In short
- A WooCommerce to Shopify migration in India succeeds or fails on four things: clean data, working payments and COD, correct GST setup and complete URL redirects.
- Shopify's URL structure is fixed, so every old product, category and blog URL needs a 301 redirect to its new address.
- Shopify Payments is not available to India-based stores, so plan for a third-party gateway such as Razorpay, Cashfree or PayU plus Shopify's transaction fee on non-Plus plans.
- Shopify calculates CGST, SGST and IGST but does not create a GST-compliant invoice, so you need an invoicing app or accounting integration.
- Customer passwords cannot be migrated, so plan an account activation or passwordless login message for existing customers.
A WooCommerce to Shopify migration in India is very manageable if you treat it as four projects rather than one: moving clean data, rebuilding payments and COD, setting up GST correctly, and protecting SEO with redirects. Most migrations that go wrong fail on redirects or payments, not on the data import itself.
This guide walks through each part in the order we recommend, with the India-specific details generic migration guides leave out.
Step 1: Audit what you have
Before touching Shopify, build an inventory of your WooCommerce store. Export it into one spreadsheet with these tabs:
- Products: count of simple and variable products, number of attributes per product, SKUs, weights and HSN codes.
- Categories and tags: which ones drive traffic and which are clutter.
- Customers and orders: how many you need to migrate and how far back.
- Content: blog posts, landing pages and policy pages.
- Plugins: every active plugin and the job it does (reviews, wishlists, COD rules, invoices, shipping, subscriptions).
- Top URLs: export landing pages with traffic and backlinks from Google Search Console and your analytics tool.
The plugin list becomes your app shortlist. The top URLs list becomes your redirect priority list.
Step 2: Clean and map your product data
Shopify's product model is different from WooCommerce's. The biggest constraint to check early: according to Shopify's WooCommerce migration guide, products with more than three options will not have their options imported. A kurta sold in size, colour, fabric and sleeve length needs restructuring, for example by splitting into separate products or moving one attribute into a metafield.
| WooCommerce | Shopify equivalent | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Product categories | Collections (manual or automated) | Automated collections by tag or type save time later |
| Attributes and variations | Options and variants | Maximum of three options per product |
| Custom fields (ACF) | Metafields | Define metafields before import |
| Tags | Tags | Clean up duplicates and spelling variants |
| Reviews | Reviews app | Cannot be exported directly; use an app that imports them |
For the move itself, Shopify offers a first-party Store Migration app for product imports, and third-party migration apps handle customers, orders and sometimes redirects. Whichever you use, run a test import of 20 products first and check every field.
Step 3: Rebuild payments and COD
This is where Indian migrations differ most from international guides.
Choose your gateway
Shopify Payments is not on Shopify's list of supported countries, so India-based stores use a third-party provider. The common choices are Razorpay, Cashfree and PayU. Their standard published pricing, as of September 2026, is roughly 2% per domestic transaction plus 18% GST on the fee (Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU), with higher rates for international cards and some card types. Negotiated rates for larger volumes are common.
Remember that Shopify also charges a transaction fee on third-party gateway payments on non-Plus plans: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, per Shopify's India pricing page. Factor both layers into your margin model.
Set up COD properly
Cash on Delivery is a manual payment method in Shopify, enabled under Settings, Payments. Shopify's manual payments documentation confirms you are not charged third-party transaction fees on manual payments. What you lose from WooCommerce is any custom COD logic your plugins handled, such as:
- COD fees or a minimum order value for COD
- Pin code-based COD availability
- COD order confirmation by WhatsApp or IVR
- Partial prepayment to reduce return-to-origin losses
Recreate each rule with a Shopify app, a payment customisation, or your courier aggregator's settings. Test every combination (prepaid, COD, discount code, free shipping threshold) before launch.
Step 4: Set up GST correctly
Shopify's India GST help page explains that it applies CGST and SGST for sales within your state and IGST for inter-state sales. Your setup checklist:
- Set your business address and state correctly in Settings, since it determines intra- versus inter-state tax.
- Decide whether your prices include tax. Most Indian D2C brands show tax-inclusive prices, and Shopify supports this.
- Add HSN codes in the HS tariff code field. Shopify notes codes need at least six digits; shorter codes can go in a metafield.
- Set up tax overrides for products or collections taxed at a different rate from your default.
- Install a GST invoicing app or connect your accounting software, because Shopify states that it does not create a GST-compliant bill.
GST rules and rates change, so treat this as a setup guide as of September 2026 and confirm your rates, invoice format and any e-invoicing obligations with your CA before going live.
Step 5: Protect your SEO with redirects
Shopify uses fixed URL patterns: /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/. Your WooCommerce URLs, such as /product/ or /product-category/, will all change. Without 301 redirects, every backlink and ranking to those pages is lost.
- Export all WooCommerce URLs: products, categories, tags you want to keep, pages, blog posts and images that rank in image search.
- Map each to the most relevant new Shopify URL in a spreadsheet. Discontinued products should go to the closest collection, not the home page.
- Import the redirects in bulk through Shopify's URL redirects section (Online Store, Navigation, URL redirects) using a CSV.
- Carry over page titles, meta descriptions and on-page copy for your top pages.
- After launch, submit your new sitemap in Google Search Console and crawl the old URL list to confirm every one returns a 301 to a live page.
Shopify's migration guide recommends setting up redirects in advance, before you transfer the domain. Do it then, not the week after launch.
Step 6: Handle customer accounts
WooCommerce password hashes cannot be carried into Shopify, so existing customers cannot log in with their old passwords. Shopify's current customer accounts let people sign in with their email and a one-time code, which removes most of the friction. Send a short email and WhatsApp message after launch explaining the new store and how to sign in, and keep loyalty points balances in your import if you run a programme.
Launch-day checklist
| Area | Check |
|---|---|
| Payments | Live prepaid order through each method: UPI, card, netbanking, wallet |
| COD | COD order placed, fee and restrictions applied correctly |
| GST | Tax lines correct for an intra-state and an inter-state address; invoice generated |
| Shipping | Courier integration pulls the order; rates correct by zone and weight |
| SEO | Top 50 old URLs redirect correctly; sitemap submitted; robots not blocking |
| Tracking | GA4, Meta and Google Ads purchase events fire once per order |
| Order confirmation and shipping emails branded and correct |
Keep the WooCommerce site accessible privately for a few weeks after launch in case you need to recover data.
After launch: the first 30 days
Watch Search Console coverage and 404 reports weekly, and add redirects for anything you missed. Compare conversion rate and average order value against your WooCommerce baseline, and review COD return rates, since checkout changes can shift the prepaid and COD mix. If you want an outside view of your new store, our free website audit covers speed, SEO and conversion.
Getting your migration done right
Migrations reward preparation. If you would rather hand over data mapping, redirects, payments and GST setup to a team that has done it before, The Night Marketer's Shopify development team can plan and run the move end to end, so your customers and Google barely notice the switch.
Frequently asked questions
You should not lose rankings permanently if you map every important old URL to a relevant new URL with 301 redirects, keep titles, descriptions and content, and resubmit your sitemap. Short-term fluctuation for a few weeks is common. Big drops usually come from missing redirects, deleted content or redirects that all point to the home page.
Yes. Customers can be imported by CSV, and order history can be moved with third-party migration apps from the Shopify App Store. Shopify's own guide notes that reviews cannot be exported directly from WooCommerce, so use a reviews app that supports importing them. Customer passwords do not transfer, so plan how customers will sign in.
Enable Cash on Delivery as a manual payment method under Settings, Payments. Shopify does not charge its third-party transaction fee on manual payments. Most Indian brands then add rules or apps to control COD, for example limiting it by order value or pin code, adding a COD fee, or confirming COD orders on WhatsApp to reduce returns.
No. Shopify's GST help page says it does not create a GST-compliant bill. It can calculate CGST, SGST and IGST and store HSN codes, but you need a GST invoicing app or an integration with your accounting software for compliant invoices. Confirm your invoice format and fields with your CA before launch.
For a catalogue of a few hundred products with a premium theme, six to ten weeks is realistic. Larger catalogues, heavy custom functionality, B2B pricing or ERP integrations can take three months or more. Most of the time goes into data clean-up, redirect mapping and testing payments, not into moving the data itself.
