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Stewart Doxey

Portfolio - Gushlow & Cole

Moving a fashion brand from WooCommerce to Shopify

Gushlow & Cole had outgrown their WooCommerce store. I moved every product, order and customer across to Shopify and rebuilt the shop on a redesigned Prestige theme. The full project, build and migration together, took about 16 weeks.

Since launch, sales and visits are noticeably up, and the team finds Shopify much easier to use. See the live store.

Gushlow & Cole homepage
Products migrated
600
Orders migrated
2,000
Customers migrated
2,250
Build to launch
16 weeks

Who they are

Gushlow & Cole is a fashion brand making shearling and sheepskin clothing, accessories and homeware in England. Their online shop ran on WordPress and WooCommerce.

What wasn't working

Keeping plugins up to date had become a chore, the theme had slowed down over the years, and they never found the WordPress admin easy to use. They wanted a fresh start, and they'd heard Shopify was a better home for a fashion brand.

What was built

Platform

Shopify

Technologies
  • Shopify
  • Prestige theme
  • Custom design
  • Matrixify
  • Data migration
  • URL redirects

I didn't build a theme from scratch. I started from Prestige, a theme from Shopify's Theme Store, and the web designer I work with redesigned it so the finished shop looks like a one-off build. Gushlow & Cole get a store that's fully on-brand and that they can still edit from the Shopify admin.

Behind the shop front, I moved the whole catalogue and trading history across from WooCommerce: 600 products, 2,000 orders and 2,250 customers.

Inside the shop

  • Gushlow & Cole women's shearling collection page

    Women's collection

    258 products, filtered by size, colour, price and type.

  • Gushlow & Cole materials page on Toscana shearling

    Our materials

    Each shearling explained, with the pieces made from it to shop underneath.

How the data came across

The data was the slow part, and the only part of the project that was genuinely awkward. I connected Matrixify, a Shopify app for bulk imports, straight to the WooCommerce store to bring across the products, orders and customers. Most of it came through cleanly, but the orders didn't, and they needed correcting by hand.

With 2,000 orders that's a lot of careful, repetitive work. It's also the part you can't afford to get wrong, because order history and customer details are what the business runs on.

Keeping the old links working

The old product and category addresses on the WooCommerce site needed to point to their new pages on Shopify, so anyone following an old link or search result still lands in the right place. Some of the redirects came through with the Matrixify import, and I added the rest with a bulk redirect import in Shopify.

What I'd do differently

Next time I'd bring in a specialist in data migrations for the orders, and use AI tools to take the repetitive part out of cleaning the data. AI tools like that weren't around when this project ran.

Everything else, the theme, the design and the build, went smoothly.

Gushlow & Cole product page on desktop
Gushlow & Cole product page on tablet
Gushlow & Cole product page on a phone

Since launch, Gushlow & Cole have seen a noticeable rise in both sales and visits. Just as important to them, the shop is now easy to run. They find Shopify very easy to use day to day, and they no longer spend time keeping WordPress plugins up to date.

Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify

01 How long does a WooCommerce to Shopify migration take?

For Gushlow & Cole, the full project took about 16 weeks. That covered a redesigned theme and the move of 600 products, 2,000 orders and 2,250 customers. On this project, the data took the most time.

02 Can you keep your order history and customers when you move to Shopify?

Yes. On this project every order and customer came across along with the products. I connected Matrixify straight to WooCommerce to import them, though the orders still needed some correcting by hand.

03 Will old links still work after moving from WooCommerce to Shopify?

They will if the redirects are set up. Each old product and category address needs to point to its new Shopify page. Here, some redirects came through with the Matrixify import and the rest went in as a bulk import in Shopify.

04 Do you need a custom-built theme for Shopify to look bespoke?

Not always. Gushlow & Cole's store is built on Prestige, a theme from Shopify's Theme Store, redesigned by the web designer I work with so it looks like a one-off build.

Thinking of moving your store to Shopify?

How I build Shopify stores 

Like what you see?

Tell me what your store runs on now and roughly how many products, orders and customers you have. I'll reply by the end of the next working day.

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