Migrating to Shopify: The Complete Guide for Merchants Leaving Another Platform

Most Shopify migrations don't fail during the migration. They fail three weeks after launch, when the traffic report comes in and organic is down 40%, or when a wholesale customer calls asking why their login doesn't work and where their net 30 terms went.

Both of those failures were decided before cutover, in steps that got skipped because the store "looked done."

TL;DR: Replatforming to Shopify is a well-understood project with a fixed sequence: audit and backup, migrate data in dependency order, build the theme, replace plugins with apps, map every old URL to a 301 redirect, cut over DNS, then monitor. The two things that cannot move are customer passwords and marketing consent. The thing most likely to hurt you is a missing redirect map, because every URL on your old platform changes shape on Shopify.

This guide covers the whole sequence. If your store has a wholesale side, also read migrating wholesale customers to Shopify B2B: B2B adds failure modes of its own, and they need their own plan.

The Sequence, and Why the Order Matters

A migration has seven phases, and they run in this order for dependency reasons, not tradition.

1. Audit and backup. Export everything from the old platform before you touch anything: products, customers, orders, content, and a full crawl of your live URLs (Screaming Frog is the standard tool). The URL export becomes your redirect map later. The data export is your rollback insurance.

2. Data migration, in dependency order. Products first, then collections, then customers, then historical orders, then discounts and gift cards, then blog content and pages. The order isn't optional: an imported historical order has to reference a customer and products that already exist in Shopify, so importing orders first simply fails. Shopify's own guidance follows the same product → customer → order sequence.

3. Theme and build. Your old theme doesn't migrate under any method. This is a rebuild, which is also your one free chance to fix ten years of accumulated design decisions.

4. Apps to replace plugins. Every plugin on the old platform either has a Shopify equivalent, becomes a native feature, or gets dropped. Do this inventory deliberately. The data inside plugins (reviews, loyalty points, subscription contracts) needs its own export path per app and is routinely forgotten.

5. The redirect map. Shopify enforces fixed URL prefixes (/products/, /collections/, /pages/, /blogs/), so essentially every URL on your old store changes, and every one that earns traffic needs a 301 redirect waiting on day one. How to build the map, and the limits of Shopify's redirect tool, are covered in Don't Lose Your Rankings: SEO for Shopify Migrations.

6. DNS cutover. With the new store built, tested with real orders, and redirects loaded, the cutover itself is an anticlimax. Storefront downtime is mostly a myth on a well-planned migration, since the new store is built in parallel and DNS just switches the sign on the door.

7. Post-launch monitoring. Search Console for crawl errors and 404s, analytics for conversion, and your support inbox for what you missed. Plan for a fix-it budget; agencies commonly suggest reserving 15–20% of the project for post-launch corrections.

What Cannot Migrate, No Matter the Method

Some things don't move, and knowing them up front changes how you plan.

Passwords. Customer passwords are hashed on the old platform and cannot be exported or imported. Shopify's documentation is explicit about this. Every customer arrives with a disabled account and must be invited to set a new password. For a consumer store this is friction; for a wholesale store it's a churn risk with a name on every account, and the invitations need sequencing, not a blast (more here).

Saved payment methods. Stored cards and payment tokens stay behind for PCI reasons. First checkout on the new store means re-entering payment details.

Marketing consent. Legally, consent given on one platform doesn't automatically carry to a new context, and practically you should import customers as not-subscribed unless you hold documented opt-in records. Assuming everyone is opted in is how a migration turns into a GDPR complaint. More on this in GDPR Compliance for Shopify B2B Apps.

Themes, page-builder layouts, and custom code. Elementor layouts, Magento extensions, bespoke checkout logic: all of it is a rebuild.

Order history, with an asterisk. Historical orders can be imported with the right tools and they're worth having for customer service and reporting, but they arrive as archived records, not fully native orders. Decide early how many years you actually need.

Choosing a Migration Method

There are four realistic paths, and the honest answer is that store size picks for you.

Shopify's free Store Migration app handles products and customers from a short list of platforms: Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Wix, Amazon, eBay, Clover, and Lightspeed's retail POS (Vend). Notice what's missing: Magento, BigCommerce, and every local European platform. Notice also what it doesn't move even on supported platforms: orders, menus, reviews. It's a starting point for small WooCommerce stores, not a migration plan.

Matrixify is the practitioner default for everything else. It imports products, collections, customers, orders, redirects, metafields, pages, and B2B companies (more on those below), from spreadsheet templates you control. The trade-off is that you're doing the mapping work yourself, and the template has a learning curve.

Automated migration services (LitExtension and similar) connect the two platforms and move products, customers, and orders for a per-entity fee, typically somewhere between $60 and $1,500. They're a reasonable choice for a non-technical merchant with a standard store. They do not rebuild your design, reconnect your integrations, or take responsibility for your SEO.

Agencies and custom builds are for stores where the migration is entangled with an ERP, a large SKU count, or a B2B operation. Published agency ranges run from around $5,000 for a small store to well past $100,000 for enterprise work. Treat all such figures as what they are: numbers published by people selling migrations.

One gap runs through all four paths: none of them handles a wholesale customer base well. Companies, locations, payment terms, and tax treatment are either out of scope entirely or arrive as raw data with none of the checks a wholesale book needs. If your store has trade accounts, plan that part separately: Migrating Wholesale Customers to Shopify B2B covers what breaks and the tools that exist for it.

Timelines Worth Planning Around

Practitioner ranges are consistent enough to plan with: a small store under about 500 SKUs takes two to four weeks; a mid-size store four to eight; anything with B2B, ERP integration, or five-figure SKU counts runs three to six months. The long pole is rarely the data. It's the theme build and the app replacement work.

One date matters more than the rest: don't cut over in your peak season. The ranking volatility after any migration (Google's own documentation says weeks at minimum, and says to keep redirects live for at least 180 days) lands whenever you launch, so launch when a soft month can absorb it.

Going Deeper

Two parts of a migration reward more depth than a checklist can give them. For protecting your search traffic through the URL change, see Don't Lose Your Rankings: SEO for Shopify Migrations, including the specific limits of Shopify's redirect tool. For moving companies, payment terms, and tax treatment without retyping your wholesale book, see Migrating Wholesale Customers to Shopify B2B.

Nothing here is legal or tax advice, and the cost and timeline figures are industry ranges, not quotes. But the sequence is the sequence, and the failures are predictable enough that you can simply decide not to have them.