Ask a migration tool what it costs to move a store from WooCommerce to Shopify and you get a clean answer. Cart2Cart, Matrixify, LitExtension, and the rest charge by how many products and orders you push through them, so a small catalog can land in the low hundreds of dollars, while a large one runs into the low thousands. Either way it is a real number, it is relatively cheap, and it is close to useless as a budget.
The migration app moves rows of data. It does not move your search rankings, rebuild your theme, replace the plugins that no longer exist, or do anything about the revenue you lose while Google re-learns your site. Those are the expensive parts, and the reason teams overshoot a migration budget is almost always the same: they price the data transfer and treat everything else as a footnote. The footnote is the project. A realistic mid-market WooCommerce to Shopify migration runs somewhere between 15,000 and 75,000 dollars when an agency does it properly, and the spread is wide because the surprises are not random. They are predictable. This post itemizes them.
Why merchants leave WooCommerce in the first place
It helps to know what the move is actually buying, because that frames whether the bill is worth paying.
WooCommerce is not a small player to be migrating away from. It is a free, open-source plugin that turns WordPress into a store, and by store count it is the largest ecommerce platform in the world. Estimates vary by how you measure, but it powers somewhere around 4.4 million live stores, particularly strong outside the United States. It is free to install, it has no platform transaction fee, and the merchant owns everything.
That last point is the catch. Owning everything means owning the hosting, the security patches, the plugin updates, the performance tuning, and the 2 a.m. call when an update breaks checkout. WooCommerce is a platform you operate. Shopify is a platform you rent. Merchants migrate when they would rather pay a monthly fee and stop being a part-time systems administrator. The trade is control for convenience, and for a store doing real volume with no in-house developer, it is often the right one. The mistake is assuming the trade is free.
The data migration, and what quietly does not come across
Start with the part everyone budgets for, because even here the estimate is usually wrong.
Products, customers, and orders can be moved. Shopify offers its own Store Migration app, a CSV import path, and a long list of third-party tools, and Shopify's own help documentation points merchants to apps like Matrixify, LitExtension, and Ablestar for the heavier jobs. For a tidy catalog this works. The problem is the things that do not move, and you only find them after launch when a customer asks where their review went.
Reviews do not transfer. Shopify states plainly that you cannot export and migrate WooCommerce reviews directly. They have to be re-imported through a separate app such as Judge.me, Loox, or Yotpo, which means extra work and an extra subscription. Product metafields and custom attributes do not map cleanly to Shopify's metafield structure without manual configuration. Custom pricing rules tied to WooCommerce user roles do not come across. Subscription relationships, the recurring billing links between a customer and a plan, often need custom API scripting to rebuild rather than a clean import. Variant-specific images can lose their association during the transfer. And historical orders can be imported, but they do not automatically link to a customer's Shopify account, so a returning customer may log in to a store that has apparently forgotten they ever bought anything.
There is also a hard structural limit worth knowing before you start. Shopify allows only three options per product, color, size, and material, for example, with no fourth. A WooCommerce product built with four or five attributes will not import its full option set. The old 100-variant ceiling has been lifted for eligible stores, which can now reach into the thousands, but the three-option rule has not moved. If your catalog leans on complex configurable products, part of the migration is not a transfer at all. It is a redesign of how those products are modeled, done by hand.
None of this is exotic. It is the standard list. Budget for a post-migration data audit and the cleanup that follows, because the import tool will report success while leaving these gaps behind.
The URL change, and the traffic risk that comes with it
This is the line item that does the most financial damage when it goes wrong, and it goes wrong often.
WordPress lets you shape URLs however you like. A WooCommerce product might sit at /shop/blue-mug/ or /product/blue-mug/ or a structure you invented. Shopify does not offer that freedom. It is a hosted platform with a fixed URL structure, and every product lives under /products/ and every category under /collections/. You cannot remove those prefixes. You do not get access to the equivalent of an .htaccess file. So the moment you migrate, every indexed URL on your store changes.
To a search engine, a changed URL with no instructions is a new page. The old page, with its accumulated ranking and backlinks, returns a 404, and the ranking it held evaporates. This is the mechanism behind a figure that recurs across migration write-ups and merchant communities: organic traffic falling by something on the order of a third to a half after a poorly handled platform move. Treat that as a directional warning, not a precise forecast, since the real number depends entirely on execution. It is not Shopify being worse at SEO. It is hundreds or thousands of URLs changing at once with nothing telling Google where they went.
The fix is a 301 redirect map: a spreadsheet with every old WooCommerce URL in one column and its new Shopify equivalent in the next, loaded so that every legacy address points a visitor and a crawler to the right new page. This is unglamorous, detailed work. For a large catalog it is thousands of rows, and it has to be accurate, because a redirect to the wrong page is its own SEO problem. Practitioners who do this well generally report keeping the large majority of their rankings and recovering most lost traffic within the first month. Practitioners who skip it, or rush it, are the ones posting about a traffic collapse a month later. Even a clean migration usually sees a short dip while search engines re-crawl and re-assess. The redirect map is what decides whether that dip is a brief, shallow wobble or a multi-quarter recovery project.
Build the redirect map as a real deliverable with a real owner. It is the single highest-leverage task in the entire migration.
The theme rebuild and the app re-purchasing
Two more costs that the data tools never touch, and that merchants consistently underestimate.
Your WooCommerce theme does not move to Shopify. The platforms render storefronts differently, WooCommerce through WordPress and PHP, Shopify through its own Liquid templating language, so the front end is rebuilt, not transferred. A Shopify theme itself is cheap, often free or a few hundred dollars from the theme store. The cost is the work of matching your brand, your layout, and your specific merchandising, and migration agencies commonly price that customization anywhere from the high hundreds into the low thousands of dollars, more if your old store had bespoke design or custom page templates.
Then there is the plugin problem, which is the single biggest swing factor in the whole budget. A mature WooCommerce store does not run a handful of plugins. It runs a stack, often dozens of active plugins covering reviews, subscriptions, wholesale pricing, SEO, shipping rules, popups, and more. Almost none of those plugins exist on Shopify. Each one has to be matched to a Shopify app, and Shopify apps are overwhelmingly paid monthly subscriptions, not the one-time or free model common in the WordPress world. A busy production Shopify store often ends up running a dozen or more paid apps. The average Shopify app costs a little under 60 dollars a month, so a working stack quickly adds up to a recurring cost of a few hundred dollars a month that did not exist before, and it never stops.
Specific replacements can be jarring. Yoast SEO, free on WooCommerce, becomes a paid SEO app on Shopify. A subscriptions plugin that cost a couple of hundred dollars a year is replaced by an app like Recharge or Skio billed monthly, often a few hundred dollars a month at any scale. Wholesale and B2B functionality that came as an inexpensive WooCommerce plugin may require a Shopify app or, for full B2B features, the Shopify Plus tier. The fix here is a spreadsheet audit done before you commit: list every plugin, find its Shopify equivalent, note the monthly price, and add up the new annual total. That number belongs in the business case, not in a surprise invoice six months later.
The fees and the dip nobody puts on the quote
Two final costs. One is permanent. One is temporary but real.
The permanent one is platform economics. WooCommerce charges no platform transaction fee. You pay your payment processor and nothing else. Shopify's standard plans, at roughly 29, 79, and 299 dollars a month on annual billing, include payment processing through Shopify Payments at a card rate. But if you cannot or do not use Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of your processor's fee, between 2 percent and 0.6 percent depending on plan. For merchants in countries where Shopify Payments is not available, that surcharge is unavoidable and continuous. On a store doing 25,000 dollars a month, an extra 0.6 to 2 percent is several thousand dollars a year in fees that simply did not exist on WooCommerce. That is not a migration cost. It is a structural change to your margin, and it should be modeled across three years before you sign anything.
The temporary one is the post-launch revenue dip. Even a well-executed migration disturbs things. Rankings wobble while Google re-crawls. Returning customers meet an unfamiliar layout. Small bugs surface under real traffic that staging never caught. A post-launch performance dip is common enough that you should plan for one by default, and even good migrations with a complete redirect map often see a modest single-digit-percent drop that recovers over the following four to eight weeks. A botched one drops much further and recovers over quarters, if at all. The honest way to budget this is as working capital: assume a soft six to eight weeks and make sure cash flow can absorb it. The optimistic case is real too. One vendor survey of recent ecommerce migrators found about 90 percent reported sales or revenue improvements afterward, and roughly a third reported sales up by 30 percent or more, once the new platform removed the constraints that pushed them to move. The dip is the cost of admission to that upside, not a sign of failure.
Who should migrate, who should not, and how to de-risk it
Add the pieces together and the decision gets clearer.
Migrate when WooCommerce's ownership burden is actively costing you. The signals are concrete. You have no in-house developer and you are paying a freelancer to keep the site patched and stable. Your store breaks when WordPress or a plugin updates. Security and performance have become a recurring fire drill. Your sales volume is high enough that Shopify's monthly fees and app costs are a small fraction of revenue rather than a tax on it. In those conditions, paying once to migrate and then paying a predictable monthly fee to never think about hosting again is a sound trade.
Do not migrate when the move solves a problem you do not have. If your WooCommerce store is fast, stable, and converting, and you have the technical support to keep it that way, you would be spending tens of thousands of dollars and risking a traffic dip to fix nothing. If your catalog depends on deep configurability, many product options, intricate pricing rules, custom post types, Shopify's structural limits will fight you indefinitely. And if the appeal is purely cost, run the full three-year model first. For some stores Shopify is genuinely cheaper once developer time is counted honestly. For others, the platform fees, the transaction surcharge, and the stack of monthly app subscriptions make it more expensive than the WooCommerce setup it replaced.
If you do migrate, the de-risking playbook is well established and worth following exactly. Build the full 301 redirect map before launch, pulling every old URL from a site crawl, Google Search Console, analytics, and backlink tools so nothing is missed. Build and test everything on a password-protected staging store that search engines cannot see. Audit your plugins against Shopify apps and price the new stack in advance. Run a post-migration data audit hunting for the things that do not transfer cleanly. Migrate in a slow business period, never before a peak season. And keep the old WooCommerce store intact for a while after launch, as a reference and a fallback. None of this removes the cost. It removes the catastrophe, the version where the bill doubles because the work was done in the wrong order.
A WooCommerce to Shopify migration can be a genuinely good decision. Plenty of merchants are happier and more profitable on the other side of it. But the move is not the few hundred dollars the migration tool quotes. It is the redirect work, the rebuilt theme, the re-bought plugins, the data the importer silently leaves behind, the changed margin, and a soft few weeks while the new store finds its feet. Price the whole thing first. The stores that regret the move priced only the part that was cheap.
Council summary
This post argues that the migration tool merchants price first is the cheapest part of a WooCommerce to Shopify move, and the real budget lives in the redirect map, the rebuilt theme, the re-bought monthly apps, the data the importer leaves behind, and a permanently changed transaction margin. Review confirmed the load-bearing figures: the three-option-per-product limit still holds while the old 100-variant ceiling has been lifted toward 2,000, annual-billing plan prices sit near 29, 79, and 299 dollars a month, and the third-party-gateway transaction fee runs from 2 percent down to 0.6 percent by plan. Two claims were corrected. An unverifiable 92 percent ranking-retention case study was rewritten as a directional statement, and a claim that surveys show most migrations decline was fixed, since the cited survey is actually positive on satisfaction and revenue. The traffic-drop range is now framed as a directional warning, not a forecast. The takeaway: price the whole migration before committing, because the stores that regret it budgeted only the part that was cheap.
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