Wix to Shopify — the catalogue moves, the rest of the site does not

Going from Wix to Shopify splits cleanly into two jobs that people keep treating as one. The catalogue has a supported path: Shopify publishes a Store Migration app, it is Shopify’s own, and Wix is named on its list of sources alongside Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Clover and Lightspeed. Products, customers and historical orders travel through it.

The rest of the site has no path at all. Your home page, your about page, your shipping policy, your blog and every URL attached to them are a rebuild. That is not a small footnote for a store — the content pages are frequently where the organic traffic lands before it reaches a product.

Start by taking the Wix data out yourself

Run the migration app if you qualify for it, but take your own copies first. Exports stop being available when a plan lapses, and a CSV in a folder on your machine is worth more than a tool you are hoping works.

1. Products. Wix’s Products tab exports to CSV. The documented ceiling is 5,000 rows per file, and digital products are explicitly not covered — if you sell downloads, they are a manual rebuild.
2. Orders. Wix exports orders as CSV and lets you choose one row per item or one row per order. Take one row per item. Every timestamp in the file is UTC, which matters when you reconcile against a Shopify report in local time.
3. Contacts. Export the contact list. This is the asset that is genuinely irreplaceable.
4. Anything written. There is no blog export from Wix — its help centre says outright that exporting blog posts to other platforms is not currently possible — and the RSS feed is documented as carrying up to twenty recent posts. Copy the text of anything you intend to keep.

The Store Migration app, and what it says about itself

Shopify’s guide to migrating from Wix covers products, customers, historical orders and reviews, with reviews handled through third-party apps rather than the core tool. You either upload CSVs from the old platform or connect the source account directly where that is supported.

Read the limits in Shopify’s own words rather than a summary of them, because two of them change what your catalogue looks like on arrival.

• Three options per product. Shopify documents that products can have a maximum of three options and that products with more than three will not have their options imported. If you sell something configured on four axes, that product needs rebuilding with metafields or an app.
• Prices by location are not supported. Shopify states that these are automatically set to the product’s highest price. If you price differently by market, every one of those products is now at the top price until you fix it.
• Availability. Shopify describes the Store Migration app as being in early access, available only for certain stores and only on desktop. If it is not available to you, the CSV route and a third-party migration service are the alternatives.

Shopify also publishes a sentence worth quoting to yourself before you start: some platforms do not export all data or use compatible formats, so small edits may be required afterwards. That is an accurate description of every store migration ever performed.

Check the catalogue before you trust it

After the import, verify by hand. Pick ten products across your range — one with many variants, one with a single variant, your bestseller, something with a long description — and compare each against the old store for price, variant list, inventory count, weight and image order.

Weight and inventory are the two that cause real damage if they are wrong, because both feed systems that spend your money. A weight that imported as zero produces shipping rates that are nonsense. An inventory count that imported high sells you into a stockout.

Do this before you take a single order on the new store, not after.

Pages and posts are a rebuild, and they carry your traffic

Neither end of this move helps you here. Wix publishes no export for pages or posts. Shopify has no native import for them either — its admin has no export for blog articles at all, and the tooling that exists is third-party.

So you retype them. The pragmatic approach is to rank your content pages by traffic first and rebuild in that order, so that if you run out of patience you have run out of it on the pages nobody reads. Anything you decide not to rebuild still needs a row in the redirect map, pointing at the nearest sensible page.

The URL problem, and the wrinkle that actually helps

Shopify does not let you choose your URL structure. Products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, content pages under /pages/ and articles under /blogs/. Whatever shape your Wix URLs had, they are changing.

That makes a complete redirect map non-negotiable. Shopify’s redirect tool lives in the admin under Content, then Menus, and it accepts a CSV import so you can paste a map of several hundred rows in one operation. Standard plans are documented as allowing up to 100,000 redirects, which is not a limit you will reach.

Two rules from Shopify’s documentation shape how you use it. First, you can only redirect from a URL that is currently broken — a path that already returns a page cannot be redirected. On a freshly built store that is a help rather than a hindrance, because every one of your old Wix paths is a 404 there, so all of them are eligible. Second, a set of prefixes is reserved and cannot be redirected at all: /apps, /application, /cart, /carts, /orders, /services and /shop. If your Wix site used a path that collides with one of those, that URL cannot be rescued and you should plan for it now rather than discover it on launch night.

The map itself is built before anything else. Build the redirect map has the procedure.

Payments, shipping and tax are configuration, not data

None of this migrates and none of it should. Your payment provider, your shipping zones and rates, your tax settings and your checkout copy are all set up again from scratch on Shopify.

Give it a dedicated session rather than squeezing it in on launch day, and place a real test order with a real card before the store goes live — through the full funnel, including the confirmation email and the refund. A store that takes orders it cannot fulfil is worse than a store that is offline.

Cutover, and the fortnight afterwards

Build the store on Shopify’s own temporary address with password protection on. Only when the catalogue is verified and the redirects are loaded do you point the domain.

Copy your existing MX and TXT records before you change any DNS, or your order notifications and your business mail stop arriving together. Lower the TTL a day ahead so the change propagates quickly. Then watch your 404 report daily for a fortnight — every entry in it is a URL you missed, and each one is a two-minute fix while it is still fresh.

Keep the Wix plan alive for at least a month. You will need it. Run both sites in parallel covers the overlap, and the wider order of operations is on the plan for switching website builders.