Moving a WooCommerce store to Shopify is not the same as copying its products. You are replacing the storefront, checkout, payment setup and parts of the operating system behind your sales. A migration tool can transfer catalogue data, but it cannot decide how your subscriptions, delivery rules, old URLs or customer accounts should work afterwards.
For a Nigerian business planning a professional migration in 2026, I would use these illustrative project allowances to start a scoping conversation. They are not surveyed market averages or a fixed quote.
| Migration scope | Initial project allowance | What you are paying for |
|---|---|---|
| Small, standard store | ₦750,000–₦1.5 million | Catalogue transfer, Shopify theme setup, basic payments/shipping, redirects and launch testing |
| Established store | ₦1.5m–₦4m | More products, order/customer history, custom page templates, app replacement, SEO mapping and stronger QA |
| Complex or integration-heavy store | ₦4m+ | Subscriptions, wholesale pricing, unusual product options, inventory systems, multiple locations or custom integrations |
These allowances exclude Shopify subscriptions, paid themes, migration apps, ongoing app fees, payment processing, content production and advertising. A very small DIY transfer can cost much less in cash. A high-volume or heavily customised operation can cost far more.
First decide whether leaving WooCommerce solves the actual problem
Shopify is attractive when a store owner wants managed hosting, fewer plugin updates and a more standard retail workflow. But a slow WooCommerce site does not automatically justify a platform move. Bad hosting, oversized images, a broken theme or poorly configured checkout may be cheaper to fix.
I would first ask: What would Shopify make easier that your current WooCommerce store cannot do reliably? If the answer is only “the website looks old,” a redesign on the existing platform may be the better purchase.
If you are still comparing the platforms, start with my Shopify vs WooCommerce guide for Nigerian businesses. This article is for the next decision: you already have a store and need to price the move without losing sales or search traffic.
What actually moves, and what needs rebuilding?
Shopify’s official WooCommerce migration guide distinguishes products, customers, orders, reviews, pages and other data. They do not all travel by the same method.
| Store asset | Migration reality |
|---|---|
| Products, images and variants | Export/import is possible, but fields, images and variation options need checking |
| Customers | Can be imported; existing customer passwords do not transfer |
| Historical orders | Need a suitable migration app or other supported method, not a basic product CSV |
| Reviews and blog posts | Require separate migration work or compatible tools |
| Coupons and discounts | Often need recreation or a specialist migration route |
| WooCommerce plugins | Do not become Shopify apps automatically; each business function needs a replacement |
| Product/category URLs | Often change; old addresses need a mapped redirect strategy |
| Payment and shipping rules | Must be configured and tested again on the destination store |
The practical risk is not that an import fails visibly. It is that it reports success while a variant loses its price, an image points to an old server, a delivery zone disappears or a returning customer cannot access the account journey they expect.
Shopify also documents a maximum of three product options for its Store Migration app. A WooCommerce product with four or more variation attributes needs a different representation or additional work. That matters for businesses selling configurable products, not just simple shirts in three sizes.
Nigeria changes the economics: check payment fees before migrating
Shopify’s Nigeria pricing page, checked in October 2026, lists Basic at US$19/month when billed yearly (US$27 paid monthly). It also lists a 2% third-party payment-provider fee on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. These rates can change, so verify them when choosing a plan.
Nigeria is not currently listed on Shopify’s supported countries for Shopify Payments page. A Nigerian merchant will therefore generally need an eligible third-party provider. Paystack documents its Shopify integration, but eligibility and available payment methods should be checked for your actual business.
Shopify explains that its third-party transaction fee is in addition to the provider’s processing fee.
Here is the decision in numbers: if ₦3 million in monthly orders is processed through a third-party gateway on a plan charging 2%, that percentage alone is ₦60,000 per month, or ₦720,000 over 12 months, before gateway processing fees. This is a calculation, not a prediction of your sales or an estimate of total Shopify charges.
A merchant doing serious volume should compare the complete three-year cost: Shopify subscription, transaction fees, apps, developer support and the one-time migration, against the current WooCommerce hosting, plugins, maintenance and operational problems. The platform with the smaller setup quote may not have the lower running cost.
The five workstreams I would expect in a serious quote
1. Catalogue and customer-data mapping
Start with a complete inventory: products, variants, SKUs, images, collections, customers, historical orders, discounts and any custom fields. WooCommerce’s product CSV exporter documentation explains the built-in export; it is not a guarantee that every plugin’s data will map cleanly into Shopify.
Agree on record counts before migration and reconciliation after import. Spot-check bestsellers, expensive products, sale prices, inventory quantities and unusual variants.
2. Storefront and business-function replacement
A Shopify theme is not a copy of your WordPress theme. Decide whether you are recreating the existing design, improving the conversion journey or commissioning a fresh storefront.
List every WooCommerce plugin by business function, not plugin name: subscriptions, delivery rates, bookings, product bundles, invoices, loyalty points, wholesale pricing and abandoned-cart emails. Each needs a documented Shopify equivalent, custom implementation or conscious removal.
3. SEO preservation
An established store may have hundreds of product and category URLs indexed in Google. Shopify’s URL structure can differ from WooCommerce’s, so the migration should include an old-to-new URL map, redirect implementation, canonical checks, metadata, internal links and sitemap verification.
Google Search Central’s site-move guidance recommends permanent server-side redirects, testing and monitoring. Google also warns against sending unrelated old URLs to the homepage. Shopify’s redirect documentation has platform-specific restrictions that should be checked before promising a perfect one-to-one move.
This is especially important when organic search already produces orders. Read my SEO migration checklist for the broader launch controls.
4. Payment, shipping and real-order testing
Do not accept a migration because the homepage and product pages look correct. Test the full path on mobile: browse, add to cart, choose a delivery address, pay, receive confirmation, view the order in the admin and receive the correct customer notification.
For Nigerian stores, test the actual supported payment methods, refund workflow, shipping zones, tax rules and failed-payment behaviour. A checkout that works in test mode is not proof that the live merchant account and fulfilment process are ready.
My payment gateway integration cost guide explains why configuring checkout and verifying the complete payment lifecycle are different scopes.
5. Cutover, rollback and handover
Before switching the domain, agree who owns the Shopify account, domain, payment provider, theme code, app subscriptions and analytics. Keep a usable WooCommerce backup and a plan for handling orders placed during the final sync window.
After launch, verify priority redirects, Google Search Console, live orders, email delivery and analytics. Define who handles defects during the stabilisation period. Do not cancel the old hosting before the migration data and recovery plan have been checked.
How to compare two migration quotes
A quote saying “500 products migrated” is not enough. Ask both providers to price the same deliverables:
- Exact data types and record counts to transfer, including historical orders and reviews.
- Theme design scope, pages and required Shopify app replacements.
- Payment, shipping, tax and customer-account setup.
- SEO URL mapping, redirects and metadata migration.
- Test cases for checkout, refunds, inventory, mobile and notifications.
- Final sync window, downtime assumptions, recovery plan and post-launch support.
- Account ownership, documentation and what remains payable every month.
If one quote excludes redirects, historical orders, checkout testing and support, it is not cheaper than a quote that includes them. It is a different project.
When I would not recommend migrating
I would advise staying on WooCommerce for now if the business depends on unusual checkout logic that Shopify cannot support economically, if the current problems are fixable, or if third-party payment fees would outweigh the operational savings. A move made purely because another platform is fashionable can exchange one set of problems for another.
But if the store has outgrown its maintenance setup, its existing plugins keep failing, and Shopify can support the actual sales workflow with less operational burden, migration may be a sensible investment.
For the general difference between hosting transfers and full replatforming, see my website migration cost guide for Nigeria. For the cost of building a new store rather than moving an existing one, see Shopify development cost in Nigeria.
Need a migration quote you can trust? Tell me about your WooCommerce store: the number of products, monthly order volume, payment provider, essential plugins and what is currently going wrong. I can help define whether to repair the existing store or scope a Shopify move that preserves the business-critical parts.