WooCommerce to Shopify Migration Plugin: LitExtension vs Cart2Cart vs Matrixify

⏱ 12 min read

WooCommerce still powers close to a third of the ecommerce stores that tracking services can see, yet Shopify now leads among high-traffic sites and keeps pulling growing brands off self-hosted WordPress, as the latest platform market-share data shows. The day you decide to move, one choice shapes everything that follows: which WooCommerce to Shopify migration plugin you trust with your catalogue, customers, and order history.

Every tool in this space promises a click-and-done transfer. The difference shows up weeks later, in the data that quietly never arrived: customer passwords, 301 redirects, product reviews, metafields. This guide puts the three most-used Shopify migration tools side by side, LitExtension, Cart2Cart, and Matrixify, on what they actually move, what they cost, and which store profile each one fits, so you can choose your WooCommerce to Shopify migration plugin with your eyes open instead of finding the gaps after launch.

What a WooCommerce to Shopify Migration Plugin Actually Moves (and What It Cannot)

Before comparing tools, it helps to separate what any decent migration app can carry from what no app carries. This is where most DIY moves lose data without noticing.

The transferable set is broad: products and variants, customers, order history, coupons, blog posts, pages, images, categories, and SEO URLs. The non-transferable set is the one that hurts. Customer passwords never move. Shopify hashes passwords and does not accept imported ones, so every returning shopper has to reset or accept an account invite on first login, a friction point merchants routinely discover only after go-live, as this Shopify community thread on re-inviting imported customers documents.

Two more items catch people out. Product reviews do not migrate natively and need a review app on the Shopify side (Judge.me, Loox, Yotpo, or Okendo) plus a separate export. And order history does not come across with Shopify’s free native importer at all, so orders are one of the main reasons stores reach for a paid tool in the first place.

LitExtension vs Cart2Cart vs Matrixify at a Glance

All three are credible Shopify migration apps. They just solve different problems. In the LitExtension vs Cart2Cart comparison, both are automated services that connect your two stores and run the transfer for you. Matrixify is a spreadsheet engine: you export to Excel or CSV, control every field, and import. The quick read is below, then each tool gets its own section.

Merchant sentiment tracks those roles, though the exact scores move over time and differ between listings, so verify them before you quote them. As of September 2026, LitExtension’s listing sits around 4.8 and Matrixify around 4.9, while Cart2Cart’s listing is more polarised at roughly 3.8 to 4.2 across its listings, with about 16 to 17 % one-star reviews.

Shopify App Store ratings, checked September 2026 (Matrixify listing). These numbers change, so re-check before citing them.

LitExtension: Automated Moves With a Safety Net

LitExtension is the most safety-first Shopify migration app of the three. It runs a connected, mostly hands-off migration and leans hard on reducing risk. Pricing starts at $59 and scales with the number of entities you move, and the plan carries a 30-day money-back guarantee, per the LitExtension pricing page. A free demo migration lets you preview results before paying.

Two features make it a safe default for stores that care about continuity. It preserves order and customer IDs on the target store, and it allows unlimited re-migrations at no extra cost, so a failed or partial run does not cost you again. It also offers optional SEO URL migration with 301 redirects and a recent-data sync, which matters if your old store keeps taking orders during the build.

Where it fits: a mid-size store that wants the transfer done for it, values preserved order history, and would rather pay once than learn a spreadsheet workflow. If a migration turns messy, LitExtension can also take over as a managed service, which is the usual reason people pick it over a pure self-serve tool.

Cart2Cart: Fast and Hands-Off, With Paid Add-Ons

Cart2Cart is the veteran automated migrator and the easiest Shopify migration app to start. Its automated app runs from about $69, and a done-for-you service package sits around $549 for teams that want experts to handle everything. Pricing is dynamic and driven by data volume, and much of the SEO-critical work lives in paid add-ons, as this independent Cart2Cart review lays out.

Those add-ons are the catch. A 301-redirect package, product reviews, and optional migration insurance (roughly 9 to 13 % of the migration price) are extras, so the sticker price and the real price diverge. Support is 24/7, which helps during a live cutover. The trade-off shows in reviews: it flattens complex data structures, so custom fields like engraving text or bespoke attributes are often dropped rather than mapped. That is the real weight behind the LitExtension vs Cart2Cart choice for stores with unusual data.

Where it fits: a small or non-technical store that wants the fastest possible push-button move and has a simple catalogue. The free demo migrates up to ten records so you can sanity-check the result before committing.

Matrixify: The Spreadsheet Engine for Complex Data

Matrixify (formerly Excelify) is the tool agencies reach for when data is the hard part. It works through Excel, CSV, and Google Sheets, handles files up to 20 GB, and maps the entities native imports refuse to touch: metafields, metaobjects, translations, B2B companies, redirects, and more. Plans run free (Demo, 10 records per file), then $20, $50, and $200 per month by volume, per the Matrixify pricing page.

The catch that trips people up is how those limits are counted: per file, per data type, not as one monthly quota, and you can run unlimited jobs on every plan. Here is how the caps break down by entity, on the same pricing page, before Shopify’s own limits apply on top.

The practical read: a 6,000-product catalogue does not need Enterprise, it needs the Big plan or two Basic jobs, because the cap is per file and you can split the export. The upside beyond limits is total control and a paper trail. Every row is visible before it imports, and detailed error logs tell you exactly which SKU failed and why.

On speed, treat vendor-style benchmarks carefully. In its January 2026 hands-on tool test, the agency WeArePresta rated Matrixify 5 out of 5 for speed and reported importing 100,000 SKUs in about two hours, and it flagged the free native Shopify importer for silently skipping products on large files. That is one team’s benchmark, not a guarantee: your own throughput depends on file size, image handling, and Shopify’s daily variant limit.

The downside is the learning curve and the licensing. You need real spreadsheet fluency, each plan covers one store, and custom work you cannot do yourself is billed by Matrixify experts by the hour. For a large or complex catalogue, that control pays for itself. For 300 plain products, it is overkill.

What a Migration Actually Costs

Headline prices from Shopify migration tools mislead because the models differ. LitExtension and Cart2Cart charge once and scale with your data. Matrixify charges monthly while you work, so a fast migration is cheap and a drawn-out one is not. The honest way to compare is a concrete data point, not a marketing range.

Cart2Cart’s own estimator prices a move of 1,000 products, 500 customers, and 500 orders at about $69, before add-ons. LitExtension starts at $59 and climbs with entity count. Matrixify would run this at $20 to $50 per month on the Basic or Big plan, finished inside a single billing cycle. Use each tool’s estimator or demo before you commit, because add-ons and volume are where the real number hides.

A Real Migration, in Numbers

Published figures beat guesswork. One verifiable example is the US store Genealogical Surveyor, which used LitExtension’s app to move a catalogue of more than 10,000 products to Shopify and, in its Shopify App Store review, estimated the automated migration saved about four months of manual work. The merchant did not disclose an exact invoice, so treat the store’s figures and the typical benchmarks separately.

Source for the above: the store’s Shopify App Store review (December 2024). Exact cost and duration were not disclosed by the merchant.

For context, published 2026 benchmarks put a self-serve migration app at roughly $50 to $180, saving 10 to 15 hours versus a manual CSV import on a mid-size catalogue. A fully engineered, managed migration for a mid-market store (about 1,000 SKUs and 10,000 orders) runs longer, at 6 to 10 weeks and $20,000 to $75,000. Where you land depends on catalogue complexity and how much you do yourself.

The Part Every Tool Gets Blamed For: SEO and 301 Redirects

No migration plugin can save the rankings you built if the URLs change and nothing points the old addresses to the new ones. WooCommerce and Shopify use different URL structures, so products, collections, and blog posts all land on new paths. Without a complete 301 map, every external link, saved bookmark, and indexed page hits a 404.

Done properly, this is survivable. Fluctuation during reprocessing is normal, and Google’s own guidance is that a medium-sized site takes a few weeks or more to fully move, with larger catalogues longer and rankings settling over time, per Google Search Central. Missed redirects, not the move itself, are what cause lasting traffic loss. Our walkthrough on how to migrate without losing SEO covers the exact mapping order.

Two adjacent tasks belong in the same sprint. Rebuild your structured data so rich results survive the move, which our guide to Shopify product schema explains, and set your preferred canonicals so Shopify’s default variants and filters do not split signals, covered in our note on how to set up canonical URLs. If traffic does dip after go-live, the pattern is usually diagnosable, as our breakdown of an SEO traffic drop after redesign shows.

The 2048-Variant Change and Why It Matters for Your Catalogue

One recent Shopify change reshapes how variable WooCommerce products migrate. On 15 October 2025, Shopify raised the per-product variant limit from 100 to 2,048, confirmed in the Shopify changelog. For apparel, configurable, and multi-attribute products, that removes the old headache of restructuring anything over 100 variants before importing.

The trap is what did not change. The limits below still apply no matter which migration plugin you use:

• Products are still capped at three options each (for example Size, Color, Material).
• A WooCommerce product built on four or five attributes loses options unless you restructure it first.
• Media stays capped at 250 files per product.
• Stores past 50,000 products face a 1,000-new-products-per-day ceiling off Shopify Plus.

The practical takeaway: audit your attribute structure before you migrate, not after. If any product needs a fourth option, decide now whether to collapse attributes, split the product, or use line-item properties, because no tool solves the 3-option limit for you.

Which WooCommerce to Shopify Migration Tool Should You Choose?

This Shop Migration Tool Vergleich comes down to one question: choose by store profile, not by review score. The right WooCommerce to Shopify migration plugin depends on catalogue complexity and how much of the work you want to own.

There is a point where DIY stops paying off. If your store mixes heavy variant logic, live order flow, metafield-driven content, and rankings you cannot afford to lose, the tool is the easy part and the mapping is the risk. That is usually the moment to bring in help rather than learn the hard lessons on a live store. Our WooCommerce to Shopify migration service exists for exactly that threshold.

Mistakes That Quietly Break a DIY Migration

Most failed migrations fail the same predictable ways. Avoiding these removes the majority of the risk.

• 🔗 Launching with no 301 redirect map, so old URLs return 404s and rankings slide.
• 🔑 Not warning customers that passwords reset, which reads as a broken site on day one.
• 🧹 Migrating dirty data (test orders, duplicate SKUs) instead of cleaning the export first.
• 🧪 Skipping the free demo run and paying before you know what the tool drops.
• ⭐ Forgetting product reviews and metafields, which no automated tool moves natively.
• 🚦 Going live without QA on mobile, checkout, and a real test order.
• 💾 Starting with no full WooCommerce backup, so there is no way back.

Speed is the other silent killer. A store that imports cleanly but loads slowly converts worse than the one it replaced, so treat performance as part of launch, using our page speed checklist before you flip the domain.

Getting Your Data to Shopify Without Losing Ground

The WooCommerce to Shopify migration plugin you pick is the visible decision, but it is secondary. LitExtension gives you a safety net, Cart2Cart gives you speed with paid extras, and Matrixify gives you control over complex data. Pick the one that matches your catalogue, then spend your energy where migrations actually break: redirects, passwords, reviews, variant structure, and post-launch QA.

Get those right and a WooCommerce to Shopify move is a step up in speed, stability, and scale rather than a traffic event you spend months recovering from. Run a demo, map your URLs, back everything up, and test like a customer before you go live.