Moving from WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify
Moving a store from WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify is a data project that ends in a theme, not a theme project that hopes the data follows. Merchants in the United States and Europe lose more money on broken URLs and wrong prices than on the look of the new homepage. On devdiy.com we run the move in a fixed order: export what is true, import a slice, rehearse on an unpublished DEVDIY theme, redirect, then open. Summit is the right DEVDIY theme if the old store was really a B2B catalog. A retail DEVDIY theme is the right one if it was not. Choose that before you debate colors.
Do not migrate every plugin. Most of them were compensating for the old platform. List the behaviors you still need, such as subscriptions, tax, or company prices, and find the Shopify way. Recreating a ten-year plugin stack is how the new store becomes as fragile as the old one.
Freeze a source of truth
Pick a date when product edits stop on the old store, or accept that you will do a second import. Export products with variants, prices, SKUs, and images. Export customers if your policy and your laws allow it. In the EU, customer migration is a privacy question, not only a CSV question. Do not move passwords. Customers should reset them. Export the URL list you actually rank for or send in email: products, collections, and the few articles sales still uses. Ignore the thousands of tag archives nobody linked.
Write down tax and shipping as they work today. Shopify will not infer your Magento tax rules from a screenshot. US sales tax and EU VAT need to be configured on purpose. If you are unsure, stop and ask the person who files the return. A pretty theme on the wrong tax setting is not a launch.
Import a slice and look at it
Import fifty products, including the awkward ones: many variants, a shared image, a price of zero that should not be public, a product you will discontinue. Open them on an unpublished DEVDIY theme. Check the title, the price, the image, and the handle. Handles should stay stable when you can keep them, because redirects are easier when the path barely changes. If the old URL structure cannot be kept, map every important path to the new one in a spreadsheet before launch day. A spreadsheet you write on launch morning will miss the URLs in your ads.
Customer accounts, if you import them, need a test login path that does not depend on the old password. Company accounts for Summit need a second test: the contract price must not be visible to a guest. If the old Magento store mixed retail and wholesale in one catalog with hidden rules, this is the moment to separate them. Do not import the mess and promise to sort it later. Later is when orders are wrong.
Rebuild only the pages that sell
Recreate the homepage, the main collection, the product template, and the policy pages. Leave the blog until the product pages are right, unless an article is a top landing page. In that case, move the article and keep the path. Write policy pages that match what you will do on Shopify, not a paste of the old pages if the old pages describe a warehouse you are closing.
Apps come after the slice looks right. Add reviews, email, and consent. For EU traffic, consent and privacy links are part of launch, not a polish week. For US traffic, confirm the payment methods you will actually offer. Turn off anything you have not tested. An untested subscription app on day one is a support incident, not a growth channel.
Redirects and the cutover
Load redirects before you announce the domain change. Spot-check the top fifty URLs from analytics, not a random sample from the bottom. Publish the DEVDIY theme only after a test order succeeds on the new store. Keep the old store in a read-only state for a few weeks if you can, so you can look up an order the import missed. Do not keep it taking payments. Two checkouts is how inventory and accounting diverge.
Tell customers what will happen to accounts. Send the password reset when the new store can accept it, not three days early. Tell wholesale buyers on Summit when the new login opens and who approves them if approval is required. Sales teams should have the new admin before the public does, so they are not learning it on a live ticket.
The first week
Watch 404s, payment failures, and “where is my price” emails. Fix redirects the same day. Do not start a redesign. Compare order counts with the old store’s typical week, and remember that a migration week is noisy. A total stop in orders with normal ad spend means checkout is broken. Roll forward with a fix or, if you kept the old domain plan, be ready to say so publicly. Silence is more expensive than a delay.
When the week is calm, delete the imported junk: draft products you do not sell, collections that were tags, and apps you added out of fear. A DEVDIY theme stays editable only if you do not bury it under leftovers. devdiy.com’s rule is simple. Move the catalog you mean to sell, point the old links at it, and prove one order. The homepage can improve after the orders are real.
