You've decided to move platforms. Maybe your current store fees increased again, or your plugin stack finally broke in a way that cost you a weekend to fix. You've found something better β and you need to get your products across.
Then you open the migration documentation. Your optimism has about forty-five seconds left.
What Other Platforms Actually Put You Through
Shopify's product CSV has 65 columns. Variants live on separate rows keyed by a handle you have to manually maintain. Images go in a comma-separated string inside a single cell β in a specific order, with specific URL formats. Get the column order wrong and your whole import silently fails, or worse, succeeds with corrupted data.
WooCommerce doesn't have import built in. You install a plugin. Then you learn that the free version only imports 100 products. The paid tier is another $80/year. You buy it, run the import, and discover that half your images didn't link because WooCommerce expects them to already be uploaded to your media library before you run the CSV.
BigCommerce has a dedicated import tool, but variant pricing, custom fields, and product options each have their own separate CSV format. Importing a product with three size options and two colour options means touching four different files and getting the cross-references between them exactly right. Their documentation runs to twelve pages for a single product type.
Every platform claims to support CSV import. None of them tell you how many hours you'll spend making your data match their format exactly β before the real migration even starts.
The Image Problem Nobody Warns You About
Even when the product data imports cleanly, the images don't. Most platforms want you to either host your images somewhere publicly accessible (a separate CDN, your old platform, a Google Drive with link sharing on), or upload them manually one by one through a separate media interface and then re-link them to each product by hand.
A store with 400 products and three images each is 1,200 manual uploads. If you're migrating away from a platform that's going offline, or one that's about to delete your data, you might not even be able to access your original images programmatically. You're downloading them to your laptop and uploading them again, individually, into a file manager that wasn't designed for bulk operations.
This is where most migrations get abandoned. Not because the business owner gave up β because they looked at the work honestly and realised the platform isn't worth the price of switching.
Format Mismatch Is the Real Migration Tax
The deeper problem isn't the steps β it's that every platform has invented its own arbitrary interpretation of what a "product CSV" should look like. The column names are different. The boolean values are different (some want "true/false", others want "yes/no", others want "1/0"). Variant handling varies wildly. Categories might be a path string, an ID reference, or a pipe-separated list depending on the platform.
So you don't just export your data and re-import it. You export it, open it in a spreadsheet, spend hours reformatting it to match the new platform's expectations, run a test import into a staging environment you had to set up separately, debug the failures, fix the spreadsheet, and try again. Experienced migration specialists charge $300β$800 for a catalog of a few hundred products. That's the real price of this complexity β it created an entire professional service category around a problem that shouldn't exist.
How Mika Store Handles This
The Import Wizard takes two things: a CSV file and an optional ZIP of your product images. The CSV uses our template β which you can download pre-filled with your existing products if you're already on the platform, or fill from any spreadsheet export. The column names are human-readable. Variants, options, categories, pricing, and descriptions are all in one file.
Before anything is committed, our pre-flight validator reads your entire file and surfaces every error in a single pass. Wrong attribute value? Listed. Missing required field? Listed. Image filename that doesn't match any product? Listed. You fix the issues in your spreadsheet and re-upload. Nothing touches your live catalog until you've seen a clean validation report and chosen to proceed.
The image ZIP is the part we're most proud of. Drop your product photos in, name them to match a column in your CSV, upload the archive. Our worker extracts them, matches them to products by filename, uploads them to our CDN, and links them to the right product records automatically. No manual re-linking. No pre-upload step. A store with 400 products and 1,200 images takes the same effort as one with five products and five images β you ZIP it and upload it once.
The import runs asynchronously. You don't watch a progress bar for forty minutes. You submit the job, close the tab, and get a notification when it's done. The import is atomic β if anything goes wrong during processing, your catalog is untouched. There are no half-imported states, no partially linked images, no corrupted data that requires manual cleanup to fix.
Switching platforms should be a business decision, not a technical project. Your catalog is your work β it shouldn't cost a week of your life to carry it with you.