Shopify Plus migration

Ireland's biggest salon group was paying about £3,000 a month just to keep its Magento store patched. I built the Shopify Plus store they moved to, working alongside their agency. 22,495 customer accounts and more than 8,000 orders came across, gift cards kept working at the till, and the project went on to deliver 28% more online sales.

Migrations that go wrong tend to fail quietly. The store launches, it looks better than the old one, and three months later organic traffic is down and nobody can say exactly when it started. That's almost always redirects, and it's almost always avoidable.

The front end is rarely the risky part. Rebuilding a product page in Liquid is a known quantity. What takes the time, and decides whether a migration goes well, is everything underneath.

What comes across

Products, variants, collections, customers and order history all move, and every one of them needs mapping. Each platform models data differently, and the gaps are where the work is.

Customer records are the part people forget. Passwords can't move between platforms, so every customer sets a new one the first time they log in. That's a comms job as much as a technical one: an activation email at launch and an obvious reset route on the login page, both planned well before launch day.

Moving from your current platform

Magento to Shopify Plus

Magento's configurable products and custom options don't map one to one onto Shopify variants. A product with more than three option dimensions needs a decision, best made with your merchandising team. Magento stores also carry the most bespoke checkout and pricing logic, and most of it becomes a Shopify Function, a smaller app stack, or a feature nobody used. If you're weighing it up, I've written a longer guide to what a Magento to Shopify Plus migration really takes.

WooCommerce to Shopify Plus

WooCommerce sites carry years of plugin-written data. Sorting it into what becomes a metafield, what becomes a tag and what gets left behind is most of the data work. WordPress permalinks are free-form and Shopify's aren't, so the redirect map is longer than on any other platform. The blog moves too, and it's often where most of the organic traffic lives.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus

Commerce Cloud stores tend to have the cleanest catalogue data and the most business logic on top of it: promotions, customer groups, and ERP or order management integrations that expect the platform to behave a certain way. The migration is mostly mapping that logic: what Plus does natively, what becomes a Function, and what the integration has to absorb.

BigCommerce to Shopify Plus

BigCommerce is the most straightforward for products and orders. The work is in its price lists and customer groups, which become Shopify Markets for regions and B2B catalogues for trade customers, and in its free-form URLs.

URLs, redirects and rankings

This is the part that protects your traffic.

Every indexed URL on the old store needs a mapped destination on the new one. A redirect to the homepage won't do, because search engines treat it as a soft 404. Each URL needs a page-level match. Shopify's URL structure is fixed: products live under /products/, collections under /collections/, and a product reached through a collection has a different path to the same page. Getting the canonical structure right at the start is far easier than unpicking it after launch.

I pull every URL with an impression or a backlink, from Search Console, server logs and a crawl of the old site, map each one to its new destination, and load the redirects before the DNS change. Anything that can't be mapped gets a deliberate decision.

Rankings dip for a few weeks after any migration. With a proper redirect map they recover.

Apps and what replaces them

Every platform migration is also an app migration. Some things that needed an extension on Magento are built into Shopify. Some things that were built in become an app or a Shopify Function. Subscriptions, loyalty, reviews and search need the most thought, because each holds data that has to come too. Reviews especially are worth moving properly: they carry structured data and they're slow to rebuild.

The honest version of this conversation is that the app stack usually gets smaller. That's a good outcome, so I make each app decision on purpose, one at a time.

How long it takes

A straightforward catalogue with a clean redirect map and a theme built from an existing design takes 4 to 6 weeks. A Magento or Commerce Cloud store with heavy custom logic, B2B pricing and a large catalogue takes 8 to 10. What moves it is catalogue complexity, how much business logic sits outside the platform, and how much of the design is changing at the same time.

Migrating and redesigning at once is usually a false economy. If traffic drops, you won't know which change caused it.

Planning a move? Start with the Shopify Plus migration checklist, the one I use on real projects, or book a call and I'll tell you what I'd look at first.