April 2nd, 2021 | Updated on June 28th, 2022
Shopify and WooCommerce gained their reputation as the most powerful solutions to build an eCommerce website. As of March 2021, Shopify has been hosting over 1.5 millions live websites. Meanwhile, WooCommerce is home to 4.4 million online businesses. It could be said that both Shopify and WooCommerce are among the dominating platforms in the eCommerce market.
However, it’s not that everyone using Shopify is satisfied. Since the beginning of 2021, there have been nearly 5000 merchants moving their store from Shopify to WooCommerce. There are various reasons for this, but it’s mostly the difference between the open-source and the hosted nature.
Migrating from a hosted eCommerce platform to an open-source is not easy as a pie if you don’t have the right solution. Therefore, in this article, I will show you the best solution and the process of transferring data from Shopify to WooCommerce in just a few minutes.
Why You Should Migrate From Shopify To WooCommerce
According to an in-depth Top eCommerce platforms 2020 report implemented by LitExtension, Shopify and Woocommerce are the two leading solutions. Shopify’s market share currently is about 11% whilst WooCommerce’s market share is over 29%.
Let’s have a look at some of the advantages that make WooCommerce the pick of the bunch.
WooCommerce is more affordable
WooCommerce is totally free to use. All you need to prepare is a domain name and hosting. This platform also comes with various built-in features with a lot of free plugins and extensions to enhance your store’s capability. Meanwhile, Shopify offers three pricing plans that range from $29-$299 per month and requires a payment fee of 0.5% – 2% per transaction. Obviously, switching to WooCommerce is a great economical deal for your online business.
WooCommerce is extremely easy to customize
WooCommerce is a customizable, open-source shopping cart plugin built on WordPress. Thus, you are capable of modifying the underlying code to create and customize any feature or even create a new plugin or theme from scratch.
Besides, the WordPress plugin repository is known as the most robust marketplace among eCommerce platforms with almost 57,000 plugins. WooCommerce users can make use of these extensions to enhance their store’s capability in terms of design, functionality, navigation, and more. Additionally, WooCommerce also offers almost 400 extensions specifically designed for eCommerce for you to choose from.
WooCommerce enables unlimited variations
Shopify only supports up to three drop-down menu options per product with the limitation of 100 possible combinations. This could be an inconvenience for many stores whose products need dozens of variations such as clothes or shoes. In this case, Shopify merchants need to pay for an extra application to create multiple products. Meanwhile, WooCommerce has its own built-in feature to create products with unlimited variations. Therefore, WooCommerce merchants don’t have to worry about this issue.
So, if you have coding skills and want a truly customizable and powerful platform, WooCommerce could be a better choice than a hosted solution like Shopify.
Super Easy Steps To Set Up A WooCommerce Store
Before migrating your current store to WooCommerce, you need to set up your new one to enable your data migration.
3.1. Choose a hosting
First of all, to build a WooCommerce website, you need to choose a hosting provider that can help you handle your basic website maintenance, set up and security. Choosing the right hosting provider is very important because your store will benefit a lot from the most suitable one.
There are several hosting providers including options that offer pre-installs of WordPress, WooCommerce, Storefront theme, and eCommerce-specific features. You also need an SSL certificate to keep your store protected and secure. You can consider Bluehost and SiteGround – the two names that are recommended by WordPress or go for whichever hosting providers of your choice.
3.2. Install WordPress
After having a space to start building a website, your next step is installing WordPress. If you opt for a hosting provider that offers an one-click installation process, the system will do most of the work for you.
In case you decide to manually install WordPress, don’t worry, the process is quite clean and linear. Please check this video for detailed instruction.
3.3 Activate WooCommerce
Now that your website is up and running, it’s time to install WooCommerce. You can search for WooCommerce on the Plugin > Add New page or download the package and upload it to the plugins folder on your server to activate.
Then, go to the Setup Wizard to fill in some general information such as Store details, Industry, Product Types and Business Details. It is important to choose another theme for your website, since your theme will not be migrated from Shopify to WooCommerce due to the difference in platform. Check out our theme selection to find the most suitable template for your online store.
The Best Ways To Move Your Business From Shopify To WooCommerce
There are 3 ways to migrate your store from Shopify to WooCommerce namely:
- Migrating manually by exporting and importing data from Shopify to WooCommerce
- Hiring a developer or a web agency to perform the migration
- Using automated shopping cart migration service
Manually migrating your store from Shopify to WooCommerce is an optimal way if you want to save some money.
However, please keep in mind that this option might require lots of time and effort to export data from your old store and upload it to a new one. Furthermore, during the migration process, your business may be temporarily closed which negatively influences your store’s sales.
On the other hand, if you are ready to spend some money, you can hire an experienced developer to help you export and import CSV files. The cost for a website agency fluctuates around $50-$80 per hour.
The total price for the whole process usually ranges between $500-$2500. However, in some cases there still are unexpected errors because rarely can a web agency or freelancer understand 100% data structure of both platforms.
The third way, using an automated migration service is another method to transfer your current Shopify store to the new one.
This can be considered the most effective way in terms of speed, security, and cost-efficiency. There’s no need for any technical knowledge, all you have to do is provide your store’s information, and the tool will help you transfer your data from Shopify to WooCommerce.
LitExtension is the world leading shopping cart migration expert. This tool can transfer almost every important data (including products, customers, orders, CMS pages, multilingual sites, etc.) flawlessly in a short period of time to your WooCommerce store without any interruption to your business. Several additional options include transferring customer passwords, SEO URLs… and other custom fields.
Here is a 5-step guide to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce with LitExtension:
Step 1: Register an account on the LitExtension website
To begin with, you need to create a new account at LitExtension. You can use your email address to sign up or you can log in directly by using your Facebook or Google account.
Step 2: Entering Shopping cart information
On the ‘My Migrations’ page, click Create New Migration at the top right button on the screen. For Shopify to WooCommerce migration, you need to choose Shopify as Source Cart in the drop-down list, then provide the store URL, API key, and password.
Next, set up your Target Cart by choosing WooCommerce as your Target Cart type and provide your store URL. After that, click LitExtension Connector to download and install the connector.
If you have any problems during this stage, feel free to contact LitExtension’s technical support team.
Step 3: Configure Shopify to WooCommerce migration
After setting up your source and target stores, click Next: Configure your Migration. Then, you can choose the data you want to migrate from your Shopify to WooCommerce.
The supported data includes products, reviews, taxes, customers, orders, pages, blog posts, and other related entities. Besides, LitExtension also offers over 10 more additional options to extend your migration possibility.
Step 4: Perform the migration
Now, you can try a free demo migration by clicking Start Demo Migration or skip to go straight to full migration. If you decide to proceed with a full migration right away, you will see a table that clarifies the number of entities and additional options to be switched, the validation date of Re-migration, Recent Data Migration and Smart Update. Hit Start Full Migration to continue.
The full migration process may last for a couple of minutes (depending on the number of entities you want to migrate). Notably, LitExtension data transfer is cloud-based, therefore, you don’t have to keep the browser or the network connection on during the process.
Step 5: Perform Post-migration action
After your migration process from Shopify to WooCommerce using the LitExtension tool is completed successfully, there are some post-migration activities needed.
Step 6: Perform Post-migration action
After your migration process from Shopify to WooCommerce using the LitExtension tool is completed successfully, there are some post-migration activities needed.
- Add essential extensions
WordPress gives you access to more than 55,000 plugins that are well-matched with WooCommerce or you can hire a developer to design one for you. No matter what your business is, you shouldn’t ignore some important extensions and plugins for SEO, multi-language, import-export products, abandon cart management, …
- Run recent data migration
During the migration process LitExtension, your Shopify store still receives new orders or customers while you are busy configuring and setting up your new store.
LitExtension provides the Recent Data Migration service, which can help you migrate the data added after you perform the first migration. This option is available after 3 months.
- Change DNS and switch domain
Next, you need to change DNS and switch domains. Domain name System (DNS) translates domain names to IP addresses so that browsers can load Internet resources.
Your DNS settings provide the link between your custom domain name and the IP address of the network. When you set up a custom domain, or when the server changes its IP address, you will need to change your DNS settings to the new IP address.
How to dramatically boost your WooCommerce store?
After your migration is completed, it’s time to boost your store. Before you launch your marketing campaigns, you need to maximize the user experience as site speed, design,…
Once your website is up and running, try to get as much traffic as possible to your website through multi-channel marketing campaigns via Facebook, Instagram, Google ads, Email,…Then, the next thing to do is improve the conversion rate. Here are some tips for you:
- Provide discounts and coupons
- WooCommerce Upsells and cross-sells
- Flash sales promotions
- Sell Gift Cards for Holidays or special events
- Offer points for the purchase and send abandoned cart emails to loyal customers
- Personalized Newsletters
- Social Proofing
- Remarketing campaigns
Today, an extremely popular solution that significantly increases sales for your business is omnichannel selling. You can integrate your WooCommerce website with some large marketing places such as eBay or Amazon.
Final Words.
In this article, we have provided some advantages of WooCommerce and three different ways to migrate your store from Shopify to WooCommerce. Don’t forget to take note of some tips to boost your sales and run your business sustainably.
That’s all you need to know when migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce. Migrating the store to a more optimized platform brings you the chance to level up your store. This job can be difficult and complicated, but everything will be a piece of cake if you choose the right method.
