Can I migrate from WIX to Shopify?

Wix is a popular website builder, and while the service itself answers most website building problems, if you have an online store you may be considering migrating to a Shopify Website.

Because as it stands. Shopify is the world’s leading eCommerce platform builders, with solutions specifically designed to help people create and manage an online store. But is migration possible?

The short answer is yes, it’s completely possible, and you should do it. But let’s see what the process of moving from Wix to Shopify may look like.

Wix vs. Shopify

Wix is a website builder first, so its solutions are designed for anyone who wants to create a site, be in an online store, personal website, news site, and more.

Shopify, on the other hand, is designed to help people design stores. All of its solutions revolve around the world of eCommerce, from adding the key functionalities an online shop may need, to extensive customer service you can turn to at any time to fix your problems.

Both services allow you to create websites in just a few simple steps, but there’s really no point in denying that for eCommerce stores, Shopify gives you the best experience. Wix has some eCommerce solutions to allow consumers to set up Wix Stores, but over time it’s easy to outgrow what the platform is capable of offering and become unhappy with your store performance at some point.

So if you want to migrate from Wix to this eCommerce-exclusive builder, let’s look at what it may take to make that happen.

Shopify Migration 101

Let’s look at the main steps required for full migration:

Review Migration Considerations

Migration can turn into an SEO nightmare if you’re not careful. Before we start discussing how to actually move from Wix to Shopify, you should consider:

• Removing specific protocols from your assets to make sure they can make the transport;
• Set up URL redirects to ensure customers who have URLs bookmarked can still access those pages post migration;
• Passwords – customer passwords cannot be migrated because they are encrypted;
• Blog posts and articles – while text can be easily transported, images not so much. Consider hosting your images externally instead.

These are steps to take before you even set up your Shopify account. It may take a while to ensure all your data can be easily transferred from Wix to Shopify, but it’s important to take that time and do it right. Otherwise, you can lose data.

Migrating the Data

We’ll skip the step about setting up your Shopify account, choosing a Shopify Store URL, and getting familiar with the dashboard, and just straight to data migration.

There is a lot of data you may need to move:

• Product content
• Blog pages
• Customer transactions, etc.

This process can take a while, but consider the fact that not everything needs to be transferred to your new site. First, evaluate what data you currently have and establish what you want to take with you.

After you have that list, you actually have several options for data migration:

• Copy-paste content from Wix to Shopify
• Use a migration service or app from the Shopify App store to do it automatically
• For customers and products, you can transfer data manually using CSV files.

You can use a combination of these methods as well. If you have a lot of data, especially in terms of shopping cart migration (meaning all data related to sales, such as gift cards, store credit, etc.), then you’d want to use an app to ensure the process runs smoothly. There are plenty of services that offer free demo migration you can use to test the process.

Copy-pasting data is great for small amounts of content, such as the store policy page, so you should necessarily dismiss it.

Shopify recommends to migrate your data in the following order:

• Products
• Customers
• Historical order

Organising Data and Designing Your New Store

Once you finish migrating your data, you need to check if it was imported correctly:

• Product details
• Meta descriptions
• Images
• Product categories, etc.

If that’s all fine, you can then move toward designing your new online store by choosing a Shopify theme and customising it to your liking. The service’s support team can offer some help if you stumble into any problems along the way.

Can We Help?

Australian Internet Advertising is here to lend a hand at migrating from Wix to Shopify with complete Shopify website development and optimising your new store. Book a free strategy session with us now to get started.