WooCommerce to Shopify Migration: The Honest Cost Breakdown

Most WooCommerce to Shopify migration quotes lie by omission. Not because agencies are dishonest, but because the scope of a migration quote ends on launch day, and the real bill lands in month three. By then the redirect map is live, the theme is polished, the team has been trained, and then the Klaviyo invoice arrives, the Recharge fee hits, the transaction fee on Razorpay shows up for the first full month of orders, and the founder realises that the platform they moved to in order to simplify operations is now costing roughly four times what the old LAMP stack plus a few WordPress plugins used to cost. This article walks through every cost bucket in a migration, puts real 2026 numbers against each, names the month-three bill-shock items that every honest replatform engagement should disclose up front, and gives a framework for deciding whether the migration actually pays back for your specific store.

The Platform Subscription Differential

The sticker price is the least interesting number in the stack, but it is where every conversation starts so it is worth dispatching quickly. Shopify's 2026 tier structure is Basic at thirty nine dollars a month, Shopify at one hundred five, Advanced at three hundred ninety nine, and Plus starting around two thousand three hundred on a three-year commitment. Annual billing cuts the lower tiers by roughly a quarter. A serious store will run on Shopify or Advanced, which means the platform line item alone is somewhere between one thousand and four thousand eight hundred dollars per year before apps.

Compare that to a typical WooCommerce stack, where hosting on a managed host like Kinsta or WP Engine runs between forty and two hundred dollars a month depending on traffic, plus a handful of premium plugins that bill annually rather than monthly. The naked platform cost of WooCommerce is routinely under one thousand dollars a year for stores doing six figures of revenue. Shopify's platform line will be two to five times that, and this is before we get to the part of the bill that actually hurts.

The Transaction Fee Nobody Mentions in the Sales Call

Here is the single biggest line item that migration quotes routinely fail to surface. If you process payments through Shopify Payments, your card rates are comparable to Stripe and there is no platform transaction fee on top. If you use anything else, which includes PayPal, Stripe direct, Razorpay in India, Authorize.net in the United States, or any local gateway in a market where Shopify Payments is not available, Shopify charges a platform transaction fee on every single order. That fee is two percent on Basic, one percent on Shopify, zero point six percent on Advanced, and zero point one five percent on Plus.

Run that math on a store doing eight hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. On the Basic plan using Stripe or Razorpay that is sixteen thousand dollars a month, nearly two hundred thousand dollars a year, handed to Shopify purely as a penalty for not using their payment processor. Upgrading to Advanced drops that to roughly four thousand eight hundred a month. Upgrading to Plus drops it to twelve hundred. This is the quiet pressure mechanism that pushes growing stores up the tier ladder, and for merchants in markets where Shopify Payments simply does not exist, it is unavoidable. If you are in India, large parts of Southeast Asia, or running cross-border with a gateway Shopify Payments does not support, model this line item at your projected revenue before signing anything.

Migration Tooling and Data Movement

The data movement itself is the cheapest part of the project and the one most people overestimate. LitExtension and Cart2Cart are the two dominant tools and they price on entity count. A small catalogue under a thousand products with customers and order history lands between three hundred and eight hundred dollars for the core migration. A mid-market store with five thousand SKUs, tens of thousands of customers, and a few years of order history lands between one thousand and two thousand five hundred. Add-ons for preserving product IDs, recent data re-sync after go-live, and 301 redirect generation are each fifty to one hundred fifty dollars. Budget two thousand to cover everything.

What these tools do not do is the part that actually determines migration quality. They do not migrate your theme, they do not translate plugin business logic into Shopify apps or Liquid, they do not handle custom post types or ACF fields cleanly, they do not rebuild your subscription state in Recharge, and they do not make intelligent decisions about which WooCommerce product attributes should become Shopify variants, which should become metafields, and which should become metaobjects. A migration executed with only the tool and no engineering discipline produces a Shopify store that looks right and fails quietly at every edge.

The Metafield Schema Decision That Has to Happen Before the Import

This is the second item SERP articles routinely miss. WooCommerce is permissive about data. You can attach arbitrary post meta to a product, you can use Advanced Custom Fields to store ingredient lists or care instructions or spec tables, and you can use WooCommerce attributes as either variant axes or as generic product metadata. The platform does not force you to distinguish. Shopify forces that distinction on day one.

Every non-variant attribute on your WooCommerce catalogue has to be mapped to a Shopify metafield with a defined namespace, key, type, and validation rule, or to a metaobject if it is a structured content block like an ingredient card or author bio. This mapping has to be decided and documented before the import runs, because the import writes values into the schema and reversing that on a live catalogue of thousands of products is painful. Stores that skip this step end up with product description fields stuffed with HTML tables that used to be clean structured data, filter facets that cannot be built because the data is now free text, and rich-result markup that degrades to nothing.

Budget ten to forty hours of data engineering purely on metafield and metaobject schema, depending on catalogue complexity. On a mid-market store with a hundred or so custom attributes across product types, this is a four thousand dollar line item that is nowhere to be found on most migration quotes.

Theme Rebuild Is Not Optional

Your WooCommerce theme does not migrate. Liquid is not PHP, Shopify sections and blocks are not WordPress template parts, and the JSON template architecture Shopify introduced in Online Store 2.0 has no WooCommerce equivalent. Any agency that implies they can port your existing theme is being economical with the truth.

The real choice is between adopting a premium theme and customising it, or commissioning a custom theme build. A premium theme in the Dawn, Impulse, Prestige, or Broadcast lineage costs two hundred to four hundred fifty dollars one-time and gets you a credible storefront in about two weeks of configuration work. Customising it to match an existing brand system, rebuilding bespoke PDP components, adding metaobject-driven content blocks, and wiring up the section schema properly usually adds five to fifteen thousand dollars of engineering. A fully custom theme from scratch runs eight thousand to forty thousand. Going headless with Hydrogen moves you into forty thousand to two hundred thousand territory and requires a standing front-end team to maintain, which almost no mid-market merchant has.

The honest recommendation for most WooCommerce migrators is to adopt a premium theme, customise selectively, and invest the saved budget into the app stack and metafield schema work that will actually determine post-launch performance.

The 301 Redirect Map at Real Catalogue Scale

SEO preservation is where a lot of migrations quietly lose six months of organic traffic. The problem is that WooCommerce and Shopify use different URL structures and Shopify does not let you remove the forced prefixes. WooCommerce products typically live at slash shop slash product-slug or slash product slash product-slug depending on permalink settings. Shopify forces slash products slash product-slug and you cannot change the prefix without a reverse proxy in front of the store, which nobody does.

Categories migrate from slash category slash whatever to slash collections slash whatever. Blog posts move from slash blog slash post-slug to slash blogs slash news slash post-slug or whatever blog handle you choose. Product tag archives, attachment pages, author archives, and every other WordPress URL pattern that Google has indexed over the years needs an explicit 301 rule. For a store with five thousand products, five hundred categories, three hundred blog posts, and the usual long tail of WordPress-generated archive URLs you are looking at a redirect map of roughly six thousand rules before you even consider legacy URL variants that accumulated during previous URL structure changes.

Shopify accepts redirects in bulk through the admin's URL redirects import or via Matrixify, and the hard limit is one hundred thousand per store. That is plenty of headroom but the real work is not loading the rules, it is generating them correctly. Handle normalisation is where most migrations break. WooCommerce permits non-ASCII slugs, trailing slashes, category-in-URL patterns, and the same product being reachable via multiple URLs depending on context. Shopify normalises slugs, strips non-ASCII, and serves one canonical URL per product. If your WooCommerce product was indexed as slash shop slash cat accent slash product and Shopify now serves it as slash products slash product with the accent stripped, your redirect rule has to match the exact indexed variant.

Budget two to four thousand dollars of engineering time on 301 planning, generation, verification, and post-launch search console monitoring for a mid-market catalogue. Do not trust the migration tool to do this alone.

The Month Three Bill-Shock Nobody Warns You About

This is the single most underdiscussed item in the replatform conversation and the one most likely to turn a happy migration into a tense founder call. WooCommerce's ecosystem is mostly one-time plugin purchases with annual renewal discounts. Shopify's ecosystem is aggressively subscription-priced, and the apps that replace your WooCommerce plugins bill monthly and scale with revenue, contacts, or orders.

A realistic mid-market Shopify app stack in 2026 looks approximately like this. Klaviyo for email and SMS runs between forty five and seven hundred dollars a month depending on contact count. A reviews app like Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox, or Okendo runs fifteen to three hundred. A site search upgrade like Searchanise or Boost AI Search runs twenty four to three hundred. A bundling or upsell app like Rebuy, Bundler, or ReConvert runs thirty to two hundred. Recharge for subscriptions is ninety nine a month plus one percent of subscription revenue, which on a moderately sized subscription programme is the single most expensive line item in the stack. Tax automation via Avalara or TaxJar runs nineteen to ninety nine. Back-in-stock alerts, wishlist, size charts, inventory sync to a warehouse, and the three other small utilities every store needs add another fifty to one hundred.

Add it up honestly and a mid-market Shopify store is spending four hundred to fifteen hundred dollars a month on apps alone. That is between five and eighteen thousand dollars a year of recurring cost that either did not exist on WooCommerce or existed as one-time plugin purchases at a fraction of the price. When founders ask why their monthly software spend quadrupled after the move, this is the answer, and it needs to be modelled into the migration business case on day one rather than discovered on the first full-month invoice.

The Shopify Plus Escalation Trigger

If you are migrating a store that does B2B, runs wholesale accounts with custom pricing, sells internationally with market-specific catalogues, needs checkout customisation beyond what standard Shopify allows, or runs the kind of automation volume that Flow exists to handle, you are going to end up on Shopify Plus whether or not the migration quote mentions it. B2B on Shopify is Plus-only. Checkout extensibility for functions like custom validation, new payment methods, or bespoke shipping logic is Plus-only in any serious capacity. Multi-store architectures for regional catalogues require Plus.

The threshold where Plus becomes defensible on pure economics is somewhere around one to two million dollars a year in revenue, because the reduced transaction fee and the elimination of transaction fees on most gateway usage offset a chunk of the subscription. Below that, Plus is an overspend unless a specific feature like B2B or checkout extensibility forces the move. Any WooCommerce migration where the source store runs wholesale plugins, custom pricing rules per customer group, or a B2B portal needs to model Plus into the budget from the start. A migration that lands on Advanced and then forces a Plus upgrade in month six is two migrations.

A Realistic Year-One Total

For a mid-market store of roughly five thousand SKUs, reasonable catalogue complexity, no B2B, no subscriptions, and a single market, a faithful year-one total looks like this. Agency engagement for migration execution, fifteen thousand. Premium theme plus customisation, five thousand. Migration tooling and add-ons, fifteen hundred. Metafield and metaobject schema engineering, four thousand. Full 301 redirect map, testing, and post-launch Search Console monitoring, twenty five hundred. Training and handover, fifteen hundred. First-year Shopify plan subscription on annual billing, roughly a thousand. App stack at an honest eight hundred a month, ninety six hundred. That totals close to forty thousand dollars in year one, with an ongoing floor of ten to fifteen thousand a year in platform and apps for as long as the store exists.

Quotes that land materially below this number are either excluding the app stack, skipping the metafield work, underestimating the redirect engineering, or assuming a theme port that is not actually happening. Ask which bucket is compressed and decide whether you are comfortable with the answer.

A Framework For Deciding Whether The Migration Pays Back

Migration pays back cleanly when four conditions hold. Conversion rate lifts meaningfully from Shop Pay's one-click checkout, which on a well-optimised Shopify store routinely delivers a five to fifteen percent lift on mobile compared to WooCommerce's default flow. Dev maintenance cost drops because you stop paying someone eight to thirty thousand a year to keep plugins updated, patch security issues, tune hosting, and field the weekly "why is the site slow" ticket. Uptime during traffic spikes is measurably better on Shopify than on self-managed WooCommerce, which matters if you run sales events. And team velocity rises because merchandisers can ship landing pages and content sections through the theme editor without waiting on dev tickets.

Migration does not pay back when the store has heavy B2B and you refuse to budget for Plus, when the catalogue depends on complex product bundle or configurator logic that WooCommerce plugins handle natively and Shopify apps handle awkwardly, when the subscription revenue is under about five hundred thousand a year so Recharge's one percent cut actively hurts margin, when the store is content-heavy and the team is genuinely more productive in WordPress's authoring environment, or when you operate in a market where Shopify Payments is unavailable and the transaction fee on your local gateway eats the conversion lift. Model the numbers honestly against your specific situation before committing.

How WitsCode Runs This Engagement

WitsCode has migrated more than two hundred fifty stores across WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce origins, and the thing that differentiates our engagements is that the TCO model we present on day one includes every bucket in this article, not just the launch-day scope. Before we quote the engagement we build a five-year cost projection with realistic app stack growth, a Plus escalation threshold based on your roadmap, the transaction fee exposure if Shopify Payments is unavailable in your markets, and a sensitivity analysis on conversion rate lift so you can see under what assumptions the migration actually pays back. The metafield schema and 301 redirect map are first-class deliverables with named engineering ownership, not line items buried inside a launch checklist. If you are considering the move and want a TCO model you can defend in a board conversation rather than a quote that stops at launch day, we would be glad to run the numbers with you.