This page is for service businesses and small shops that got put on a commerce platform because that is what the person building the site knew. It is not for anyone running an actual retail operation.
Most people who call us about Shopify are a contractor, a shop, or a studio whose website needs to explain what they do, generate calls, and sell a handful of items on the side. Shopify is built the other way around, with everything organized as a storefront.
A Shopify store is usually a platform subscription plus several app subscriptions that each renew on their own. On WordPress those functions are mostly plugins you own outright. Stores run on our Professional plan, and store work is quoted separately.
If your business gets found through service pages, city pages, and articles rather than product searches, WordPress gives you a better tool for that than a storefront platform does.
The other side
Read this part before the rest. Shopify is the better answer more often than the internet admits, and if any of these describe you, stay where you are.
If orders arrive daily, inventory has to stay accurate, and a checkout failure costs you money the same hour, Shopify is doing a hard job well. Their checkout is battle-tested and ours would be a WooCommerce install we maintain. That is not a fair trade at volume.
Shopify POS keeps in-store and online inventory in one system. Nothing we build does that. If you have a register and a website that share stock, stay.
Multi-channel selling with one product catalog is a core Shopify strength. Reproducing it with plugins is possible and it is a maintenance job you will feel every month.
Recurring billing, multi-state sales tax, real-time carrier rates, and international duties are all places where a platform earns its subscription. On WordPress each of those is a plugin you become responsible for.
Shopify carries the payment compliance burden. Run your own store on your own hosting and the updates, the patching, and the plugin vulnerabilities become your problem. We handle a lot of that, and it is still your problem.
Short version: Shopify is a commerce platform and we are a web host with a good WooCommerce build. If commerce is the business, buy the platform. If the store is a side door on a service business, you are paying for a warehouse to keep six boxes in.
The move
An online store migration is a controlled rebuild, not a copy. Product data moves. Checkout, payments, tax, shipping, apps, customer accounts, and subscriptions each need their own plan, and skipping that planning is how people lose orders.
Never cancel Shopify while orders are still arriving, or before payment and fulfillment have been tested on the new store. Keep both running until the new one has proven itself.
How many products, how many orders a month, whether you sell anywhere other than the website, and what the apps are doing. This call is where we decide together whether this move makes sense. Under roughly fifty products with a handful of orders a month, it usually does. Above that it usually does not.
Products with all variants, customers, orders, and gift cards as CSV, plus original product images and a downloaded copy of the theme for reference. The Shopify store stays live and selling.
Every installed app, in plain English. Reviews, bundles, loyalty points, subscriptions, feeds, and fulfillment connections each need a decision: replace it, rebuild it, or drop it. This list is usually longer than people expect.
The site gets rebuilt in WordPress with WooCommerce, then we run test orders end to end: payment, tax, shipping, confirmation emails, and the receipt. Nothing goes live until real money has moved through it once.
A short pause on new orders, a final export so recent orders and inventory are current, then DNS moves. Do not cancel Shopify on switch day. Keep it until the new store has taken real orders for a couple of weeks.
Not in general, and we would rather say that plainly. We host WordPress and we build WooCommerce stores for small catalogs. Shopify is a full commerce platform with POS, multi-channel selling, and payment compliance built in. What we replace well is a Shopify subscription being used for a website that happens to sell six things.
There is no hard line, but roughly fifty products with simple variants and a modest order volume is where a WooCommerce store stays comfortable to run. Past that, the ongoing work of maintaining it starts costing more than the subscription you were trying to avoid.
Customer records move. Passwords do not. Customer passwords cannot be transferred to a different platform, so anyone with an account will need to set a new one. That is worth telling your customers before launch, not after.
You can export orders and customers as CSV for your records, and import much of it. Treat historical orders as records rather than as a live system, and keep the Shopify export file permanently.
Where the Shopify facts on this page come from, checked September 2, 2026: Shopify: backups and store duplication (opens in a new tab). Plans and policies change, so check the provider page if something in your account looks different.
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