63,117 YouTube videos tell you why to leave WooCommerce for Shopify. Almost none tell you why to stay. I nearly became another migration statistic. The plugin conflicts, the update anxiety, the “your site is down” emails at 2am—Shopify promised to make it all disappear. Then I calculated the data cost.

The number that stopped me: $2,000 per month. That’s what Shopify Plus charges for access to your own raw customer data. Standard Shopify stores can export basic orders and customer lists, but analytics history? Behavioral data? The customer journey information that powers modern marketing? Locked away unless you pay enterprise prices.

The Frustration Was Real

Let me be honest about why I almost left. WooCommerce had worn me down.

Every WordPress update felt like Russian roulette. Would the site still work? Would checkout break? The plugin graveyard in my dashboard—abandoned projects from developers who moved on—haunted me. My hosting bill kept climbing because “you need more resources” became the answer to every performance question.

Shopify looked like freedom. No updates to manage. No hosting to worry about. No compatibility issues between plugins that both claim to work perfectly until they meet each other.

The migration content flood made it feel inevitable. Search “WooCommerce to Shopify” and you’ll drown in tutorials, success stories, and agency pitches promising seamless transitions. The algorithm had decided: WooCommerce was the past, Shopify was the future.

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The Research Phase: What Nobody Mentions

I did what every overwhelmed store owner does—I started researching. But instead of just watching “Why I Switched” videos, I asked different questions. What happens to my data during migration? What can I actually do with customer information on Shopify versus WooCommerce?

The answers changed everything.

Shopify’s data export includes orders and customers—but not your analytics history, not your abandoned cart data, not your customer journey information. According to Shopify’s own export documentation, behavioral data simply doesn’t come with you. Cart2Cart, the most popular migration tool, confirms that migrations preserve 85-95% of core data (products, orders, customers), but everything else gets left behind.

That “everything else” includes years of customer behavior patterns. Who browses what. What paths lead to purchases. Which products get abandoned in carts. The data that actually explains your business.

Then I found the pricing reality. Shopify’s standard plans give you dashboards and reports, but raw data access—the kind that lets you build custom analytics, train AI models, or export to BigQuery—requires Shopify Plus. Starting at $2,000 per month.

The Calculation That Changed My Mind

I ran the numbers. Not just the monthly subscription comparison, but the actual data cost.

WooCommerce: Every customer interaction lives in my MySQL database. Every order, every abandoned cart, every page view I choose to track. I own it. I can query it. I can export it anywhere. Total cost for this data access: $0 beyond my existing hosting.

Shopify Standard ($79-299/month): Pre-built dashboards. Limited exports. Customer data exists, but on Shopify’s terms. Want to run custom queries? Build AI models? Export to your data warehouse? Upgrade to Plus.

Shopify Plus ($2,000+/month): Finally, raw data access through APIs and custom reports. The ability to actually own and use your customer information.

The math was brutal. Trading WooCommerce frustration for Shopify convenience meant either accepting limited data access forever or paying $24,000+ per year for what I already had.

Companies leveraging first-party data strategies achieve 2.9x better customer retention (Secure Privacy, 2025). That retention advantage comes from understanding customers deeply—the kind of understanding that requires data you actually control.

Why Data Ownership Matters More in 2026

Here’s what sealed the decision: AI.

Every marketing platform now promises AI-powered optimization. Predictive audiences. Smart bidding. Personalized recommendations. But AI needs data to learn. And if your customer data lives on a platform that restricts your access, you’re training their AI, not yours.

WooCommerce stores can pipe customer data directly to BigQuery. From there, you can build custom predictive models, analyze customer lifetime value patterns, and feed your own AI tools. The 43.5% of websites running WordPress have a structural advantage here—full database access means full AI capability.

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Shopify’s ecosystem is powerful, but it’s designed to keep you in Shopify’s ecosystem. The apps, the analytics, the AI features—they work within Shopify’s walls. Step outside, and you’re starting from scratch.

Fixing WooCommerce Instead of Fleeing It

The real question wasn’t “WooCommerce or Shopify?” It was “What would make WooCommerce work for me?”

The plugin conflicts? Most came from redundant tools trying to do the same thing. I audited ruthlessly, kept what worked, deleted the rest. The update anxiety? A staging environment and proper backup system turned updates from gambles into routine maintenance.

The tracking problems—the broken GA4 data, the Facebook attribution gaps—those required a different solution. Server-side tracking fixed what client-side couldn’t.

Transmute Engine™ runs as a first-party Node.js server on my subdomain, receiving events from a lightweight WordPress plugin and routing them to GA4, Facebook CAPI, and BigQuery simultaneously. No GTM complexity. No cloud infrastructure to manage. The same server-side tracking that enterprise stores use, but without the enterprise price tag or technical overhead.

Total investment to fix my WooCommerce tracking problems: a fraction of one month’s Shopify Plus subscription. And I kept my data.

The Counter-Narrative Nobody Shares

I understand why “Why I Left WooCommerce” content dominates. It’s a clean story: frustrated user finds simpler solution, problem solved. The algorithm rewards it. Agencies profit from it.

But 63,117 videos about leaving versus almost zero about staying creates a skewed picture. Not everyone who considers migration actually migrates. Not everyone who migrates stays happy. The counter-narrative just doesn’t get made.

My decision wasn’t anti-Shopify—it was pro-informed-decision. Shopify is genuinely excellent for certain businesses. If you’re starting fresh, if data ownership isn’t a priority, if you’re comfortable with platform-controlled analytics—Shopify delivers real value.

But if you have years of customer history in WooCommerce, if AI-powered marketing is in your future, if data ownership matters to your business strategy—the calculation changes.

Key Takeaways

• Raw data access on Shopify requires Plus tier at $2,000+ per month—standard plans offer dashboards but not data ownership
• WooCommerce stores retain 100% of customer data in MySQL—exportable, queryable, and AI-ready without additional fees
• Migration tools preserve orders and customers but not behavioral history—analytics patterns and journey data don’t transfer
• First-party data strategies deliver 2.9x better retention—but only if you actually control the data
• Fixing WooCommerce tracking costs less than surrendering data ownership—server-side solutions solve the problems that drive migration consideration

Ready to fix your WooCommerce tracking instead of abandoning your data? See how Transmute Engine works.