Services / Platform Migration
Migrations to Shopify that don't lose your data, your SEO, or your weekend.
Most replatforms go wrong in one of three places: the catalogue arrives incomplete, the redirects are an afterthought and rankings fall off a cliff, or the cutover runs long and the store is down through a trading day. All three are preventable, and all three are avoided the same way — by verifying the data before anyone touches DNS.
Shopify
Waiting to receivePress replay to run the sequence again.
Figures illustrate the shape of a mid-size migration and are not a specific client's data. Your real counts come out of the free migration audit, along with the URL map and the risks we find before anything moves.
At a glance
Shopify migration services, in plain terms.
- What it is
- A full replatform to Shopify or Shopify Plus — catalogue, customers, order history, content and URLs moved across with verified data integrity, a complete 301 map, and a cutover planned to the hour.
- Platforms we move from
- Magento 1 and 2 · WooCommerce · BigCommerce · Wix · Squarespace · custom and in-house builds. Also Shopify to Shopify Plus, and store consolidations.
- What is preserved
- Products, variants, images and metafields · customer accounts, addresses and consent state · full order history with refunds and fulfilment status · blog and page content · every indexed URL, via 301.
- What can't come across
- Hashed passwords never migrate — no platform can decrypt them, so customers reset on first login. We plan the comms for that rather than letting it surprise your support inbox.
- Shopify or Plus?
- Both. The migration work is identical either way — the plan only changes what the storefront can do afterwards. We recommend a tier in the audit, and for most brands under roughly $5M it is not Plus.
- Typical timeline
- 6–12 weeks depending on catalogue size, integration count and how clean the source data is. Cutover itself is measured in minutes, not days.
- Investment
- From $2,000 to $100,000+, depending entirely on catalogue size, data complexity and whether you need a new design. A small store onto a configured theme starts around $2,000; a Magento B2B multi-store replatform runs to $100,000+. Four tiers below. Fixed scope, milestone billing.
- First step
- A free migration audit — we scan your store, size the catalogue, map the URL structure and name the risks in writing. Yours whether or not you hire us.
The failure modes
Migrations rarely fail loudly. They fail quietly, in March.
Launch day usually looks fine. The damage shows up six weeks later in a traffic graph nobody can explain, or in a support queue full of customers whose order history vanished.
What goes wrong
Every one of these we have been called in to repair after someone else's migration
- Redirects treated as a launch task — done in a rush, partially, with chains three hops deep. Rankings bleed for months
- Variants flattened because the source model didn't map cleanly, so 4,000 SKUs became 900 products with a size dropdown that lies
- Order history left behind — "we'll keep the old site up for reference" — and support cannot answer a single returns question
- Customer consent state lost, so the whole list is re-imported as opted-in. A compliance problem and a deliverability disaster
- Cutover on a Friday with no rollback, discovered broken on Saturday morning with nobody available
- Structured data and canonicals never rebuilt, so rich results quietly disappear and nobody connects it to the replatform
How we prevent it
Not cleverness — sequence and verification
- The URL map is built first, from a crawl plus your analytics, before a single product moves. It is a deliverable, not a step
- Data model mapped and signed off up front, including the awkward cases — bundles, configurables, tier pricing
- Order history migrated in full, with refunds and fulfilment status, so support loses nothing on day one
- Consent state carried across per subscriber, and where a source can't provide it we say so rather than assume opt-in
- Cutover mid-week, early, with a rollback plan and the whole team on. Never a Friday
- Reconciliation before DNS — source counts against destination counts, row by row, until they match exactly
The single biggest predictor of a clean migration is whether the redirect map existed before the build started. It is also the step most often skipped, because it is unglamorous and takes a week.
Platform by platform
Every platform breaks in its own specific way.
Generic migration checklists are why migrations go wrong. These are the actual hazards we plan around, by source platform.
WooCommerce → Shopify
The friendliest export on paper and the messiest in practice, because a Woo store is really a WordPress database with commerce bolted on. Most of the real product data lives in plugin tables nobody documents.
postmeta. A
naive CSV export loses custom fields entirely./product/slug/ and /product-category/ map
cleanly to Shopify's /products/ and /collections/. Highly predictable
301s.Magento → Shopify
The hardest of the common migrations, because Magento's data model is genuinely more expressive than Shopify's in places. The work is deciding what to rebuild rather than move.
BigCommerce → Shopify
The closest structural match of the group, which makes it the fastest migration — and the one where people get complacent about the parts that genuinely differ.
Wix & Squarespace → Shopify
Usually a growing brand outgrowing a website builder. Small catalogues, so the catalogue is easy — the content and the URLs are where the work is.
Custom & in-house builds → Shopify
No export tool exists, no documentation survives, and the one developer who understood it left. This is the migration most agencies decline, and it is mostly a data-archaeology problem rather than a commerce one.
Which plan
Most brands don't need Plus. We'll tell you if you do.
Agencies quote Shopify Plus by default, partly out of habit and partly because it makes the project sound bigger. The migration work is identical either way — same data, same redirects, same cutover. The plan only changes what the storefront can do once it is live, so it is a separate decision and we make it with you rather than for you.
Shopify moved B2B onto every paid plan — company accounts with up to 50 locations, three price catalogs, net payment terms, PO numbers at checkout, self-serve ordering. Shopify Flow went to all plans too.
That removed the single most common reason a mid-size brand upgraded. A lot of advice still circulating online predates this, including the old rule that you move to Plus somewhere between $1M and $3M. That rule is out of date.
Advanced is enough if
Which covers most brands we migrate
- You sell direct to consumers in one or two markets from a single storefront
- Your checkout is standard — no custom discount logic, delivery rules or payment gating
- Your B2B needs fit three price catalogs and net terms, which are now included
- You don't run drops or flash sales with severe concurrency spikes
- Your catalogue syncs comfortably inside standard API rate limits
Plus costs roughly $20,000–$25,000 a year more than Advanced at this size. If none of the triggers opposite apply, that money does more for you spent on the storefront.
You genuinely need Plus if
Any single one of these justifies it on its own
- You need to change how checkout behaves — the Checkout Editor and checkout Shopify Functions are Plus-only
- You run multiple storefronts — expansion stores for regions or separate brands
- Your B2B needs more than three price catalogs, a dedicated B2B domain, deposits or vaulted cards
- You do high-concurrency drops and need the checkout throughput
- Large integrations are hitting API rate limits on your current plan
- You've outgrown Advanced's staff account limit
Notice that none of these is a revenue number. A $5M single-market DTC brand runs fine on Advanced; an $800K wholesaler needing deposits across three regions needs Plus.
Plan pricing and feature boundaries change — Shopify has revised both twice in the last two years, and Plus terms are negotiable at scale. We confirm current pricing directly with Shopify during the audit rather than quoting from a blog post. If you are already on Plus and don't need it, we will say that too.
The part that costs the most when it goes wrong
A replatform is a site-wide URL change.
Search engines treat it as exactly that. Handled properly, rankings hold within weeks. Handled as a launch-week task, you lose positions that took years to earn and spend the next two quarters buying back traffic you used to get free.
| Source pattern | Shopify destination | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| /product/{slug}/ | /products/{handle} | Handles auto-generated from titles drift from the old slug. Map explicitly rather than trusting the default. |
| /product-category/{a}/{b}/ | /collections/{handle} | Nested categories flatten. Deep hierarchies need a decision, not an automatic rule. |
| /{sku}.html | /products/{handle} | Magento's suffix patterns vary per store view. Extract from the real URL rewrite table. |
| ?filter= & layered nav | /collections/{h}/{tag} | Indexed faceted URLs are usually the biggest single block, and the most often missed. |
| /blog/{y}/{m}/{slug} | /blogs/{blog}/{handle} | Date-based paths have no Shopify equivalent. Per-post mapping, and often the largest content loss. |
| Paginated /page/2/ | ?page=2 | Frequently left to 404 in bulk, which looks to a crawler like the site shrank overnight. |
Every URL, mapped by hand
Built from a full crawl plus your Search Console and analytics data, so URLs that still earn traffic are found even when they are not linked anywhere.
One hop, never a chain
Old URL to final destination directly. Chains bleed authority at every step and are the most common defect we find in other agencies' migrations.
Structured data rebuilt
Product, breadcrumb and review schema recreated and validated before cutover, so rich results survive the move rather than quietly disappearing.
What it costs
From $2,000 to six figures. Your data decides which.
That is a wide range because migrations genuinely are. A 60-product Squarespace store and a 40,000-SKU Magento build with three store views are not the same project, and pretending they cost the same is how agencies end up either overcharging small brands or under-scoping large ones.
| Tier | Typical range | What it covers | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $2,000–$6,000 | Data migration, full 301 redirect map, structured data, and setup on your existing design or a well-configured Shopify theme. No custom design work. | Small catalogues — Wix, Squarespace or a light WooCommerce store, roughly under 200 products, where the current design is fine or a good theme will do. |
| Standard | $8,000–$25,000 | Everything in Essential plus a custom theme designed in Figma and built to it, Online Store 2.0 sections, and conversion tracking configured properly. | Most brands. You are replatforming and you want the storefront to be better afterwards, not just relocated. |
| Complex | $25,000–$50,000 | Everything in Standard plus large or awkward catalogue work — attribute mapping, variant restructuring, bundles rebuilt, and third-party integrations reconnected. | Large Magento or WooCommerce catalogues, stores with ERP, POS or warehouse systems wired in, or heavy faceted URL structures. |
| Enterprise | $50,000–$100,000+ | Everything in Complex plus B2B architecture, multi-store or multi-region setup, custom checkout logic on Plus, and data archaeology where no export path exists. | B2B and wholesale operations, multi-brand or multi-region groups, and custom in-house platforms with undocumented schemas. |
Put you in the cheapest tier that works. If your catalogue is small and your design is fine, Essential is the honest answer and we will say so rather than talk you into a rebuild you did not ask for. We would rather do a $2,000 job well and be the people you call at $10M.
Tell you when it is not us. Below roughly $2,000 there are app-based bulk importers that do a competent job on simple catalogues. If that is genuinely your situation we will name one — the redirect map is the part that matters most, and we would rather you got that right somewhere than got it wrong with us.
Ranges are starting points, not quotes. The free migration audit sizes your catalogue, maps the URL structure and names the risks, and the fixed price is written against what it actually finds. Every tier is milestone-billed, and no tier changes the data-integrity or redirect work — that is the same on a $2,000 migration as on a $100,000 one.
Process
Seven stages. Nothing skipped.
The order is the method. Verification sits before cutover for a reason — once DNS moves, discovering a problem is expensive.
Migration audit — 1 week
We crawl the store, size the catalogue, extract the URL inventory from your live site and Search Console, map the data model and list the risks. This is where the awkward cases surface — bundles, tier pricing, faceted URLs, plugin-owned fields.
Week 1Migration scope of work
A fixed scope written against what the audit actually found, naming explicitly what migrates, what gets rebuilt, and what is deliberately left behind. Priced and signed before any build begins.
Week 1–2Staging build
Theme built on Online Store 2.0, data migrated into a staging store, integrations wired. You see it working on real data — not a demo with placeholder products — with weekly demos throughout.
Week 2–7Data verification
Source counts reconciled against destination counts, row by row: products, variants, customers, orders, refunds. Discrepancies are investigated rather than rounded away. This stage is why we can say zero records lost and mean it.
Week 6–7QA period
Checkout tested across payment methods and edge cases, redirects tested in bulk against the map, structured data validated, Core Web Vitals measured, and your team trained on the admin before they need it.
Week 7–8Cutover
Mid-week, early in the day, with the whole team on and a rollback plan ready. DNS switches, redirects are verified live within minutes, and orders are watched in real time. Downtime is measured in minutes.
Week 6–7Post-launch monitoring
Thirty days of watching what actually matters after a replatform: indexation, crawl errors, redirect health, conversion rate against your old baseline, and Core Web Vitals on real field data. Problems get found by us, not by your traffic graph.
Week 7–8Who this is for
Worth saying who it isn't for.
A good fit
Where a migration reliably pays for itself
- You're on Magento 1 or 2 and the maintenance cost has stopped making sense
- Your WooCommerce store has outgrown its hosting and every plugin update is a risk
- You have real SEO equity to protect and cannot afford a rankings drop
- Your order history matters to support, finance or a future sale of the business
- You're on a custom build with key-person risk and want that dependency gone
- You need B2B, multi-currency or multi-region and your platform makes it painful
Probably not a fit
We'll tell you this on the first call rather than the fifth
- You want it live in two weeks. A real migration is 6–12 and we won't pretend otherwise
- You want the cheapest possible import. App-based bulk imports exist and are fine for simple catalogues — we'll name one
- Your platform isn't actually the problem. Sometimes the site converts badly and replatforming won't fix that
- You want to migrate and redesign and rebrand at once with no extra time. Pick two
- Nobody internally can own decisions for the duration
Questions we get
Straight answers.
Will I lose my search rankings?
Not if the redirect map is built properly and built first. Expect some volatility for two to four weeks while search engines reprocess the site — that is normal and recovers. What causes permanent loss is missing redirects, chains, and orphaned content, which is why the URL inventory is stage one rather than a launch-week task. We monitor indexation for 30 days afterwards so any gap is found by us rather than by your traffic graph.
Do I need Shopify Plus?
Usually not, and we would rather say so before you commit to a plan you do not need. As of April 2026 B2B is available on every paid plan, which removed the main reason mid-size brands upgraded. Plus earns its cost when you need to change how checkout behaves, run multiple storefronts, go beyond three B2B price catalogs, handle high-concurrency drops, or you are hitting API limits. None of those is a revenue threshold — a $5M single-market brand often runs fine on Advanced. We recommend a tier in the audit, and the migration itself is identical either way.
How long does a Shopify migration take?
Six to twelve weeks for most stores. The variables are catalogue size, how many integrations need rebuilding, and how clean the source data is — a 50,000-SKU Magento store with tier pricing and three store views is a different project from a 400-product WooCommerce shop. The audit gives you a real timeline before you commit to anything.
How much downtime will there be?
Minutes, not days. The new store is fully built and verified on staging before cutover, so the switch itself is a DNS change plus a final delta sync of anything that changed during the window. We cut over mid-week and early in the day, with the whole team on and a rollback plan ready — never on a Friday.
Does order history come across?
Yes, in full — orders, line items, refunds and fulfilment status. This matters more than people expect: without it your support team cannot answer a returns question on day one, and your finance team loses year-on-year comparison. Anyone proposing to "keep the old site up for reference" is telling you they are not migrating it.
What about customer passwords?
They cannot migrate. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes and no platform can decrypt them, so this is a hard technical limit rather than a choice. Customers reset on first login. What we do is plan the communication properly — a heads-up email before cutover and clear messaging on the login page — so it lands as expected rather than as a support spike.
Can you migrate from a custom in-house platform?
Yes, and it is a good share of what we do. There is no export tool, so it starts with a paid discovery: we read the database and the running application, reverse-engineer the data model, and produce a written specification. Nobody can honestly fix-price a system they have not read, and an agency that quotes one on a call is guessing.
What does a migration cost?
Anywhere from $2,000 to $100,000+, and the honest answer is that catalogue size and data complexity decide it, not us. A 60-product Squarespace store moving onto a well-configured theme is a $2,000–$6,000 job. A full replatform with a custom theme is $8,000–$25,000. A large Magento or WooCommerce catalogue with integrations runs $25,000–$50,000. B2B, multi-store or a custom platform with no export path is $50,000–$100,000+. The free audit tells you which tier you are actually in before anyone quotes anything, and we would rather put you in a cheaper one than oversell a bigger project.
What happens after launch?
Thirty days of monitoring is included: indexation, crawl errors, redirect health, conversion against your old baseline, and Core Web Vitals on real field data. After that it is optional — a retainer covers ongoing work, but the migration stands on its own and you own everything we built.
Next step
Find out what your migration actually involves.
A free migration audit: catalogue sized, URL structure mapped, data model reviewed, and the risks named in writing. One business day. Yours whether or not you hire us.
