WooCommerce to Shopify: Real Costs and What Most Agencies Don't Tell You

The phrase that finally pushed Maria over the edge was “the hosting bill is now $400 a month.”

She’d been on WooCommerce for almost five years. Beauty brand, $1.4M a year, growing. The store had started on a $30/month managed WordPress plan in 2020. Five years and three plan upgrades later, she was at $400. Plus plugin licenses. Plus a developer she’d been retaining for two years just to keep things from breaking.

Her bookkeeper sent her the year-end recap in January. Maria added it up. She’d spent $43,000 on her platform that year. Not on marketing. Not on inventory. On running the website.

She emailed us in February. Subject: “How much would it cost to move to Shopify?”

That email is the spine of this post. Maria’s been the platonic ideal of a “ready to migrate from WooCommerce” founder. Most of you reading this are some flavor of Maria. Here’s the answer I sent her, expanded with the context I usually save for a discovery call.

Why the WooCommerce math stops working

Most WooCommerce stores don’t migrate because Shopify is cheaper line-for-line. They migrate because the operating cost of WooCommerce passes a threshold around $500K-$1M in revenue, and the threshold isn’t visible until you do the math Maria did in January.

Specifically:

• Hosting cost scaling. A store doing $50K/month of revenue is putting real load on managed WordPress hosting. Plans that handled launch ($30/month) become $150-$400/month.
• Plugin maintenance. Six plugins for what Shopify ships in core. Each one is a WordPress update gamble. License fees plus the developer hours to manage compatibility.
• Security overhead. PCI compliance, WAF, security plugins, daily backups, malware scanning, all your problem on WooCommerce, all included on Shopify.
• Developer retainer. Most WooCommerce stores at $500K+ have a dev on retainer at $1K-$3K/month for plugin glue, theme tweaks, and emergency response. That’s the line item that disappears on Shopify.

Maria’s stack: $400/month hosting, $150/month plugin licenses, $80/month security tooling, $2,000/month developer retainer. That’s $2,630/month. Annualised: $31,560, which doesn’t even include the one-off “the cart is broken at 11pm” dev incidents she’d been paying out separately.

Shopify Standard is $105/month. Plus starts at $2,500/month (license only). The crossover happens earlier than most founders think.

”What does it actually cost?”

Maria’s first real question. Here’s what real WooCommerce → Shopify migrations cost. The bracket depends on five things, but the shape is consistent.

Profile	SKUs	Realistic cost
Small D2C, simple plugins	<500	$3,500-$7,500
Mid D2C with subscriptions or B2B-lite	500-3,000	$7,500-$18,000
Larger D2C with multi-region or custom integrations	3,000-10,000	$18,000-$40,000
Mid-market with B2B / multi-store / ERP integration	10,000+	$40,000-$100,000+

Maria had 1,800 SKUs. Bracket two. Quoted $14,500. Came in at $14,200 because we didn’t need to do the photography pass we’d budgeted for.

The “Save up to 70%” headline you’ll see across migration agencies (us included) is real. The comparison is against like-for-like quotes from agencies that price enterprise migrations on stores that don’t need enterprise treatment. It’s not “your $20K WooCommerce migration becomes a $6K Shopify migration.” It’s “your $20K migration plus $30K/year of ongoing platform overhead becomes a $14K migration plus $5K/year of ongoing overhead.” The difference compounds.

The five things that move the price

1. Your WooCommerce plugin stack

The biggest single cost driver for any WooCommerce migration. Every plugin you depend on needs a Shopify equivalent, and the work to map that equivalent is real.

The ones we map most often:

• WooCommerce Subscriptions → Recharge or Shopify’s native subscriptions. Customer migration with payment-token preservation is the variable.
• WooCommerce Bookings → not a 1:1 on Shopify. Either rebuilds with Tipo or BookThatApp, or removes from scope.
• WooCommerce Memberships → Bold Memberships or Shopify Bundles for simpler cases.
• WPML / multilingual → Shopify Markets + a translation app.
• Yoast SEO → built-in Shopify SEO + careful metadata migration.
• WooCommerce B2B → Shopify B2B (Plus only) for serious cases, or app-based for simpler.

Maria had 24 active plugins. After our audit, the map looked like this: 8 became Shopify apps, 4 became native theme features or Shopify Functions, 12 were either deprecated or no longer needed because the store had grown past them. We map every plugin in week one of every migration. The plugin map is the most accurate predictor of total cost.

2. Catalog cleanup

WooCommerce catalogs accumulate cruft over years: duplicate variants, inconsistent categories, orphan products with broken images, descriptions with hardcoded HTML from the theme builder. Cleaning this during migration is not optional, but how clean it needs to be on the Shopify side affects the cost.

A “lift and shift” migration accepts the messiness and ports as-is. A “clean migration” sanitises taxonomy, normalises images, rewrites broken descriptions. The latter costs $2K-$8K more depending on catalog size, and it pays off forever in operational cost.

Maria opted for the clean migration, worth every dollar.

3. SEO preservation

WooCommerce stores often have years of organic traffic accumulated. Preserving it requires:

• A 301 redirect map covering every indexed URL (we covered this in detail in Shopify Migration SEO Playbook)
• Metadata migration (titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags)
• Schema porting (Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, Review)
• Image SEO preservation (alt text, file names where useful)

This is engineering work, not optional. Budget $1.5K-$5K depending on traffic depth. Maria’s site had ~3,400 indexed URLs. The redirect map alone took two days to build and four to validate.

4. Customer + subscription data

WooCommerce stores customer data, order history, and subscription details in WordPress’s database. Migrating it cleanly involves:

• Customer accounts with addresses, tags, segments
• Historical orders for customer service continuity
• Active subscriptions with payment tokens (where the processor supports it)
• Email subscriber lists (often via Klaviyo direct connection rather than full migration)

For most processors (Stripe, Authorize.Net Customer Profiles, Braintree), tokenised migration works. Some legacy processors require customers to re-enter card info post-migration, handle this with care and a clear comms plan.

Maria’s processor was Stripe. Tokens migrated cleanly. None of her 1,800 active subscribers had to re-enter cards.

5. Theme rebuild vs. theme port

Most WooCommerce themes are heavily modified WordPress themes, they don’t port directly. The choice on Shopify is:

• Use a Shopify-native theme as the base (faster, cheaper), the redesign happens during migration. Most migrations bundle this.
• Rebuild the existing visual identity (slower, more expensive), preserves brand exactly but takes longer.

Honest answer: 80% of WooCommerce migrations are also redesigns, because the existing theme was built around plugin assumptions that don’t exist on Shopify. Bundling the redesign is usually cheaper than doing it separately later. Maria bundled hers.

Hidden costs nobody itemises

Six line items that show up on the actual bill but not on the initial quote. Maria caught two of these by asking the right questions; we’d planned for the other four.

1. WooCommerce export licensing. Some WP-side data export tools require a paid license. Cheap ($50-$200) but it shows up.
2. Recharge or subscription-app onboarding fees. If you have subscriptions, the new app provider sometimes charges a setup fee.
3. Klaviyo re-flow setup. Most flows port via the Klaviyo-Shopify integration, but custom flows referencing WooCommerce-specific events need rebuilding.
4. Email list re-confirmation. Some ESP migrations trigger a re-confirmation requirement. Rare on Klaviyo, more common with smaller ESPs.
5. Shipping zone reconfiguration. WooCommerce shipping rules with carrier-calculated rates need to be rebuilt with Shopify’s carrier integrations.
6. Tax setup verification. Especially for US multi-state, EU VAT, or UK MTD. Always handled, but always takes a few hours.

Total hidden cost across these: usually $500-$2,000. Manageable if planned for, frustrating if discovered mid-project. We line-item all six in every quote now precisely because of a project two years ago where we didn’t, and the founder felt blindsided.

Maria’s six weeks, in detail

Week 1, Discovery + plugin map

• Store audit
• Plugin-by-plugin equivalence map (24 active plugins → 8 Shopify apps + 4 native features + 12 deprecated)
• 301 redirect map drafted (3,400 indexed URLs)
• Theme direction agreed (redesign bundled, reusing brand identity)

Week 2, Theme + structure build

• New theme built on Shopify dev store
• Section library built for PDP, collection, cart
• 200-SKU subset imported for QA visualisation

Week 3, Catalog migration

• Full 1,800-SKU import via Matrixify
• Image normalisation (compressed, alt text validated)
• Metafields populated for ingredient lists, certifications

Week 4, Customers, subs, integrations

• 12,400 customer accounts imported with addresses
• 1,800 active subscriptions migrated to Recharge with tokenised cards
• Klaviyo connected, flows re-mapped, lists re-segmented
• Yotpo reviews imported product-by-product

Week 5, Final QA

• Cross-browser testing (iOS Safari, Android Chrome, Edge, Firefox)
• Redirect map validated (3,400 URLs tested via script)
• Schema validation (Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, Review, FAQPage)
• Pre-cutover Search Console preparation

Week 6, Cutover + monitoring

• Cutover Tuesday 2am EST
• DNS propagation monitored
• Hour-by-hour support for first 24 hours
• Days 2-30: daily Search Console review

Total cost: $14,200. Plugin license savings: ~$280/month going forward. Mobile conversion lift: 2.1% → 2.7% in 60 days.

Six WooCommerce-specific traps we plan around

These are the things that break WooCommerce migrations when nobody’s looking.

Trap 1: Pretty permalinks vs. parameterised URLs

WooCommerce sometimes serves both /?product=123 and /product/[slug]/ for the same product. Both need 301 redirects to the new Shopify URL. Forget the parameterised version, lose backlinks.

Trap 2: WooCommerce Subscriptions payment tokens

Most stores use Stripe, which tokenises cleanly. If you’re on Authorize.Net legacy CIM or a niche gateway, payment tokens might not transfer. Plan for customer-facing comms.

Trap 3: Variable products with attribute-driven pricing

WooCommerce supports per-variant pricing rules natively. Shopify supports it, but the data model is slightly different, variant SKUs need to be unique, attribute structure normalised. Bulk migration tools sometimes scramble this.

Trap 4: Custom user roles on WooCommerce B2B

If you’re using WooCommerce’s B2B extensions with custom user roles (wholesalers, VIPs, retailers), Shopify B2B (Plus) handles these via customer groups. Translation work, not 1:1.

Trap 5: WordPress page builders

If your “store” is partly built with Elementor, Divi, or WPBakery, those page structures don’t port. They need rebuilding as Shopify sections. Most agencies underquote this. Ask specifically: “How are you handling [my page builder] content?”

Trap 6: Yoast metadata vs. Shopify meta

Yoast stores meta titles and descriptions in WordPress post meta. They migrate via export-and-map, but the field names differ. Easy to lose if not specifically scoped.

What “Save up to 70%” actually means

The headline you’ll see across migration marketing pages (ours included) needs context. The 70% comparison is against:

• Like-for-like quotes from agencies that price enterprise migrations on stores that don’t need enterprise treatment
• Total cost of ownership including hosting + plugins + dev retainer + security tooling vs. flat Shopify license + standard apps
• Multi-year cost projections including the developer time that disappears once the platform handles the basics

For Maria, “70%” wasn’t the right number. Her one-time migration cost was 30% lower than her competing quote. But her ongoing platform spend dropped 80%. Year one savings: about $25,000. Year two: $30,000. The numbers compound.

Frequently asked

Will my WooCommerce store keep running during the migration? Yes. Both stores stay live. Cutover is a DNS swap during a low-traffic window. Customers buying on Tuesday at 9pm don’t know anything is happening.

What about my historical orders? Migrated. Shopify supports historical-order import including line items, addresses, and totals. Customer service can look up “what did Sarah order in 2023” without going back to WooCommerce.

How long until rankings stabilise? Two weeks for impressions to settle. 30 days for full stabilisation. With proper redirect mapping, organic traffic is flat or up after a properly run migration.

Can I keep my domain? Yes, that’s the whole point. The domain points to Shopify after cutover. Your customers’ bookmarks still work.

What if I’m using WooCommerce Bookings or Memberships? Bookings → Tipo, BookThatApp, or similar. Memberships → Bold Memberships, Shopify Bundles, or rebuild with Shopify Functions for complex cases. Always solvable, costs vary by complexity.

Do I need to rebuild my Klaviyo flows? Most flows port via the Shopify-Klaviyo native integration. Flows referencing WooCommerce-specific events (e.g. WooCommerce Subscriptions hooks) need rebuilding. Budget half a day for this.

Want a real WooCommerce → Shopify quote?

We’ve done enough WooCommerce migrations to quote yours within 48 hours of seeing the store. Send us the URL plus a one-line note about your plugin stack, and we’ll write back with a free audit covering scope, timeline, cost, and the specific traps we’d plan around.

Get a free WooCommerce migration audit, 48-hour turnaround.

For the broader migration picture, see Shopify Migration: The Complete 2026 Buyer’s Guide.