Migration field guide
How to Migrate Shopify Customers and Orders to WooCommerce
Migrating Shopify customers and orders requires more than matching record counts. Customer identities must remain linked to their historical orders, status and tax mappings must be explicit, and password-reset communication must be planned because Shopify password data is not available through normal exports or APIs.
The migration map.
Give every source record a destination and a verification method before the full import begins.
A responsible sequence
How to plan this workstream.
The exact tools can change. The decisions and checks should not.
- 01Step 1
Define the historical boundary
Decide how much order history the destination needs for customer service, reporting and compliance. Record the selected date range and whether cancelled, test, refunded, draft and archived orders are included.
- 02Step 2
Stabilize customer identity
Use a durable matching key, usually normalized email plus a retained source ID. Resolve duplicates and invalid addresses before import so orders are not attached to the wrong account or left without a customer.
- 03Step 3
Map every order state
Shopify financial and fulfilment states do not map one-to-one to WooCommerce statuses. Define the destination for paid, pending, partially refunded, refunded, fulfilled and cancelled records before importing.
- 04Step 4
Plan the account transition
Prepare a secure account invitation or password-reset journey. Test the reset email, login, address book and order-history view so returning customers are not surprised after cutover.
- 05Step 5
Reconcile values, not only rows
Compare record counts and financial totals by period. Sample discounts, taxes, shipping, refunds, multi-currency orders, subscriptions and edited orders, then document known fields that cannot be recreated.
Failure modes
What a clean-looking import can hide.
- Customer passwords are assumed to be portable and no reset journey is prepared.
- Duplicate email addresses overwrite profiles or detach historical orders.
- Order numbers change without retaining the original Shopify reference.
- Refund, tax, shipping and discount values import but no longer add up to the historical total.
- Payment tokens or gateway credentials are mistaken for ordinary order data.
- New orders created during the build are missing from the destination at launch.
Questions, answered directly
Before the work begins.
The answers below state what can be planned now and which details still depend on the source store or provider.
01Can Shopify customer passwords be migrated to WooCommerce?+
Shopify does not expose customer password data through standard exports or APIs. Plan a secure account invitation or password-reset process, then test the full customer journey before directing traffic to WooCommerce.
02Can historical Shopify orders appear in WooCommerce?+
Yes, many migration methods can import historical orders. The important work is preserving customer relationships, source order references, dates, totals, statuses, line items, discounts, taxes, shipping and refund context accurately.
03What should be reconciled after the order import?+
Compare source and destination counts, gross and refunded totals, order dates, customer links and status distribution. Inspect edge cases such as partial refunds, edited orders, multi-currency transactions and products that no longer exist.
Primary references
Sources used for this guide
Provider capabilities and platform documentation change. Review the current source documentation again when planning a live migration.