We moved showbags.com.au from WooCommerce to Shopify in under a month, and the store went live in August 2026. Showbags is a family-run Australian retailer of novelty showbags, party bags and confectionery, backed by Bensons Trading and has a loyal Instagram following.
This was never a simple migration. The store runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, so stock, pricing, discounts, orders and tracking all had to flow cleanly between Shopify and the ERP from day one. Customers also expected their order history, wishlists and back-in-stock requests to still be there when they logged in.
Here is how we did it, and what we would tell any business planning the same move.
Why leave WooCommerce
The biggest single saving was hosting. Showbags was running on WP Engine’s P2 plan, a premium managed tier needed to keep a large-catalogue WooCommerce store fast under seasonal traffic. Shopify includes hosting, security, SSL and scaling in the subscription, so that bill disappeared entirely.
The less visible cost was maintenance. Plugin updates, PHP upgrades and compatibility testing took time every month. On Shopify that work shrinks to managing apps and the theme, which we keep in a GitHub repository so every change is versioned and reversible.
Business Central stays the single source of truth
We set up the Shopify and Business Central integration so the team keeps working in BC and Shopify simply reflects it. Nobody re-keys a price, a stock level or a tracking number.
| Data | Direction | Where it comes from in BC |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory | BC → Shopify | Stock held at the online-fulfilment location, not the whole business |
| Regular prices | BC → Shopify | The retail price list |
| Sale prices | BC → Shopify | A dedicated discount price list, written to Shopify’s Compare-at price |
| Orders | Shopify → BC | Every web order lands in BC as a sales order |
| Tracking | BC → Shopify | Shipment tracking flows back, and Shopify emails the customer |
Syncing inventory by location matters for a business like Bensons Trading, where most volume is wholesale. Online shoppers only ever see stock that is actually available to ship to them.
Shopify Flow runs the merchandising
On WooCommerce, keeping the Sale, New and Coming Soon pages accurate was manual work that was easy to forget. We rebuilt all three with Shopify Flow so they maintain themselves.
Sale page. When a discount price arrives from BC’s discount price list, Flow adds the product to an automated Sale collection. When the discount ends, it drops off. The Sale page is always exactly what is on sale, nothing more.
Coming Soon to New. Products created before stock arrives go onto Coming Soon automatically. The moment BC reports stock, Flow moves them from Coming Soon to New.
New expires on its own. Two months after a product lands in New, Flow removes it. The New page stays genuinely new without anyone keeping a calendar.
The result is a storefront the client’s team never has to tidy. They receive stock and set prices in BC, and the website follows.
Customers kept their history
A returning customer should not notice the platform changed. We imported every past WooCommerce order, so customers can still see what they bought and the team can still look up old orders in one place.
We also brought across wishlists and waiting lists. People who had saved products or asked to be notified when something came back in stock kept those requests, and the back-in-stock notifications carried on after launch.
We spot made several migration tools (Thanks Claude) to handle the bulk of the product and customer data and handled things such as WooCommerce categories becoming Shopify collections, sale prices mapping to Compare-at price, and short descriptions moving to metafields etc.
SEO rankings survived the move
Shopify uses a fixed URL structure, so every WooCommerce address changes. A product at /product/ninja-showbag becomes /products/ninja-showbag, and a category becomes a collection. Without redirects, years of Google rankings and backlinks would point at 404 pages.
We built a full 301 redirect map covering products, nearly 200 category and collection URLs, and the store’s content pages. Each old URL was checked against the live WooCommerce sitemap before it went in, and the map was implemented alongside the client’s SEO agency.
We also fixed the Open Graph tags on the new store, so product links shared on Instagram and Facebook show the right image, title and type.
What we learned along the way
- Don’t trust a green tick in Flow. Flow’s Send internal email action only reliably reaches registered staff accounts. Sent to a shared support inbox, it reported success and delivered nothing.
- Pick the theme on evidence. We trialled several premium themes, then launched on a customised version of Shopify’s own Dawn theme. It was faster to build on, and it keeps updating with Shopify.
- Shipping is its own project. We built a bulk export into Australia Post Parcel Send, so the warehouse can lodge a day’s orders in one step instead of one at a time.
- Check plan features, not just fees. Upgrading a Shopify plan rarely pays for itself through card-fee savings alone. Features such as live carrier-calculated shipping are the real reason to move up.
The result
- Live on Shopify in under a month, with no break in trading
- Premium WP Engine hosting cost removed entirely
- Stock, prices, discounts, orders and tracking synced with Business Central, with no double entry
- Sale, New and Coming Soon pages that run themselves
- Full order history, wishlists and waiting lists preserved
- Search rankings protected with a complete 301 redirect map
The store is also ready for what comes next. Shopify now offers native B2B features on standard plans, which opens a path to serving Bensons Trading’s wholesale and fundraising customers from the same platform.
Planning your own move?
Pragati Tech Services is a boutique agency that helps SMEs in Australia and the UK move from WooCommerce to Shopify, and connect their store properly to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. If your store is outgrowing WordPress, or your team is re-keying data between the website and the ERP, talk to us. Also since we are a registered Shopify Partner, you don’t need to pay until your store goes live as we can keep working on a Dev store which we transfer to you once ready to go live and then you can choose a plan and start paying to Shopify directly.