin your migration!
- The first step is to sign up for an account on Shopify site. You only need to enter your email address, your password, and your desired store name. Bear in mind that the name of your store has to be unique.
- After that, it requires you to enter some information about your new store as below.
Once you’ve filled in your information, it will take you straight to the Shopify dashboard and now you can get down to migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify.
Step 3: Data migration with LitExtension
It is undeniable that using an automated migration tool is the best way to make a switch between 2 eCommerce websites at the moment. LitExtension is the leading company in this field with about 99% of customer satisfaction on Trustpilot.
LitExtension provides you with a tool that you can use to migrate all your data automatically, accurately, and safely between 2 eCommerce platforms. The migration process involves only 3 simple steps and no technical skill is required.
Otherwise, if you are too busy to run the migration yourself, you can always hand over the task to our experts using all-in-one migration service. We will take care of all the work for you at a very reasonable price.
You can check out our WooCommerce to Shopify migration tutorial video to have a better idea of our service.
Now, let me walk you through a step-by-step guide to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify using LitExtension automated migration tool.
But before we get into the details, you should register an account on LitExtension site first if you haven’t had one. You can take advantage of your Facebook or Google account to log in easily.
1. Set up Source Cart and Target Cart
Once you have logged in, click “Create new migration”. Then, you will see a page where you can enter the information of your Source and Target Cart.
First of all, choose WooCommerce as your Source Cart from the drop-down menu. Then enter your store URL.
Follow the instructions to download the “le_connector” file. This connector has only one function, which is creating a bridge between your WooCommerce database with the LitExtension App.
Extract the zip file and upload the Connector folder to WooCommerce’s root folder on your server. Once you are done, a notification will appear on your screen “Connection was successfully installed”.
Moving on to Target Cart setup, after you have chosen Shopify as your Target Cart from the menu, enter your store URL and the API password to the blank spaces. In case you don’t know how to get an API password from your Shopify store, you can follow the instructions of this video.
Now you are ready to click “Next” and proceed to the next stage of the migration process.
2. Configure migration
This is where you choose the entities that you want to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify. LitExtension supports migrating products, customers, pages, blog posts, and coupons in this case. You can choose to migrate only a few or click “Select all” to migrate all of them.
To help you extend your migration possibilities, LitExtension also offers some additional options such as Clear current data on Target Store before Migration or Create the 301 redirects on your Target Store after migration. The former option allows you to delete all the existing data that you have chosen above on your Target Store (if you have any). The data duplication risk can therefore be avoided. 301 redirect is a procedure of pointing URLs from one site to another. In other words, when your customers click on the links of your old WooCommerce website, they will be redirected immediately to the corresponding page on your new Shopify store.
Don’t forget to map your order status and language so that they will be displayed correspondingly on the Shopify site.
3. Perform migration
Now you are ready to run the migration. We highly recommend you to run the FREE DEMO migration first to see how the migration process will be carried out by LitExtension. After that, you will receive $5 and later you can use it as a discount when running Full Migration.
Once the migration starts, it will run seamlessly on the server. Therefore, there’s no need to keep your PC on while the data is being transferred. It is completely safe to turn it off! Take a break, have a cup of coffee and your email will receive notification when the process is completed.
Step 4: Migrate extensions
You may have a number of extensions that you installed on your WooCommerce site to support your business and you don’t want to lose these extended functionalities. In order to achieve that, you need to find and install the Shopify apps which have similar purposes as those in your WooCommerce store. After that, LitExtension will help you migrate data from the WooCommerce extensions into the correspondings in Shopify.
Step 5: Migrate newly appearing and edited data
During the whole migration process, LitExtension still keeps your old WooCommerce store running normally. Accordingly, you will still receive new orders and customers as usual while being busy decorating your new home. This is when our recent data migration, smart update and remigration services come in handy.
- Recent data migration allows you to transfer all the newly appearing entities to your new store.
- Smart update helps to update any changes that you have made to your data in your old store along with all the newly appearing entities.
- Remigration service enables you to migrate your data all over again.
All these three options are FREE under the condition that you have performed full migration with LitExtension within 3 months before and the total additional entities is less than 10% the total number of entities in the first migration.
Step 6: Checklist after migration
Now that you have completed migrating data from WooCommerce to Shopify, you might want to take some extra steps to set up your Shopify store. Here is a list of some post-migration activities that we recommend.
- Check result
- Change DNS and switch domain
- Set up your shipping
- Choose payment method
- Try placing some orders
For further details on how each activity should be performed, check out this article!
Conclusion
In short, I have walked you through all the steps that you need to take to make a switch from WooCommerce to Shopify using LitExtension tool. I hope you find this article helpful for you in some way.
At LitExtension, we guarantee accuracy and the highest level of security to your data with a 30-day money-back guarantee and dedicated support.
If you are a store owner and have been looking for a solution to migrate your entities to another platform, don’t be hesitant and contact our support team via live chat right now to get advice.
Thank you for reading our blog and good luck with your migration.
