There are 234,418 YouTube results for “WooCommerce to Shopify migration.” Only 411 results discuss Shopify data ownership. That ratio tells you everything about what the migration industry doesn’t want you to think about.

Every tutorial shows you how to move products and orders. None ask whether you should—from a data perspective. In 2026, with AI becoming practical for SMB analytics and first-party data increasingly valuable, that’s the wrong focus.

Here are five questions to answer before you migrate.

Question 1: Who Owns Your Customer Journey Data After Migration?

On WooCommerce, your customer data lives in a MySQL database you control. Every transaction, every page view, every abandoned cart—stored in tables you can query directly. You own it. Full stop.

Shopify works differently. Your data lives on Shopify’s servers. You access it through their admin panel, their APIs, their export formats. They provide the interface; they set the limits.

Is that a dealbreaker? Not necessarily. But it’s a fundamental shift in who controls your business intelligence.

WooCommerce: unlimited direct database access. Run any SQL query. Export any data. Build any integration.

Shopify: API rate limits cap at 40 requests per store per minute (Shopify Developer Documentation, 2025). Need to bulk-export customer data? Queue up and wait. Need real-time streaming? Plan around their throttling.

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Question 2: Can You Export Your Attribution Data?

Attribution tells you which marketing touchpoints actually drive sales. It’s the foundation of ad optimization. And it’s one of the hardest things to port between platforms.

On WooCommerce, your attribution data—UTM parameters, referral sources, customer journey sequences—lives in your database or your analytics warehouse. You own the history. You can analyze it however you want.

On Shopify, attribution depends on what their analytics captures and what their export tools allow. Shopify Analytics provides 90 days of detailed data (Shopify Help Documentation, 2025). Beyond that? Aggregated reports only.

That’s fine for month-over-month dashboards. It’s useless for training machine learning models or building custom attribution algorithms.

Question 3: What Happens to Your BigQuery Pipeline?

If you’re already streaming WooCommerce events to BigQuery, you have something valuable: a data warehouse full of raw, event-level customer data. Every purchase. Every behavior signal. Ready for analysis, modeling, or AI training.

What happens to that pipeline after migration?

Shopify doesn’t offer native BigQuery streaming. You’ll need third-party connectors—apps like Littledata or Stitch Data that pull from Shopify’s APIs and push to your warehouse. Which means:

• Additional monthly costs ($99-299/month for connectors)
• Data flowing through third-party servers
• Rate limit constraints on how fast you can sync
• Dependency on another vendor’s roadmap

None of this is impossible. But if you’ve built a clean WordPress-to-BigQuery pipeline using first-party infrastructure, you’re trading ownership for complexity.

Question 4: How Will You Train AI on Shopify’s Locked Data?

Here’s the thing about AI in 2026: models need raw data.

You can’t train a customer segmentation algorithm on dashboard screenshots. You can’t build a predictive LTV model from aggregated reports. AI requires event-level data—individual transactions, behavioral sequences, raw attributes.

WooCommerce stores retain 100% of customer data in MySQL with unlimited export capability. Want to feed five years of transaction history into a machine learning pipeline? Export it. Want to build a custom recommendation engine? Query it.

Shopify provides 90 days of detailed analytics. For anything beyond, you’re working with summaries that can’t be disaggregated back to individual events.

This might not matter today. But AI capabilities are becoming accessible to SMB businesses. The stores with raw, owned data will be able to train custom models. The stores with locked data won’t.

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Question 5: What’s Your Exit Strategy If Shopify Changes Terms?

Shopify controls the platform. They set the pricing, the features, the API limits. And they can change any of it.

Shopify Plus starts at $2,000/month (Shopify Pricing, 2025). What happens if they decide Basic plan features should move to Plus? What happens if they change transaction fee structures? What happens if an app you depend on gets acquired or discontinued?

On WordPress, if your hosting provider raises prices, you switch providers. Your data comes with you. If a plugin stops development, you swap it out. You control the stack.

Shopify is a different relationship. You’re a tenant, not an owner. That trade-off might be worth it for the simplicity—but know what you’re trading.

The Migration Industry Doesn’t Ask These Questions

The 234,418 migration tutorials focus on logistics: how to transfer products, how to move customer accounts, how to set up your new theme. All useful. All tactical.

None of them ask about data architecture. None discuss AI readiness. None explain what “owning your data” actually means when you’re paying monthly fees to access it through someone else’s API.

That’s because migration services profit from moving you, not from helping you decide whether to move.

This isn’t anti-Shopify. Shopify is excellent at what it does: providing a managed e-commerce platform that handles hosting, security, and infrastructure. For many businesses, that trade-off makes sense.

But if data ownership matters to your strategy—if you’re building toward BigQuery analytics, AI-powered insights, or simply want to control your own customer intelligence—ask these questions before you commit.

Key Takeaways

• 234,418 YouTube migration tutorials exist—virtually none discuss data ownership. The migration industry focuses on how, not whether.
• WooCommerce provides unlimited direct MySQL access. Shopify API rate limits cap at 40 requests per minute.
• Shopify Analytics offers 90 days of detailed data. Beyond that, aggregated reports only—insufficient for AI training.
• BigQuery pipelines on WordPress are first-party. Shopify requires third-party connectors with additional costs and dependencies.
• Platform dependency is a strategic decision. Shopify’s convenience comes with reduced control over your data infrastructure.

Making a platform decision? Understand how first-party data architecture works at Seresa.io