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What Gets Migrated
Before you run a migration, it is worth knowing exactly what comes across, what doesn't, and why. This page covers both — so there are no surprises after the wizard finishes.
Everything below is read through WooCommerce's own CRUD API, which means the results are identical on HPOS stores and on legacy post-table stores.
What is migrated
Products
Every WooCommerce product transfers as a FluentCart product, with its structure preserved. Published, private, and draft products are all included.
| WooCommerce concept | Becomes in FluentCart | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Simple product | Simple product | Single variation |
| Variable product | Product with variations | One FluentCart variation per WooCommerce child variation |
| Variable subscription | Subscription product with variations | Recurring config stored per variation |
| Subscription product | Subscription product | Interval, length, trial, and signup fee preserved |
| Grouped product | Product flagged as a bundle | Children linked as bundle variation references |
| Product Bundles (extension) | Product flagged as a bundle | Bundled items linked, including items pinned to a specific variation |
| External / affiliate product | Catalog-only product | Migrated but deliberately un-purchasable — see below |
| Title, description, short description, slug, author, status, dates | Same | Unchanged |
| Featured image | Same | Same media library reference |
| SKU | Same | De-duplicated if two products share one |
Pricing and sale prices. The current price becomes the item price. When a product is on sale, its regular price is stored as the compare-at price so the discount still displays.
Stock. Stock quantities, stock status, and backorder settings transfer per product and per variation. Two details worth knowing:
- If a WooCommerce item is marked out of stock without per-item stock management, FluentCart records it as managed with zero available — otherwise it would migrate as freely purchasable.
- If any variation manages its own stock, the parent product's stock-management flag is switched on. WooCommerce commonly leaves the parent flag off while stock lives on the variations; without this roll-up, FluentCart would ignore the variation quantities entirely.
External / affiliate products. FluentCart has no external-product type. These migrate as catalog entries so their content and images aren't lost, but their variation is set inactive and out of stock so they can never be checked out. The outbound URL and button text are preserved as product meta for a template or widget to read.
A bidirectional ID map is created so re-running the migration updates rather than duplicates: _fct_migrated_id on the WooCommerce product points to the FluentCart record, _wc_migrated_from on the FluentCart product points back, and __wc_migrated_variation_maps maps each WooCommerce variation ID to its FluentCart variation.
Product categories
Unlike some migrations, WooCommerce's product_cat taxonomy does transfer. The whole tree is synced into FluentCart's product-categories taxonomy parents-first, so hierarchy is preserved, and existing terms are reused by slug rather than duplicated. Name, slug, and description all come across, and each product is reassigned to its migrated categories.
Product attributes and variations
WooCommerce attributes are resolved into FluentCart's shared attribute library — attribute groups and their terms — and reused across products.
| WooCommerce | Becomes in FluentCart |
|---|---|
Global attribute taxonomy (pa_*) | Attribute group, named from the WooCommerce attribute label |
| Custom (per-product) attribute | Attribute group of type options |
Attribute of type color | Color swatch group, with hex values read from term meta |
Attribute of type image | Image swatch group, with the swatch image resolved to a URL |
| Attribute term | Attribute term in the matching group |
For variable products, only variation-defining attributes are used, and each WooCommerce child variation becomes one FluentCart variation carrying its selected terms. Variation titles come from WooCommerce's attribute summary.
For non-variable products that still carry attributes, the attributes are expanded into a cartesian product of combinations — one FluentCart variation per combination, all sharing the source product's price and stock. This is capped at 500 combinations; a product that would exceed it stays a plain single-variation product instead.
Variations whose attribute is set to "Any"
When a WooCommerce variation leaves an attribute unset ("Any …"), that attribute simply doesn't constrain the migrated variation. And when a variation references a term the parent product no longer lists — a common inconsistency in older stores — the term is recovered from the taxonomy and added back so the variation still resolves.
Downloadable files
Downloadable files attached to products and variations transfer, and this goes further than a metadata copy: files that live on your own server (an uploads URL for this site, or an absolute path) are copied into FluentCart's own storage directory so FluentCart can serve them. The copy is idempotent — re-running the migration doesn't duplicate files.
Files hosted elsewhere — S3, a CDN, another domain — keep their original URL unchanged.
Customers
Customer records transfer with full identity and address data, deduplicated on email.
- Full name, email address
- WordPress user account association
- Billing address and, when present, a separate shipping address in the customer's address book
- Phone number on the billing address
- Lifetime value, purchase count, average order value — recalculated from the migrated orders during the Recount & Verify step
Customers are created two ways. Most arrive as a by-product of order migration: the first migrated order for an email creates the customer and seeds their address book. Registered customers who never placed an order would be lost that way, so a dedicated Missing Customers step walks users with the customer or subscriber role and creates any that don't already exist, reading their addresses from the WooCommerce customer profile.
Why subscriber too
Stores that let people register before buying leave those accounts on WordPress's default subscriber role. Including that role means those accounts aren't silently dropped.
If a customer with the same email already exists in FluentCart when an order is being migrated, the order is linked to the existing record rather than creating a duplicate.
Orders and payments
Every order transfers — including line items, taxes, shipping, fees, discounts, transactions, refunds, and notes. Only WooCommerce's checkout-draft status (unfinished block-checkout attempts) is excluded.
| WooCommerce status | FluentCart order status | FluentCart payment status |
|---|---|---|
completed | Completed | Paid |
processing | Processing | Paid |
on-hold | On Hold | Pending |
pending | On Hold | Pending |
cancelled | Canceled | Failed |
refunded | Canceled | Refunded |
failed | Failed | Failed |
Payment status is refined by how much was actually refunded: an order with a partial refund lands as Partially Refunded regardless of its WooCommerce status, and one refunded in full lands as Refunded.
Each order brings:
- Order ID and order number, preserved from WooCommerce
- Subtotal, cart tax, shipping total, shipping tax, fees, coupon discount, and order total — all converted to FluentCart's minor-unit (cents) storage
- Currency and tax behavior (inclusive or exclusive, read from your WooCommerce price settings)
- Billing and shipping addresses, including company name, phone, and email
- Line items: product, variation, quantity, unit price, subtotal, tax, discount, and fulfillment type
- Per-item refunded amounts, taken from WooCommerce's refund line items
- A charge transaction carrying the gateway transaction ID
- One refund transaction per WooCommerce refund, with its own amount and date
- Applied coupon codes with the discount amount, back-linked to the migrated coupon
- Order-level tax rows, linked to the generated FluentCart tax rates
- Order notes — both system notes and notes to the customer — as FluentCart activity entries
- Customer note, IP address, completion date, and refund date
Totals reconciliation. The Migrator rebuilds the order total from its components and compares it to WooCommerce's recorded total. Any positive difference is recorded as a manual discount; any negative difference is absorbed as a fee. Migrated orders therefore always add up to the same total your customer actually paid.
Refund allocation. When WooCommerce recorded a refund at the order level without allocating it to line items, the amount is spread proportionally across items by line total, so per-item refund figures stay sensible.
Shipping status. Only physically-fulfilled orders carry a shipping status. A completed WooCommerce order lands as shipped, so migrating years of history doesn't flood your fulfillment queue with thousands of unshipped orders.
Order mode (test vs live). WooCommerce keeps no per-order record of whether a payment was taken in test or live mode, so the Migrator reads the current configuration of the order's gateway — Stripe's testmode, PayPal Payments' sandbox_on, PayPal Standard's testmode — and falls back to your FluentCart store's own order mode for gateways with no such concept (cash on delivery, cheque, BACS). This matters: FluentCart selects its API keys by order mode, so a subscription imported under the wrong mode cannot be charged. If your store flipped modes at some point in its history, override the result with the fluentcart_migrator_woo_order_mode filter.
Gateway mapping. Payment methods map by prefix, so gateway variants are handled: anything starting with stripe becomes stripe, anything starting with ppcp or paypal becomes paypal, and cod / cheque / bacs become offline payment. Paystack and Airwallex map through by name. Any other gateway ID passes through unchanged.
Shared IP masking. When the orders step finishes, IP addresses appearing on more than 30 migrated orders are cleared. An IP that common is a gateway or proxy address, not a customer's, and keeping it serves no purpose.
Subscriptions
When WooCommerce Subscriptions is active, subscriptions come across with their full state. Parent orders create the subscription; renewal orders link to it.
| Field | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Status | active, on-hold → Paused, pending, pending-cancel → Canceled, cancelled, expired, switched → Canceled |
| Billing interval | Mapped to FluentCart's slugs — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly (3 months), half-yearly (6 months), yearly |
| Recurring amount, tax, and total | Split so the recurring amount is ex-tax and the total is gross |
| Signup fee | Preserved |
| Bill times and trial days | Read from the subscription's product or variation |
| Next payment, trial end, end, and cancellation dates | Preserved |
| Gateway customer ID | Stripe customer ID or PayPal payer ID |
| Notes | Migrated as subscription activity entries |
| Renewal order history | Linked back to the subscription |
An otherwise-active subscription whose end date has already passed is imported as expired — WooCommerce sometimes leaves such records active until a cron run catches up.
Collection method is the field that decides whether renewals keep charging automatically. It's important enough to have its own page: read Subscriptions & Renewals.
Renewals whose parent is gone. If a renewal order's subscription was deleted in WooCommerce, the Migrator creates a single canceled placeholder subscription keyed to the original subscription ID, so the renewal transaction still attaches somewhere. Every later renewal of the same deleted subscription links to that one placeholder instead of spawning its own.
Switches and upgrades. Orders that WooCommerce Subscriptions marks as a switch are flagged in the migrated order's config, along with the IDs of the subscriptions involved, so the upgrade chain isn't entirely lost.
After import, the Recount & Verify step re-attaches renewal transactions that lost their subscription link, rebuilds bill counts from actual renewal orders, and recalculates customer and coupon aggregates.
Coupons
Every WooCommerce coupon transfers with its rules intact.
| WooCommerce | Becomes in FluentCart |
|---|---|
percent, percent_product | Percentage discount |
fixed_cart, fixed_product | Fixed discount |
| Free-shipping coupon with no discount value | Free shipping coupon |
| Recurring / renewal discount types (WC Subscriptions) | Coupon flagged as applying to renewals |
| Individual use only | Non-stackable coupon |
Also preserved: usage limit, usage limit per user, current usage count, minimum and maximum spend, expiry date, description, and publish status (published → active, anything else → disabled).
Restrictions are remapped, not copied. Included and excluded products are translated from WooCommerce product IDs to the migrated FluentCart product IDs; products that weren't migrated are dropped from the list rather than left pointing at nothing. Included and excluded categories are matched to the migrated FluentCart category terms by slug.
Coupon usage counts are recalculated from applied coupons on paid orders during the recount step.
Tax rates and configuration
Tax migration is conditional. It runs only when taxes are enabled in WooCommerce; otherwise the step is skipped with a clear notice.
When enabled, the Migrator:
- Turns on FluentCart's tax engine
- Sets tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive pricing to match your WooCommerce setting
- Seeds default EU VAT settings using your store's base country as the home country
- Creates FluentCart's default tax classes (Standard, Reduced, Zero)
- Generates FluentCart tax rates for every country present in your WooCommerce tax rates table, plus your store's base country
- Builds a map from each WooCommerce tax rate ID to the resolved FluentCart rate, which the orders step uses so historical tax rows stay linked correctly
Not a 1:1 rate copy
FluentCart's tax model differs from WooCommerce's. The Migrator generates FluentCart's own rates for the relevant countries rather than copying every WooCommerce rate verbatim, and where several WooCommerce rates resolve to the same FluentCart rate on an order, their amounts are combined into one row with each source component retained in its metadata. Review your tax setup after migration to confirm it matches your jurisdictional requirements.
Store settings
On the first page of the products step, WooCommerce store configuration is copied into FluentCart's store settings — but only into fields you have left empty. Nothing you have already configured is overwritten.
- Store name, address line 1 and 2, city, postcode
- Store country and state (parsed from WooCommerce's combined
country:stateoption) - Currency
- Currency position (WooCommerce's left/right becomes FluentCart's before/after)
- Decimal separator
What is NOT migrated
Honesty about boundaries matters more than a longer feature list. The following items are deliberately out of scope.
Shipping zones, methods, and rates
WooCommerce shipping zones, shipping classes, flat-rate and table-rate configurations, and any shipping extension's rules are not migrated. Historical shipping amounts on past orders come across intact, but your live shipping setup needs recreating under FluentCart → Settings → Shipping. The two models differ enough that an automated mapping would quietly produce wrong rates at checkout.
Product tags and custom taxonomies
Only product_cat transfers. The product_tag taxonomy and any custom product taxonomies do not.
Product gallery images
The featured image transfers. Additional gallery images are not migrated.
Product reviews and ratings
WooCommerce stores reviews as WordPress comments on the product. They are not migrated, and average ratings and review counts are not carried over.
Custom product and order metadata
Only known fields from WooCommerce core, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and Product Bundles are parsed. Custom meta written by other third-party extensions is not preserved. If you have important custom data on products or orders, export it separately before migrating.
Checkout-draft orders
Orders left in WooCommerce's checkout-draft status — abandoned block-checkout attempts — are filtered out. Every other status migrates.
Payment gateway credentials and saved cards beyond Stripe
Transaction records and gateway transaction IDs come across, so history is intact. Gateway API keys never transfer. Reconnect Stripe, PayPal, and any other gateway in FluentCart after migration using the same accounts you used in WooCommerce.
Saved payment methods are only carried forward for Stripe subscriptions holding a modern PaymentMethod token. See Subscriptions & Renewals for the exact rule and what happens to everything else.
Email templates
WooCommerce's email settings and template customizations are not migrated. FluentCart has its own notification system with its own templates. Review and customize them under FluentCart → Settings → Email Configuration.
Pages, shortcodes, and blocks
Your Cart, Checkout, and My Account pages remain WooCommerce pages. Shortcodes and blocks on your content are not rewritten. Replace them with FluentCart's equivalents as part of the cutover.
Refund reason text
Refund amounts and dates transfer as separate refund transactions. WooCommerce's refund reason text is not extracted into a dedicated field.
Download history logs
WooCommerce's download permissions and download logs are not migrated. The downloadable files themselves are.
Dry-run mode
All operations are live. There is no preview mode. To rehearse a migration safely, use Developer Mode on a staging environment, run the full migration, review the result, then reset and run again.
At a glance
| Entity | Migrated? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Products (simple, variable, subscription, grouped, bundle) | ✅ | External products migrate as catalog-only |
| Product categories | ✅ | Full hierarchy, matched by slug |
| Product attributes and terms | ✅ | Including color and image swatches |
| Product variations | ✅ | Attribute terms preserved |
| Featured image | ✅ | |
| Product gallery images | ❌ | |
| Product tags / custom taxonomies | ❌ | |
| Product reviews and ratings | ❌ | |
| Downloadable files | ✅ | Local files copied into FluentCart storage |
| Stock levels and backorders | ✅ | Parent stock flag rolled up from variations |
| SKUs | ✅ | De-duplicated on collision |
| Customers (with orders) | ✅ | Deduplicated by email |
| Customers (without orders) | ✅ | Via the Missing Customers step |
| Customer addresses | ✅ | Billing and shipping |
| Orders (all statuses) | ✅ | checkout-draft excluded |
| Order line items, tax, shipping, fees, discounts | ✅ | Totals reconciled to the WooCommerce total |
| Transactions | ✅ | Gateway transaction IDs preserved |
| Refunds | ✅ | Per-refund records; reason text not extracted |
| Order notes | ✅ | As activity entries |
| Subscriptions | ✅ | Requires WooCommerce Subscriptions |
| Subscription renewal history | ✅ | Linked back to the subscription |
| Saved cards for renewals | ⚠️ | Stripe PaymentMethod tokens only |
| Coupons | ✅ | Product and category restrictions remapped |
| Tax configuration and rates | ✅ | Only if enabled in WooCommerce |
| Store settings | ✅ | Only fills empty FluentCart fields |
| Shipping zones, methods, rates | ❌ | Recreate in FluentCart |
| Payment gateway credentials | ❌ | Reconnect in FluentCart |
| Email templates | ❌ | Set up fresh in FluentCart |
| Custom meta from third-party extensions | ❌ | Only known fields parsed |
| WooCommerce pages, shortcodes, blocks | ❌ | Replace during cutover |
Next steps
Now that you know exactly what's in scope, head to the Wizard Walkthrough to run your first migration — or, if you sell recurring products, read Subscriptions & Renewals first.