When a business operates across multiple countries, its data structure is extremely important.
For Maciej Gruszka, CEO & Owner of Behemoth Webstore, this was not his first migration project with Next-Cart. Over the years, he had trusted the team to move his multi-national stores to BigCommerce and PrestaShop.
But as his business evolved, so did his expectations.
This time, Maciej wanted consolidation and a long-term infrastructure upgrade. The destination platform was WooCommerce, which is integrated with WordPress. This combination is powerful enough to support both advanced commerce and content management, which was exactly what Maciej was looking for.
But Maciej wanted more than a simple data transfer. It was about merging four independent Shopify stores, each serving a different currency market, into a single WooCommerce ecosystem. This was all done without breaking product relationships, customer histories, or order integrity.
This was one of the most technically layered migrations Next-Cart handles that season.
The objection to this migration project: Consolidating four Shopify stores into one WooCommerce environment
Maciej operated four Shopify stores: a primary store and three additional stores serving the USD, EUR, and GBP markets.
The first migration phase focused on transferring the main Shopify store. That included 125 categories, 388 products, 5,898 customers, and 11,537 orders.
The real complexity emerged in the next phase when Maciej asked: If the three remaining Shopify stores share the same product base - the same SKUs and barcodes - will the orders imported recognize the already migrated products and bind correctly in WooCommerce?
This wasn’t a standard migration. It was actually a staged consolidation project with multiple instances. Each Shopify store has its own customer base and order history, yet the products were identical. How to avoid duplication and implement unification?
Specifically, the client needed:
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Orders matched to existing products by SKU
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Customers merged by email if they already existed
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All historical data is preserved and properly linked
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No product duplication
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No customer fragmentation
In this case, the migration logic needed to be thoughtfully customized with cross-store intelligence.
The first obstacle: Customers imported but not visible
After the initial migration, Maciej noticed that customers had been successfully imported into WordPress under “Users,” but they were not appearing under “WooCommerce Customers.”
At first glance, this looked like a migration issue. However, the Next-Cart team investigated deeper and discovered the true cause was a currency plugin. A multi-currency plugin installed on the WooCommerce store was overriding the default customer visibility behavior.
The plugging was configured to display customers only when they have at least one order in PLN, and the language and currency were set to Polish + PLN.
In this situation, the data was present technically. But it wasn’t displayed due to filtering rules.
Then, Next-Carat adjusted the migration configuration to ensure the conditions are met:
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Orders were assigned the correct currency.
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Language mappings aligned with plugin logic.
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Future imports from USD, EUR, and GBP stores would behave correctly once currencies were defined.
The issue was about environmental logic. It required understanding WooCommerce behavior at a system level.
Customer product mapping: Translating Shopify data into WooCommerce logic
Maciej’s next requirements about precise field mapping went beyond basic entity migration. He requested several custom fields to be translated from Shopify into WooCommerce attributes:
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Country/Region of Origin → Product Attribute
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HS Code → Product Attribute
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Barcode → WooCommerce EAN field
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Brand → Attribute
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GTIN → Attribute
At the same time, he didn’t want certain fields imported at all, including Reviews, Size, Table Size, UPC, and MPN. This selective exclusion would help the client prevent unnecessary clutter in the new WooCommerce environment.
The migration tool then had to be customized not only to map custom fields to the appropriate WooCommerce attributes, but also to exclude certain elements.
Such field-level customization is often underestimated in standard migration projects. However, in a multi-store consolidation like this, attribute consistency becomes critical. Especially, future filtering, tax rules, and shipping regulations rely on accurate metadata like HS Codes or country of Origin.
The Next-Cart developers modified the migration logic accordingly, ensuring clean, standardized product data inside the WooCommerce platform.
The core challenge: Matching orders via SKUs to the existing products in WooCommerce
The most sensitive part in this project was ensuring accurate order-to-product binding across four stores.
Because the three USD, EUR, and GBP stores contained identical products, importing them into a single WooCommerce store would have created duplicates without special handling. More importantly, orders might not attach correctly to their respective products.
To prevent this, the migration tool was customized with a strict SKU-based product matching. It identified existing WooCommerce entries using SKU as the unique key. Also, orders from all of the stores were linked to those matched products.
Customer handling also followed a similar logic. If an order referenced a customer email that had already been present in WooCommerce, the system merged the records rather than creating a duplicate account. So even if customers had purchased in different currencies, continuity was ensured across shopping histories.
The migration here served as a consolidation engine, unifying the fragmented database into a cohesive structure.
Variant-level barcode correction
In Shopify, each product variant had a unique barcode. However, after migration, WooCommerce variants appeared with the same EAN value.
For businesses relying on barcodes for their fulfillment or marketplace integration, this issue could lead to operational errors.
Once again, the team re-customized the migration logic to resolve it. Then, each Shopify variant barcode is mapped precisely to its corresponding WooCommerce variant EAN. Then, inventory systems, scanning processes, and external integrations could function correctly after consolidation.
Newsletter & Mailchimp: Understanding system boundaries
Maciej also wanted the newsletter subscription data transferred.
If a Shopify customer is subscribed to the email newsletter, he has a checkbox marked in WooCommerce as well.
After the investigation, the developer discovered that the Mailchimp integration plugin stored subscription status in Mailchimp’s system rather than in the WooCommerce database.
The migration successfully populated the subscription meta fields in WordPress. But the plugin only synchronized when users were updated manually. That’s why the WooCommerce checkboxes were not ticked.
This was an API architecture constraint.
The migration tool cannot force subscription state on an external system without triggering its own sync mechanism. This matter was clearly communicated to the client.
Hosting instability: The unexpected layer of complexity
Another demanding aspect of the project was hosting transitions.
During the migration process, Maciej changed hosting providers multiple times, between Hostinger, Kinsta, SiteGround, and Cloudways. Each hosting change required reconnecting the migration bridge, reconfiguring FTP credentials, whitelisting IP addresses, validating database permissions, and clearing server caches.
At times, access from certain regions was restricted. Moreover, caching layers caused duplicated executions when launching the tool in multiple browser tabs.
This was not due to data errors, but to environmental variables. And it required systematic troubleshooting.
The migration team continuously adapted to each hosting configuration to ensure stability before resuming data imports.
WPML: A strategic shift mid-migration
During the migration process, Maciej decided to remove WPML from the WooCommerce environment.
If not handled properly, doing this during an active migration can result in orphaned records or inconsistent product visibility. Also, translation metadata in auxiliary tables can cause conflicts when the plugin is deactivated.
To prevent these risks, the migration configuration was re-engineered before continuing to import additional stores.
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Product insertion logic was simplified to the standard WooCommerce structure and to bypass multiple hooks.
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Taxonomy mapping was reviewed to ensure attributes and categories remain stable.
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Customers and orders were verified to ensure they did not reference language-specific metadata.
This mid-process adjustment required careful sequencing. The team approached it as a controlled transition rather than a plugging deactivation.
By the end of the project, the WooCommerce store operated cleanly without WPML. Products were structured in a single language, free from complex translation layers.
The final state: A fully unified WooCommerce ecosystem
After multiple rounds of customization, the final result was a fully consolidated WooCommerce system:
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Categories and products were cleanly structured.
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Over 11,500 orders from the primary store were preserved.
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Over 10,000 additional orders from three currency stores were matched by SKU.
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Customers were merged intelligently.
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Variant EAN values appeared correctly in the WooCommerce store.
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WPML was removed without affecting the store operations.
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No product duplication
What began as four separate Shopify stores across multiple currencies became one centralized WooCommerce website with unified data.
To Conclude - A reflection on technical migration complexity
From this project, we can see that beyond simply moving data from one platform to another, migration also involves translating architecture, reconciling behavior, customizing mapping logic, and preserving historical relationships.
For businesses with multiple stores operating in different currencies, such as Behemoth Webstore, the migration requires careful planning and technical flexibility. Throughout the project, it handled various aspects, including SKU matching, customer merging, variant precision, plugin compatibility, and hosting stability.
They all played essential roles in the excellent final outcome, and Maciej later shared his feedback:
“The team and this tool are fantastic. They have migrated all my data from Shopify (customers, orders, products, etc.) with some custom changes to WooCommerce (earlier, to BigCommerce and Prestashop as well). I have an impression that there is no impossible task for them. The contact and support are very quick, even during holidays. They are awesome!”
This case study is a clear example of how important structured customization and system-level understanding are. All these efforts turned a multi-stage migration into a unified, scalable eCommerce store.
