Ask a merchant what worries them about migrating off WooCommerce and most say "losing my products." That's actually the easy part. Products, images, and customer records move over fine with any competent migration process. What actually breaks is quieter, and more expensive.
The move is bigger than it looks right now
WooCommerce still powers more stores overall, though Shopify dominates among the highest-revenue ones. That gap is part of why the migration wave is real: a significant share of stores switching platforms this year are mature businesses, some eight, ten, even fifteen-plus years old, making a deliberate move rather than a first-time platform choice.
The reasons merchants give are consistent: plugin complexity that's compounded for a decade, hosting and security that's now their responsibility instead of the platform's, and a UI that's fallen behind what a modern storefront needs. None of that is wrong. But "why we're leaving" and "what actually goes wrong in the move" are two different conversations, and most migration content only covers the first one.
What genuinely breaks: the URL structure
WooCommerce and Shopify structure product and category URLs differently by default — /product/item-name/ versus /products/item-name, /product-category/ versus /collections/. Every single indexed page on your store technically changes address in the move. If that's not mapped with 301 redirects before launch, every one of those pages returns a 404 to both visitors and Google, and the search ranking that page had built up over years starts over from nothing.
This is the single highest-leverage piece of a migration, and it's also the piece that gets rushed most often because it's tedious, not because it's hard. The process is genuinely simple in concept: build a spreadsheet mapping every old URL to its new destination, and load it as redirect rules before the domain switches over — but "simple in concept" and "done thoroughly for 4,000 product pages" are different amounts of work.
What genuinely breaks: your plugin stack
A WooCommerce store that's been running a few years has usually accumulated plugins the way a garage accumulates tools — one for reviews, one for a shipping calculator, one for a specific tax rule, one that a developer installed once to fix a one-time problem and never removed. None of that has an equivalent list anywhere. It's tribal knowledge, or it's not knowledge anyone currently has at all.
The mistake is assuming the "migration" is a data export. A thorough migration includes an audit of what every active plugin actually does for the business, matched to either a Shopify-native feature or an equivalent app — done before cutover, not discovered after launch when a customer can't apply the loyalty discount they've used for two years.
Your WooCommerce theme will not work on Shopify. That's worth saying plainly, because it changes the actual scope of the project — this isn't a data move with a new coat of paint, it's a full storefront rebuild with data continuity.
What genuinely breaks: the assumption you'll go live in a weekend
A realistic migration timeline runs 4 to 12 weeks depending on catalog size and plugin complexity, with the actual cutover — the moment live data moves and DNS switches — usually a 24 to 72 hour window, not the whole project. The "migrate in a weekend" stories that circulate online generally assume a small catalog, no meaningful plugin dependencies, and someone with nothing else going on that week. Real merchants are running the business during the migration, which is exactly why rushing the redirect map and plugin audit to hit an arbitrary deadline is where the real damage happens.
What we'd actually tell a client
Budget real time for two things specifically: the redirect map and the plugin audit. Everything else about a migration — moving products, orders, and customers — is largely mechanical at this point and well-supported by migration tooling. The two things that actually determine whether you keep your search rankings and your store's functionality intact are the two things that take patience, not cleverness.