Shopify Importer – Import Shopify Products into WordPress

Posted on December 2, 2010

Download the plugin from WordPress.org

Shopify is a great hosted eCommerce provider. WordPress is the best blogging platform.

I first learned about Shopify in 2007, and was very interested in their service: they take care of every aspect of an eCommerce shop, and you pay them monthly plus a little cut of your sales.

  • Themes: Shopify has a great theme generator package that uses Ruby on Rails and it also has a theme store with tons of beautiful, standards-compliant themes.
  • Apps: The Shopify App Store features free and paid applications that integrate using the Shopify API.
  • Hosting: Shopify uses Rackspace and Akamai for hosting and as a CDN, respectively. Security, hosting, etc.
  • …and tons of other features

Shopify Blog FunctionalityI am still impressed with Shopify, but when I logged in recently to my Shopify account, I saw that Shopify’s “blogging” functionality is weak. Very weak. When I saw that there was an app to import a WordPress blog into Shopify, I laughed, and went ahead creating a Shopify importer for WordPress.

Import Shopify Products as Blog Posts

The Shopify Importer plugin is designed to make blogging about each of your products simple.

  1. Export your products from Shopify (Go to Products, click on Export Products, then Export all products). This will save a CSV file to your computer.
  2. In WordPress, go to Tools > Import. Click on Shopify.
  3. Follow the instructions, select the CSV file from your computer
  4. Click the Upload file and import button

When products are imported, the tags are converted to WordPress tags, vendors are converted to categories (if selected), and all the product information is stored as a Custom Field for the post or page.

There are plans to expand the plugin to add additional functionality. What would you like to be added to the plugin?

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  • http://seotrainingpk.com seo training pakistan

    Off course! WordPress bangs for its beautiful themes.

  • http://theclothingmenu.com the clothing menu

    do you have an example of how this looks once complete? sounds intriguing, but i’m having a hard time picturing how it works. and does it automatically update when you add more products to shopify or do you have to keep exporting/importing?

    • http://www.seodenver.com Zack Katz

      For now, it just creates a post (or page) for each product that has the title of the product name, custom fields for all of the data, and tags for the product tags.

      You would need to keep exporting and importing. I created this plugin to gauge interest in a far more integrated offering for the Shopify world.

      • Colorcodz

        I after something similar. A sidbar widget that can show products from a shopify collection

        • Matt2

          @Matt Does Shopify not allow custom titles or meta? Really?

          @ Colorcodz I agree. A plugin that uses a widget with short codes to pull in Shopify product is needed for anyone working with Shopify and wordpress. Kinda surprised that it’s not available already?

          Does anyone have any creative solutions for this? Examples?

          @Zack is this functionality something that you have looked into? Curious about how simple/difficult it would be to have this type of plugin built.

  • matt

    I would really like to see an option for import as custom post types. Blog posts are fine if you are, well…, blogging about your products.

    I am moving away from shopify completely because its complete lack of basic SEO control such as custom page titles and meta descriptions. I may be looking at wp e-commerce solutions.

  • Rjmccormick

    I can’t get the shopify import to wordpress to work. The products exist in shopify. The CSV is correct (even though I took out some of the fields). The instructions track, but nothing happens. I get an empty wordpresss file saying, in part, I may have to adjust my ini.php – which I can’t find at my hosting server. What can I do?

  • http://www.analyticseo.info jack yang

    yeah,u r right,i agree with you

  • Jordashtalon

    I don’t see anywhere that let’s the person actually add the product to the cart in the custom fields. How would I do that in the Custom Field?

  • Pingback: Shopify Importer review, discussions, does it work, and ratings on Loadwp.com | Loadwp.com

  • Heather

    Product images? 

    • http://www.seodenver.com Zack Katz

      The URL to the product images is saved as a custom field.

  • kc

    Love it – can you also add functionality to import the pages – there is NO way to backup shopify pages, and this would be be a godsend.

  • Jesse

    Hi, I’m looking to transfer the content from our shopify blog to a new wordpress blog. We don’t really need our product info transferred, just the content from our blog. Can this app do this? Thanks in advance.

    • http://www.seodenver.com Zack Katz

      No, just the products.

      • Jesse

        Thanks Zack. Appreciate the quick follow up. Any thoughts on how we could transfer our blog content more efficiently than copy and pasting?

  • http://twitter.com/brianbotkiller brian botkiller

    Is there a way to cause this import to import as products into WP ecommerce? That would be awesome.

    • http://www.seodenver.com Zack Katz

      That’s a good idea. I’ll look into it.