Migrate Everything At Once

Migrate products, customers and orders in the same migration, in that order. Not products this week and orders a fortnight later when you have time.

Three reasons.

Order lines link better when the products arrive in the same job

Every order line in WooCommerce or PrestaShop points at a product. When the products and the orders move in one migration, we still have the original product ID from your source store, so each order line is matched to exactly the product it was sold as. No guessing.

Import the orders separately and that ID is gone. The app then matches on SKU, which works well if your catalogue has SKUs. Plenty of stores do not. For those there are a few other things the app tries, and we would rather not list them here where competitors can read them.

When nothing matches, the order line still comes through with the right title and the right price. It just is not linked to the product, which means it does not count towards that product’s numbers in Shopify’s reporting. The order looks correct. The analytics do not.

Order imports take time

Products come across in batches. Orders do not, because each one has to be written into Shopify individually and Shopify limits how fast that can happen.

On the Shopify side we see roughly 120 to 150 orders a minute, with newer stores at the slower end. For 10,000 orders that is somewhere around an hour and a half of writing, before you count the time spent reading everything out of your old store. On WooCommerce that reading time depends on how quickly your hosting answers. On PrestaShop it matters more, because addresses have to be collected separately from the invoices, so slow hosting costs you noticeably more time.

So do not start the order import the evening before you point your domain at Shopify. If the job is still running when DNS lands, you will be taking live orders on a store that is still having its history written into it, and you will have no way to tell a genuinely missing order from one that simply has not arrived yet.

You want a boring week to check the data

The reason to finish early is the gap afterwards.

Open twenty orders and check the totals against WooCommerce or PrestaShop. Pick your five strangest products, the ones with eleven variants or an odd weight unit, and look at those properly. Check an order that was placed by a guest.

Shopify rejects individual records on its own validation rules, and the job log only surfaces some of that, mainly duplicate email and phone warnings. The real check is you looking at the data with time in hand. Re-importing is free once you have paid, so a problem found in week one costs you nothing. The same problem found the day after launch costs you a weekend.

Already imported your products?

That is fine, and it is worth running a demo migration for the orders first so you can see how the line items match against the products you already have. If a lot of them come through unlinked, send us a message before you run the full import.