In this digital era having an online presence is a necessity. An online presence, whether through a website, social media, or e-commerce channels, is essential in today’s digital age. It allows businesses to reach and engage with customers in a way that was not possible before and also helps to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, generate leads, and ultimately increase sales. An online presence allows businesses to reach a global audience, whereas a physical storefront may be limited to a specific geographic location. An online presence can help businesses stay competitive in today’s digital marketplace, as more and more consumers turn to the internet for shopping and information about products and services. Moreover, setting up an online store is far more cost-effective than having a physical store.
Because of these reasons, now many businesses are going online. Many platforms ease the process of setting up an online store, such as Shopify, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, etc. Starting an online store is one thing, and maintaining it another. When you start an online store, you don’t have many customers, but as your brand grows, your user base also increases, and that’s when the problem starts. When building an online store, only a few people consider how they will manage their online store when their customers grow; they are in a hurry to go online without giving future implications of choosing an E-commerce platform much thought.
Shopify is a great option for beginners because it offers a number of features and benefits that make it easy to start and run an online store, even for those with little or no technical expertise. But as every other platform, it has some disadvantages too. And if I am not wrong, you are here too because you are using Shopify, and you are now not satisfied with it and want to switch to WooCommerce. So, set your worries aside because, in today’s article, I will discuss the benefits of migrating your online store from Shopify to WooCommerce and how you can do it easily.
Without wasting any more time, let’s start
What is Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce platform allowing businesses to create and manage online stores. It is a cloud-based platform that is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, even for those with little or no technical expertise. With Shopify, businesses can create a fully-functional online store with features such as inventory management, payment processing, and shipping integrations and customize the design of their store.
One of the main features of Shopify is its user-friendly interface, which allows users to easily manage their store’s products, orders, customers, and other data. It also offers a wide range of customizable templates and design options to help businesses create professional-looking stores.
Another feature of Shopify is its app store, where businesses can find apps that add additional functionality to their store, such as email marketing, loyalty programs, accounting, and more. This allows businesses to add features to their store that they might not be able to create themselves.
Shopify also offers a range of pricing plans to accommodate businesses of all sizes and supports various payment gateway options. It also provides various features for tracking and analysing store data, generating reports, and customer management.
Shopify is a comprehensive e-commerce platform that provides businesses with all the tools and features needed to create, manage and run a successful online store. With a user-friendly interface, easy customization options, and a wide range of built-in features and integrations, it’s a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.
What is WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for the WordPress content management system (CMS). It allows businesses with a WordPress website to create and manage online stores. It is designed to be flexible and customizable and offers a wide range of features and integrations.
One of the main advantages of using WooCommerce is that it is built on top of WordPress, one of the world’s most widely used CMS platforms. Businesses already using WordPress for their website can easily add e-commerce functionality to their site by installing the WooCommerce plugin.
Another advantage of WooCommerce is that it is an open-source platform. The source code is publicly available and can be modified or customized to fit a business’s specific needs. It also has a strong developer community that provides support, troubleshooting, and new features to the platform.
WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform, meaning businesses need to handle hosting and maintenance. This might seem like a troublesome job, but it gives them complete control over their data and full ownership of their e-commerce website.
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Benefits of Migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce
There are a few reasons why a business might choose to migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce:
Customization
WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform, which means that businesses have more control over the design and functionality of their store. This can be particularly important for businesses that need to create a highly customized online store with specific features or integrations.
Scalability
WooCommerce is an open-source platform, which makes it more scalable and flexible than Shopify. This can be especially important for businesses that expect to see significant growth in the future and want the ability to add new features or integrations to their online store easily.
Cost
While Shopify offers a range of pricing plans, it can be more expensive for businesses that need to use many apps or integrations to run their store, whereas WooCommerce is free to use but requires additional costs on hosting and development.
Ownership and control
With WooCommerce, businesses have full ownership and control over their data, which can be important for businesses that handle sensitive customer information or are subject to regulatory compliance requirements.
Open-source nature
WooCommerce is an open-source platform that allows users to modify it to their specific requirements and allows them the freedom of choice in terms of development, hosting, and plugin usage.
Integration with existing systems
WooCommerce can integrate with a wide variety of existing systems, such as CRM, ERP, and accounting software, which can make it a better fit for businesses already using these systems.
Strong developer community
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, so it benefits from a very active developer community that provides support, troubleshooting, and new features to the platform.
More options for payment gateways
WooCommerce has more options for payment gateways, which can be useful for businesses that operate in countries where certain payment methods are more popular.
Now that you know the benefits of using WooCommerce over Shopify, let’s see what you will have to do to ensure a smooth transition.
Things to Think About Before Migrating From Shopify to WooCommerce
Before you move your store from one platform to another, you must think about hosting and backing up your data.
Let’s talk in-depth about each of them.
Finding a Web Host that is WordPress friendly
Due to the popularity of WooCommerce and WordPress, you will have no trouble finding a reliable web host. For using WordPress and WooCommerce, you’ll probably want to find a web hosting service that works well with the Content Management System (CMS). Having managed WordPress hosting for your e-commerce site is recommended.
Backup Your Shopify Store
You should always back up your online store’s data before making major changes. So that If something goes wrong during the procedure, you don’t have to worry about the integrity of your data. Shopify lacks a simple backup feature. Your product data can be exported as a CSV file. It will be useful during the migration. But you can’t use the built-in functions of the platform to back up the rest of your store’s details and design.
However, you can find apps that provide basic backup features in the Shopify App.
But remember that even with backup apps, you can’t make full copies of your store, and you can’t use those backup apps while migrating your store.
Even though there is zero probability of losing data during the migration of your online store from Shopify to WooCommerce, you should proceed with caution just in case something unimaginable happens.
Now that you know the basic requirements needed before making the move, we can move on to the actual migration process.
How to Migrate From Shopify to WooCommerce
Setting Up WordPress and Installing WooCommerce
Depending on your host, WordPress provides several different installation options. When you build a new website with a managed WordPress host, the content management system (CMS) is often set up for you automatically; that is the one reason we recommend having managed WordPress hosting.
Alternatively, WordPress may be downloaded and installed manually, which is very straightforward. WordPress.org hosts the software for free download. Once you’ve uploaded the files to your server, you can follow the renowned ‘five-minute’ setup to get started and install WordPress.
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Now after Installing WordPress, you will have to install WooCommerce Plugins.
For this, click on plugins in the left sidebar of the WordPress dashboard and then click Add New. Now Search WooCommerce in the search bar. Now WooCommerce will show up in the results. Click on the Install button. This will download the WooCommerce plugin and install it. After the installation has been completed Activate button will appear, click on that, and your WooCommerce plugin will get activated.
After Setting up WordPress and installing WooCommerce, you can migrate your Shopify store to WooCommerce in two ways. You can either manually Import/Export products, or you can use migration tools.
We will discuss both ways, and you could choose whichever is convenient for you.
Manually Importing and Exporting Products from Shopify to WooCommerce
Export and download your product data from Shopify.
From your Shopify admin, go to Products
Now Select Export.
Select the items you wish to export from the corresponding dialogue box.
- The current page of products
- All products
- Products you have selected
- Products that match your search and filters.
Select the desired CSV export format:
- CSV file for Excel, Numbers, or another spreadsheet program. Use this format if you want to edit your product CSV file in a spreadsheet.
- Plain CSV file. If you want to open your product CSV file in a plain-text editor
Click on Export products.
Shopify will generate a CSV file with all of your product data and send it to you via email once you click Export products. Depending on your stock size, that email could take some time to come.
Shopify will send you an email with a download link for a CSV that contains all of your product data.
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Importing Data To WooCommerce
Now head to WooCommerce > Products in the WordPress Dashboard.
Choose Import at the top. You’ll discover a built-in product CSV importer within that section.
Now click on the choose file button and select the CSV file you generated from Shopify.
Now click continue
You will be brought to the Column Mapping screen, where WooCommerce will attempt to automatically match the column names of your Shopify CSV file to WooCommerce product fields. However, you may have to map some of them on your own; use the dropdown menus to the right of each row to do so.
Select Run the Importer and wait for the process of importing to complete.
This way, you can manually import/export your Shopify products to WooCommerce. Manually transferring your products is free and easy, though time-consuming. The disadvantage of using this technique is that you will not be able import everything from your Shopify store. Order history, images, and customer reviews etc. will not be imported.
Migrating From Shopify to WooCommerce Using Migration Tool
Transferring your store’s data from Shopify to WooCommerce is a breeze with the help of migration tools. Some of them are WP All Import, litextension, and Cart2Cart.
Cart2Cart is a great tool; therefore, that’s the one we’ll be using today.
With Cart2Cart, you can effortlessly transfer all of your Shopify data to WooCommerce, including products, customers, orders, and more. You won’t need any specialised skills to complete the migration; moreover, your Shopify store will continue to function normally during the migration.
To begin using Cart2Cart, you must create an account on their website. To begin, visit the signup page and fill out the appropriate forms with your email address, password, and name.
You’ll be directed to the migration page when you’re done creating your account.
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Now the process of migrating will start.
Next, you must provide details for your source and target carts.
Select Shopify from the drop-down selection to indicate that your source will be Shopify information. Then, copy and paste the URL of your old store.
Next, an API Password is required. To obtain this, go to your Shopify admin page and select Apps from the menu on the left.
You will then notice a link labelled Manage private apps near the bottom of the page. Click this link, then click the icon labelled Create a new private app.
You must then enter a name for the app. You can name whatever you wish.
Enter a password in the Admin API area and click Save. You now have an API password that you can copy and paste into your Cart2Cart setup.
In terms of Target Cart Setup, choose WooCommerce from the Target Cart drop-down menu and enter the URL for your new store.
Next, you must link your sites together using the Connection Bridge. Clicking the Download Bridge button will cause the necessary files to be downloaded to your computer (the folder should be called connection_bridge). Within this folder there will another folder named bridge2cart that must be copied to the root directory of your website.
A File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client is required to accomplish this.
To test your connection, you must next click the button on the Target Cart Setup screen and then click Choose Entities. You should concentrate on importing critical data for the migration, such as your products, their descriptions and image files, customer orders, and blog posts.
Check the Select All checkbox for your convenience.
Scroll down and click the green button when you’re done. This will conclude the migration procedure after taking some time.
Now the migration process is complete, but a lot of work is still left to be done.
Make all the pages your WooCommerce shop requires.
Once you’ve set up your new WooCommerce shop, the next thing is to construct your Shopify pages there. You probably won’t have to start from scratch with many of your pages (such as the products and shopping cart).
You’ll need to do manual work for the pages that Cart2Cart couldn’t transfer. WordPress, fortunately, grants you far greater leeway in determining how your shop appears.
Since you’re using WooCommerce, the Block Editor is the quickest way to start constructing your pages. You can incorporate more than 15 distinct eCommerce elements onto your pages with the help of the WooCommerce-specific blocks. With these blocks and the Block Editor’s other features, you can easily rebuild your Shopify pages without any coding experience.
This could take some time, depending on how complicated your store was. The good news is that when you install WooCommerce, your main shop page will already be set up for you.
Create a WooCommerce shop that mirrors your Shopify one.
Within the WordPress platform, themes are the basis for virtually every website. To begin, log in to your WordPress admin area and navigate to Appearance > Themes.
Because there are many WooCommerce themes to choose from, it is feasible to find one with the same general look and feel as your old Shopify website. Find a theme that reflects your old Shopify design and install it.
By following these steps, you can easily migrate your Shopify store to WooCommerce and build an online store with aesthetics similar to your previous one.
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Wrapping it Up
Switching your e-commerce platform from Shopify to WooCommerce is a laborious process. To switch platforms, you must not only export and import your product and customer data but also create a brand-new layout and adjust your settings.
Thankfully, the benefits far outweigh the effort. If you’re looking to expand your business, you’ll find more room to do so with WooCommerce and WordPress than with Shopify. They will always have more features for you.
