WooCommerce to Shopify: migrating an Australian store

The pattern we see with WooCommerce stores is depressingly consistent. A payment or shipping plugin auto-updates over a weekend, the checkout quietly breaks, and nobody notices until a customer rings on Tuesday asking why their card keeps getting declined. Three days of orders, gone. The store owner didn't do anything wrong. They just own a stack of fifteen plugins that all have to keep agreeing with each other, on a site that happens to be how they make their living.

That's usually the moment people start asking about Shopify. Not because of a feature comparison. Because they're tired.

This guide covers the move itself: what it costs in Australian dollars, what data comes across and what doesn't, the URL and redirect work that protects your Google traffic, and the honest list of things you give up. It's the commerce chapter of a bigger decision we've written up in our guide to leaving WordPress in 2026, and if you're still weighing the two platforms from scratch, the full Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison is the place to start.

Why stores leave

WooCommerce is WordPress, and WordPress carries the security profile of the most-attacked software on the web. Patchstack logged 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in its latest annual report, up 42% on the year before, and 91% of them were in plugins rather than core. Sucuri's hacked-site data tells the same story from the clean-up end: 95.5% of the infected sites their team remediated in 2023 ran WordPress.

For a blog, a hack is embarrassing. For a store it's a different category of problem, because the thing being attacked holds customer names, addresses and order histories, and because every hour the site is down or quarantined is revenue that doesn't come back. A WooCommerce store is a revenue-critical system being maintained the way hobby sites are maintained: by hoping this month's plugin updates don't fight each other.

The checkout is where this bites hardest. On WooCommerce, your checkout is assembled from your payment plugin, your shipping plugin, your theme and whatever else hooks into the purchase flow, and any one of them can take it down. Baymard's research puts average cart abandonment around 70% even when everything works. You don't want to donate further points to a broken postcode field. Shopify's checkout is the same infrastructure handling millions of orders a day for everyone; it is not waiting on you to update anything.

What Shopify costs an Australian store

The numbers, from Shopify's Australian pricing page: the Basic plan is $56 AUD a month, Grow is $149, Advanced is $575, with roughly 25% off each if you pay annually ($42, $114 and $431 respectively). Prices exclude GST. Most small and mid-sized stores live happily on Basic or Grow.

On top of the subscription there are card fees. Shopify Payments on the Basic plan charges 1.75% + 30¢ on a domestic online transaction, dropping as you move up plans. If you insist on a third-party gateway instead, Shopify adds its own fee on top (2% on Basic), so in practice almost everyone uses Shopify Payments, which also handles Afterpay and PayPal cleanly.

Then apps. This is Shopify's version of plugin creep, and it's real: a reviews app here, an email app there, $15 to $50 a month each, and a store that started at $56 a month is suddenly costing $150. Budget for it honestly.

Here's the thing though: run the same honest maths on what your WooCommerce store costs now. Hosting that can actually handle traffic runs $30 to $100 a month. The extension licences renew every year whether you think about them or not; WooCommerce Subscriptions alone is AUD $402 a year for a single site, and stores commonly carry three or four paid extensions at similar prices. Then the line item everyone forgets: someone has to apply updates, test the checkout afterwards, and fix it when an update goes sideways. Either that's a retainer, or it's your own evenings. Most store owners we talk to have never added these up, and when they do, Shopify's flat fee stops looking expensive.

The migration itself

The data move is the part people fear and it's honestly the most solved part of the whole exercise. Shopify's own WooCommerce migration guide covers the routes: export/import via CSV, Shopify's Store Migration app, or a third-party migration app. For anything beyond a small catalogue we'd point you at Matrixify, which handles products, variants, customers and order history in bulk and is the tool most migration specialists quietly use anyway.

Products and variants come across well, with one catch worth knowing up front: Shopify allows three product options per product (size, colour, material, say). If your WooCommerce products use more than three attributes, those extra options won't import and you'll need to restructure them.

Customers come across as profiles: names, emails, addresses, marketing consent. What does not come across, ever, is passwords. They're encrypted and can't be migrated, on any platform, by any tool, so every customer will need to set a new password the first time they log in to the new store. Plan a short email explaining that, or you'll spend launch week answering confused replies.

Order history can come over via Matrixify, but treat it as an archive: the records arrive for reference and reporting, not as live orders. Before you switch anything off, export your complete order history to files and keep them, because your accountant will want the source data regardless of what the new platform shows. Product reviews are the other gap; WooCommerce can't export them natively, so they need a third-party review app on both ends.

The URL problem nobody budgets for

This is the part that actually loses businesses money, and it has nothing to do with data.

WooCommerce let you structure URLs however you liked, so your products probably live at /product/blue-widget and your categories at /product-category/widgets. Shopify's paths are fixed: products live at /products/blue-widget, collections at /collections/widgets, pages at /pages/about, blog posts under /blogs/. You cannot change this. Every URL on your store is about to move, which means every ranking and inbound link you've earned is pointing at an address that's about to 404.

The fix is a redirect map: every old URL, matched to its new home, loaded into Shopify's built-in URL redirect tool before launch. Google's documentation on site moves with URL changes is the reference for why this matters: a 301 passes the old page's earned authority to the new one, and its absence throws that authority away. For a 300-product store that's 300-plus product redirects, plus categories, plus the blog. It's tedious spreadsheet work, it takes a day, and it is the single highest-value day in the entire migration. We've written a full migration checklist that covers the redirect process step by step, and the same discipline applies here, just with more rows.

GST and getting paid

The pleasant surprise of the move. If your GST turnover is $75,000 or more you need to be registered with the ATO, and Shopify's tax settings handle the 10% GST on Australian orders once you tell it you're registered, including GST-inclusive pricing, which is how Australians expect to see prices. Payouts from Shopify Payments land in your Australian bank account in a couple of business days. Compare that with the WooCommerce version, where GST behaviour depends on how your tax settings, currency plugin and payment gateway were each configured, usually by different people at different times.

One task for your accountant either way: make sure the tax invoice details on Shopify's order confirmations meet ATO requirements, since the defaults are generic.

What you give up

Honesty section. Shopify is a trade: you hand over control in exchange for not being responsible for anything.

If your store has genuinely custom logic, B2B price lists per customer, quoting workflows, deep integration with a back-office system, an unusual checkout, WooCommerce's open codebase gives you room Shopify's app ecosystem may not. Some stores should stay on WooCommerce, and our comparison guide goes through those cases properly. The short version: if you have a developer you trust on retainer and requirements no app covers, staying put can be the right call. What's rarely the right call is staying by default because moving feels hard.

The other real loss is content. Shopify's blog is serviceable and no more, and its page-building is rigid compared to what you're used to. If content marketing drives your traffic, the pattern we like is splitting the jobs: Shopify runs the shop, and a separate fast marketing site, built on something like Astro, runs the content that brings people in. We've covered that stack in our WordPress-to-Astro guide, and the two link together cleanly, content site to product pages, cart on the store.

Where AI tooling changes the maths

A quieter reason this migration got cheaper: AI coding tools are genuinely good at the destination and genuinely bad at the origin.

A Shopify theme is a folder of Liquid templates, plain text files that live in git. An agent like Claude Code can read the whole theme, make a change, and show you the diff before anything ships. The same goes double for a marketing site built in Astro or another code-first framework: pages and content are typed files, TypeScript catches the AI's mistakes at build time, and every change is a reviewable pull request. These frameworks are also everywhere in the models' training data, so the tools are working on familiar ground.

WooCommerce is the opposite shape. The store's behaviour lives partly in PHP, partly in a MySQL database, partly in plugin option screens, and no agent can safely operate on that from the outside; there's no diff to review when the change is a settings toggle inside a plugin nobody's source code covers. In practice this means the jobs that used to be a $150-an-hour developer ticket, template tweaks, redirect maps, product data clean-up, become AI-assisted work a reviewer signs off in minutes. The migration quotes people remember from 2022 are stale. It's worth being clear-eyed about the limits, though: AI accelerates clean, file-based systems. It does not rescue a tangle.

Where we fit

We'll say plainly what we told you in the comparison guide: Pagecog doesn't build Shopify stores, and this guide isn't a pitch to build yours. Where we do the work is everything around the store: the migration plan, the redirect map that protects your rankings, and the fast content site on our Cloudflare stack that feeds the shop its traffic. If you're planning the move and want the search side handled properly, we'll audit your current site for free, or tell us about the project and we'll give you a straight answer about which parts you need us for, which is frequently not all of them.