The most common reason for switching to Shopify is not enthusiasm but exhaustion: a WooCommerce install that trembles after every plugin update, a Magento whose agency invoices eat the shop’s profit, a legacy system its original developer no longer maintains. The move itself is very doable – stores with thousands of products migrate all the time. What can go wrong is precisely known: lost Google rankings, orphaned customer accounts, and a launch at the wrong moment. All three are avoidable if you plan for them from day one.

What comes along and what doesn’t

Products, categories, customers, and order history can be transferred via export and import or through the API. For products, the real work is not the transport but the rethinking: Shopify organizes variants, collections, and product options differently from WooCommerce or Magento. A product with many attributes needs restructuring, or filtering in the new store will suffer.

One limit you should know upfront: customer passwords do not come along. Any serious system stores them encrypted, and they technically cannot be transferred. Your customers will have to set a new password once after the move. That is no drama if you communicate it – and a real annoyance if regulars hit “login failed” without warning.

Gift cards, running subscriptions, and stored payment methods also need their own plan. Depending on the source system they can be transferred, reissued, or have to be phased out. Settle this before the cutover date, not after.

Data	Comes along?	What to do
Products, customers, order history	yes	via export/import or API; restructure variants
Page titles, meta texts, alt texts, blog	yes, but easily forgotten	transfer explicitly, not just the product table
Customer passwords	no	inform customers upfront; passwords get set anew
Gift cards, subscriptions, payment methods	partly	settle before cutover: transfer, reissue, or phase out
Old URLs	no, Shopify’s structure is fixed	301 redirects, product to product

Redirects: the part that decides your revenue

Google knows your store under its old addresses. A product that lived at /shop/category/product-name for years is necessarily called /products/product-name on Shopify – the URL structure there is fixed and not negotiable. Without redirects, every old Google result, every inbound link, and every bookmark points into the void after the move. The rankings the store built over years then drop measurably. The market at stake is not a small one: according to the eCommerce Studie Österreich 2025 by the Austrian Retail Association and KMU Forschung Austria, Austrians are spending €12.1 billion in internet retail this year, up 14 percent on the year before. Revenue your old rankings no longer capture goes to competitors who are easier to find.

The fix is unglamorous and diligent: a complete list of every old URL visitors might hold – from the source system, the old sitemap, and Google Search Console – and a 301 redirect for each one to its new address. Shopify ships its own redirect manager for this, which accepts thousands of entries via CSV import. What matters is product-to-product rather than everything to the homepage: Google treats a redirect to the homepage much like a dead link.

Carry over SEO substance, not just data

Beyond URLs there is ranking substance that easily gets lost in copying: page titles and meta descriptions, category texts, image alt texts, blog articles. Import only the product table and you start with a store that looks thinner to Google than the old one – and then wonder about the decline.

After launch, submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch its 404 reports for several weeks: every dead address that surfaces gets a redirect added. A temporary wobble in the first weeks is normal while Google crawls the new structure. A lasting drop is not – that points to missing redirects.

The switch itself: build in parallel, cut over hard

The new store is built entirely on a test address while the old one keeps selling as usual. Only when design, data, payments, and shipping rules have been tested does the domain move. Test on a phone above all: smartphone shopping spend in Austria is growing 28 percent to €4.1 billion this year according to the same study, roughly a third of all distance selling. The actual switch then takes hours, not weeks – shortly before, the data is synced one final time so no order from the last days goes missing.

Two practical rules. First: schedule the move in your weakest season and never right before your strongest – an October migration ahead of the Christmas business needs very good reasons. Second: keep the old system running read-only for a few months after the move. When an old order is missing in the new store or a question about history comes up, that archive is worth its weight in gold.

An honest ledger: what you give up with Shopify

A migration is also the moment to know the destination’s limits. With Shopify you rent a platform: the URL structure is prescribed, the checkout is only moderately customizable outside the most expensive plans, and payments outside Shopify Payments carry additional fees depending on your plan. Very specific features from the old store – a custom configurator, unusual pricing logic – do not come along automatically; they get rebuilt as an app or theme customization.

Against that, weigh what disappears: server maintenance, security patches, broken plugin combinations, the night before a sale with overloaded hosting. For most merchants we see, that trade is clearly positive. But it is a trade, not a free upgrade – and knowing it means no surprises after launch.

The checklist before cutover day

If you are planning a move, this list should be fully ticked before the domain switches:

Complete URL list of the old store compiled and 301 redirects imported
Products with variants, images, titles, and meta descriptions transferred and spot-checked
Customers imported and the password communication prepared
Order history migrated, or the old system preserved as a read-only archive
Test orders run through with real payment, cancellation, and refund
Legal pages, imprint, and tax rates checked for every shipping country
Launch date fixed outside peak season and Search Console set up