Wix to Shopify Migration: The CSV Gaps That Break Your Catalog

What actually transfers from Wix to Shopify (and what doesn't)

Decide scope before you touch a CSV. Only two data types have a first-party path; everything else is an app, an API call, or manual work.

Shopify's first-party Store Migration app is in early access: desktop only, available to some stores, and it moves products and customers from an unmodified Wix CSV. Two limits decide whether it fits you — prices by location aren't supported (every product takes its highest price), and products with more than three options won't have their options imported. The details are in Shopify's Migrate from Wix guide.

The order to run a Wix to Shopify migration

The sequence is not cosmetic. Orders attach to product and customer records that must already exist, and redirects are worthless if they land after the domain moves.

1. Build Shopify while Wix stays live. The two run in parallel on different domains. There is no downtime until the DNS switch.
2. Import products first. Deselect Publish new products to all sales channels on the import so nothing goes live half-built.
3. Import customers second.
4. Import historical orders third. Run earlier and you get orphan line items with no linked product or customer.
5. Load the redirect map into Shopify before the domain moves.
6. Disconnect the domain from Wix, then point it at Shopify.
7. Test orders, taxes and shipping, then remove the storefront password.

One trap worth setting a reminder for: every imported historical order fires a new-order notification to every staff member subscribed to them. Turn those notifications off before the order import and back on after, or your team wakes up to several thousand emails.

Map the Wix product CSV to Shopify's format without losing data

Export from the Wix dashboard under Catalog > Store products > Products > More actions > Export. What you get back uses Wix's own schema, not Shopify's. Here is the mapping with the gaps filled in.

Three things break quietly during the import itself:

• Keep the Wix site published until the import finishes. Shopify fetches images from the Wix-hosted URLs in your CSV at import time. Unpublish early and you import a catalog with no photos.
• Variant rows need a specific shape. Continuation rows repeat the Handle and leave Title, Body and Vendor blank. Filling them in creates duplicate products instead of variants.
• Accented product names change the handle. Once diacritics are stripped, the new handle almost never matches the Wix slug — which is exactly why the redirect map is built during this step, not after launch.

Past a few hundred SKUs with deep variants, multi-location inventory or metafields, a spreadsheet round trip stops paying for itself and a scripted import against the Admin API is cheaper — that is the point to write the script or hand it to someone who does eCommerce data migration on a regular basis.

Store Migration app, manual CSV, or a third-party migration app?

My recommendation for most Wix stores under a few hundred SKUs: remap the CSV yourself. The export is small enough to fix in a spreadsheet in an afternoon, and you finish the migration actually knowing your own data — which matters the first time a price looks wrong. Pay for a migration app when you need historical order records, because that is the one job with no first-party path and no sane manual alternative.

The Wix to Shopify redirect map that protects your rankings

This is the section most migrations shortcut, and it is the one that costs revenue. Two facts drive it.

First, URL structures differ by platform, so every indexed product, post and page gets a new address. Second — and this is the one people miss — Wix's automatic redirects run on Wix's servers. Every slug change you made over the years and let Wix redirect for you stops existing the moment your domain no longer points at Wix. Those old URLs still have links and rankings, and they become 404s on day one unless you re-create them in Shopify.

If you ever customized the Wix URL structure, the prefix won't be product-page. Read the real paths off your live sitemap instead of assuming them.

• Build the list from data, not from your menu. Pull the Google Search Console Pages report for the last 12 months plus your Wix sitemap.xml. Anything with clicks or impressions gets a redirect; the rest can be triaged.
• Upload, don't type. Shopify imports URL redirects from a CSV under Content > Menus > URL Redirects, so a 2,000-row map is one file.
• Load them before the DNS switch. A redirect created in Shopify does nothing while the domain still resolves to Wix, and it is live the second it flips. Creating them afterwards means a window where every old URL 404s.
• Never bulk-redirect to the homepage. Google treats a mass redirect to an irrelevant page as a soft 404 and drops the ranking anyway. Send unmatched URLs to the closest collection.

Cutover: domain, SSL, and the week after

• Disconnect the domain from Wix first, then point it at Shopify. Leaving it connected on both sides produces SSL certificate errors while two platforms claim the same hostname.
• Expect a short unsecured window. Shopify provisions its certificate only after DNS resolves to it, so plan the switch for your quietest traffic hours rather than a Friday afternoon.
• Keep the storefront password on until data is verified — but remember a password-protected store can't have its sitemap crawled, so remove it as soon as you've checked prices, inventory and images.
• Re-verify the domain in Google Search Console and submit the Shopify sitemap.xml. Then watch the Pages report for 404 spikes for two weeks; that report is where missed redirects surface.
• Keep the Wix site unpublished in your account for 30 days. It costs nothing and it is the only reference you have when a customer asks about an order that didn't migrate.

What actually drives the timeline

The data move is rarely the long pole. On a 200-SKU store with clean options, export, remap and import is roughly a day of focused work. What stretches the project:

• Variant depth — products with three options and dozens of combinations multiply CSV rows and surcharge arithmetic.
• Order history — the moment you need it, you add an app, a budget and a verification pass.
• Indexed URL count — a 50-page site is a lunch break; 3,000 indexed URLs is a real mapping exercise.
• Non-store Wix features — Bookings, Members areas and Velo code have no equivalent and need replacing or rebuilding.
• Theme fidelity — matching a Wix design pixel-for-pixel on Shopify costs more than adopting a good Shopify theme and moving your brand onto it.

Scope those five honestly before you pick a launch date. If you'd rather hand over the catalog remap and the redirect map and keep your own team on the storefront, tell us what your store looks like and we'll come back with scope and timing.