Product Migration : Shopify To WooCommerce

With a whopping 26% market share, eCommerce stands to be the most popular eCommerce platform that is free and easy to access. Its closest contender is Shopify, and its features are more or less similar to WooCommerce. As developers, you may come across some distinguishing features that put WooCommerce on the pedestal. It is easy to develop a WooCommerce website, even without the help and guidance of a developer.

But migrating from one store to another is a tedious process. In these vast eCommerce markets, it is a big hurdle for the sellers to choose the correct eCommerce tools for their long term business. eCommerce markets are moving fast, and nowadays, everyone can sell their products online quickly.

Given the exponential rate of change in the business arena, a small slip could mean a significant loss in monetary and non-monetary terms. Coping with emerging markets is the only way to keep yourself in the race. eCommerce is one of the many byproducts of the fundamentally transforming business arena. So, as rational sellers, your only choice is to launch your eCommerce store to keep your present and potential customers interested in your products and services. While you have numerous platforms that can power your eCommerce, choosing the right platform is of utmost importance.

WooCommerce, backed by WordPress, is a fast-growing, least expensive platform as compared to others. That is why many sellers are migrating from Shopify to WordPress, Shopify to open cart, Magento to WordPress.

If I talk about the WooCommerce migration process, they provide an easy method to migrate the data. Moreover, WooCommerce provides easy payment gateway integration; you can use them freely without any cost. However, if you want to make any changes or customization, it can also be done by the developers to achieve the functionality.

Talking about Shopify, it does not provide an easy way to export the data. You can export the data in CSV format or plain text format. By default, Shopify provides the ability to export the products. However, if your store has extra meta fields, then Shopify will not export that meta fields; you need to install an app to export that particular data. Shopify also provides an API from which you can get all the product information.

Now, talking about the migration, I have recently worked on the Shopify to WordPress migration, which consists of the Shopify products, customer information, orders, and much more. Here is the process that the team followed;

What Is Migration?

Migration stands to all your old website data will move to the new website; it consists of pages, users, posts, and images.

A Few Methods To Migrate Your Shopify Products To WooCommerce

1. Manual Process / Data Entry Process

If your store has a few products, let’s say around five products, then you can follow the Manual process. You can go to your Shopify store and edit the product and copy the title, content, attributes, etc., and insert manually to WooCommerce products. You will need to do this for all products. For the product images, you need to insert all those to WordPress and assign them to each product.

Following this process will help you only when you have a few products and have some patience to add these products on your own.

However, if you have more than 500 products in your store, this process will not help you because it contains lots of your time, and you will also not do this manual process on your own. So, rather than copying all the products, you can move to another method.

2. Export-Import With The Default System

Both the platforms, WooCommerce & Shopify, provide an Import/Export option for the products, and they are easy to use by the end-user as well.

Migration From Shopify To WooCommerce

• In your Shopify system admin screen, go to the products section page, and you will see the button Export
• Click on the button, and you will see a screen shown below. — Here, you have the option of choosing all products and select products to export. You also have the opportunity to export this as CSV for excel files or Plain CSV files. When you click Export Products, you will get an email of the CSV file.

Now talking about WooCommerce, it provides easy steps to import your products from CSV format.

• You need to go to tools > Import and then click Run Importer below WooCommerce products (CSV),
• Then you can upload the CSV file that you had exported from Shopify.

• Then you can map the columns from uploaded CSV to WooCommerce fields.
• By default, WooCommerce automatically checks for the fields and maps column names from uploaded CSV to WooCommerce products fields.
• However, some of the fields are different, so you need to map those fields manually.

Then you can start to run the process, and after some time, your import will complete. Now you will have all your products in the WooCommerce products section. You can install WooCommerce supported themes for your UI from the store; some are available free. However, you can modify the theme as per your need.

All these are the primary product migration from Shopify to WooCommerce. However, if you have made any customization in Shopify or add any extra meta fields over there, you need to customize this, and you cannot get this field by doing this process.

3. Ready Plugin For The Minor Customization Products

There are also plugins available like All-In-One migration that can help you migrate all your data using CSV. If you have larger products, then you can go with this process. Plugins have a paid version where you can pay for some extra features to import the data. They will support minor customization from the products and perform the import process.

4. Custom Solution

Implementing Custom solutions should be your last option. You need to verify with the store how it is setup. If it has the custom product app or any other data essential for the new platform, you probably need to approach this option as it is the time taking an opportunity, and may it is expensive too. You need to hire a Web developer to migrate the data. Custom solutions are time taking but are effective methods for developers. They need to verify every detail at a micro-level then, and only then can they write a good script that can help them run migration successfully.

Let me give you some steps on what your developer is going to do. It does not matter which is the platform. I will conclude this topic by taking the example of Shopify to WooCommerce migration.

The existing platform provides the API or not that will be the developer’s first approach in the CMS domain. Every CMS offers the API to access the complete data of the store. Developers will call that API to write the custom code into the targeted system. It will then migrate the whole data in the structure of the target system.

Over here in Shopify to WooCommerce, As we said, we need to find the API of Shopify. For that, we need to create a private app from the admin, and we need to provide read and write API access to that app. Check the below screenshot :

Then click on the Create a new private app, then you will have to add the name of the app and email, and then you will get the API access when you save.

Once it is done you are able to call the data from using curl call into your system once you have the data then you are able to create the custom code for the products or any other data. WooCommerce is providing the probability to add the product programmatically here is the sample code for the same:

$post_id = wp_insert_post( array(
‘post_title’ => New Import product’,
‘post_content’ => ‘Here is content of the new Imported product, so this is our new products description’,
‘post_status’ => ‘publish’,
‘post_type’ => “product”,
) );

But this is not everything; we need to add more information for the product.

Like the to set the product type set this:

wp_set_object_terms( $post_id, ‘simple’, ‘product_type’ );

However, there we need to add the product fields data for our migrated product. Below is some little bit code of that:

update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_stock_status’, ‘instock’);
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_downloadable’, ‘no’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_virtual’, ‘yes’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_regular_price’, ‘350’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_sale_price’, ‘300’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_weight’, ‘15’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_length’, ‘20’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_sku’, ‘TSHIRT’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_price’, ‘350’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_manage_stock’, ‘no’ );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_stock’, ‘1000’ );

Apart from this, if your current platform is CI, Laravel,Asp.net, this will probably be the best option for a successful migration in your system.

Conclusion

To conclude, it entirely depends on the client’s existing store and its set up; based on that, you can select the option mentioned above. If the products are less, then the manual entry is the best way. If you have a right hand on the WordPress admin and Shopify admin, you can probably go ahead with option 3. If you think you are right but do not have time or you are not that much technical, then you can select option four where you need to communicate with any web development agency who are experts in Migration. We are also providing the custom solution for every requirement, including the migration of products, not event products but orders, customers, pages, and settings.

You need to audit your website; based on that, you can take the approach that will help you make the correct decision; if you have any questions on the migration, you can reach ours at our email id hello@zealousweb.com.

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.