Magento to Shopify Migration

Magento merchants migrate to Shopify when the cost-to-feature ratio stops making sense. Adobe Commerce licensing fees. Specialized developer rates that climb every year. Extension dependencies that fight each other on every release. Plus the version-upgrade pain that big Magento installs know too well.

We’ve handled Magento to Shopify migrations from both Magento 1 (end-of-life since 2020) and Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce installs. The work is real engineering, not a data dump.

Recent Migrations and Custom Builds

Magento migrations are mostly two jobs: moving a large, messy catalog cleanly, and rebuilding the custom modules the store depends on as Shopify apps. These are recent projects of each kind.

Custom Shopify app

Manual order routing, eliminated

The global leader in chemical-free decaf runs a marketplace where every order routes to an independent roaster. Routing on metaobjects, live carrier rates per origin, automated label dispatch.

See the Swiss Water project →

Shopify CA → US

One bespoke theme, two regional stores

A complex theme built on metaobjects and metafields, migrated intact with store data to a new US store to open regional markets. No theme rework.

See the Waste Free project →

“Victoria Garland brought invaluable Shopify expertise and helped us streamline our process. They’ve truly been a great partner, and we continue to work with them.”

Who you'll work with

Victoria Garland Owner and Chief Creative Officer 13 years on Shopify

Alex Massaad CTO and Co-Founder 14 years on Shopify

You scope the project with the people who build it. The developer on the kickoff call is the developer on launch day.

What We Migrate

• Products. Simple and configurable products map directly. Bundle and grouped products map to the right Shopify pattern, with attributes preserved as metafields where useful.
• Customers. All accounts migrated. Passwords reset on first login via Shopify’s standard flow.
• Orders. Full Magento order history visible in the Shopify admin for support and analytics.
• Categories. Magento categories mapped to Shopify collections with smart rules where they apply.
• B2B catalogs, customer groups, and tier pricing. Mapped to native Shopify B2B on Plus, or to apps on standard.
• Multi-store views. Mapped to Shopify expansion stores when separate storefronts are genuinely needed.
• Blog and CMS content. Posts, pages, custom blocks where exportable.
• Redirects. Every indexed Magento URL gets a 301 to the Shopify equivalent.
• SEO metadata. Titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, structured data.

What Actually Breaks

Magento to Shopify is the hardest of the common migrations. Not because the data won’t move, it will, but because Magento stores tend to be older and bigger, carrying more custom logic than the average WooCommerce or BigCommerce install. A store that’s been running since the Magento 1 days has usually accumulated a decade of attributes and extensions, along with store-view quirks nobody fully documents. That’s the real work: not the export, the untangling.

These are the places the migration genuinely breaks, the ones specific to Magento rather than the generic advice every migration post repeats.

1. Product Types Beyond Simple and Configurable

Magento has six product types. Shopify effectively has one, with variants. The mapping:

• Simple to a Shopify product.
• Configurable to a product with variants. Clean, as long as you’re within Shopify’s option limits.
• Bundle to a bundle app, a metafield-driven grouping, or Shopify’s native bundles, depending on whether the components need independent inventory.
• Grouped to a collection or a custom “buy the set” pattern, since Shopify has no native grouped-product concept.
• Virtual and downloadable to a digital-product app, since Shopify treats these as products with shipping switched off and a delivery app.

Configurables are fine. Bundles and grouped products are where you make architectural decisions, and the right answer depends on how they’re actually merchandised and stocked. We settle this during the audit, not halfway through the build.

2. The EAV Attribute Model

This is the Magento-specific one most guides miss. Magento stores product data in an EAV (entity-attribute-value) model, which means a store can have hundreds of custom attributes organised into attribute sets. Shopify has a fixed set of product fields and metafields.

Every custom Magento attribute needs a decision: does it become a Shopify variant option, a metafield, a tag, or does it get dropped because nothing actually uses it? Large Magento catalogs routinely carry attributes that were added for a campaign in 2018 and never removed. The migration is a good moment to audit them, but that audit takes time, and skipping it means either losing data or importing a mess of metafields nobody reads.

3. URL Rewrites and the .html Suffix

Magento product URLs often carry a .html suffix and sit at the domain root (/blue-widget.html), and category URLs can be deeply nested (/furniture/living-room/sofas.html). Shopify forces /products/ and /collections/ prefixes and doesn’t use .html.

Every one of those changes needs a 301. Magento’s own url_rewrite table is the source of truth for what’s actually indexed, including the historical rewrites Magento generated automatically every time a product’s URL key changed. Export that table, don’t just crawl the live site, or you’ll miss redirects for URLs Google still has in its index. This is the single most common cause of a post-migration traffic drop from Magento.

4. The Store / Website / Store-View Hierarchy

Magento’s website/store/store-view structure lets one installation run multiple storefronts, currencies, and languages. Shopify has no direct equivalent, and deciding what it maps to is one of the biggest architecture calls in the project:

• Language and currency variations of one brand map to Shopify Markets with Translate & Adapt.
• Genuinely distinct storefronts (different catalogs, different fulfillment) map to Shopify Plus expansion stores.
• A single catalog served regionally usually collapses into one store with Markets, and the merchant discovers they were carrying multi-store complexity they no longer need.

More often than not it’s that last case. We settle it early, because it determines your pricing tier, app stack, and theme architecture.

5. Layered Navigation

Magento’s layered (faceted) navigation is powerful and often SEO-indexed, with filterable attributes generating their own crawlable URLs. Shopify’s native filtering (Search & Discovery) works differently and doesn’t generate the same indexable filter pages by default. If you’ve been earning traffic on filtered category pages, that traffic needs a plan: either a collection-per-facet strategy with proper canonicals, or a filtering app that handles indexable facets. Don’t assume it carries over.

6. Extensions Have No One-to-One Map

Most Magento installs run on a stack of third-party modules, and almost none map cleanly to a single Shopify app. Each one gets triaged: a native Shopify feature covers it, a Shopify app replaces it, or we build a small custom app or Shopify Function. The output of that triage is an extension-to-replacement map you sign off on before kickoff, so no piece of functionality goes missing during launch week. Budget real time for this on an enterprise install; it’s often the longest line in the audit.

7. Customer Passwords

Same constraint as every migration. Magento uses one-way password hashing, Shopify uses its own, and neither exposes the raw values. Every customer resets on first login. Plan the comms email and time the cutover so support is staffed for the “I can’t log in” wave in the first 48 hours.

8. B2B Is a Re-Modeling, Not a Move

Adobe Commerce B2B has company accounts, shared catalogs, tier pricing, requisition lists, and quote workflows. Shopify Plus native B2B now covers most of this, which makes these migrations far cleaner than they were two years ago, but the data model is different. Magento thinks in customer groups and tier prices; Shopify thinks in companies, locations, and catalogs. Moving a B2B store is re-modeling how your wholesale relationships are structured, not a CSV import. It gets a dedicated planning conversation.

The Migration Order We Run

1. Audit the catalog and attributes. Product types, attribute sets, and which custom attributes actually drive anything.
2. Export the url_rewrite table. This, not a site crawl, is your redirect source of truth.
3. Decide the store architecture. One store with Markets, or expansion stores on Plus.
4. Triage extensions. Native feature, app, or custom build, one decision per module.
5. Model B2B if it’s in scope, before any data moves.
6. Migrate data in order: products, customers, categories, CMS pages, redirects, then orders for reference.
7. Build the storefront on Online Store 2.0, matched to brand and merchandising.
8. Test in a development store with real data and real test orders.
9. Cutover. DNS swap, watch checkout for 48 hours, monitor Search Console weekly for the first month.

The audits and the storefront rebuild are where the weeks go. The cutover itself is a couple of hours.

Realistic Timelines

Most of the variability comes from three places: attribute and extension cleanup, B2B re-modeling, and integrations with external systems (ERP, PIM, 3PL) that were wired into Magento directly.

Mistakes We See Most Often

1. Crawling the live site for redirects instead of exporting url_rewrite. You miss the historical rewrites Google still has indexed, and rankings drop for URLs you didn’t know existed.
2. Importing every attribute as a metafield. Audit first. Half of them aren’t used, and a wall of empty metafields helps nobody.
3. Underestimating bundle and grouped products. They look simple in the admin and turn into a merchandising project.
4. Treating B2B as a data move. Adobe Commerce B2B is a different project than a B2C catalog with a few wholesale accounts.
5. Forgetting layered-navigation SEO. If filtered category pages earn traffic, they need a plan, not a shrug.

Do You Need Help?

A small Magento store with simple products and no B2B can be moved by a capable developer with the right tooling. The Shopify Help Center covers the basics of importing from Magento.

An enterprise Adobe Commerce install with a decade of attributes, custom modules, B2B, multi-store, and traffic you can’t afford to lose is not a DIY job. The cost of a botched Magento migration, lost rankings from missed redirects, missing customization data, a B2B model that doesn’t match how you actually sell, is far higher than the cost of working with a team that has done it before.

Why Brands Choose Us for Magento Migrations

Enterprise Magento installs are bigger and more interconnected than the average Shopify build, and the pattern recognition from having done this before is most of what saves you weeks. We design and build a custom theme as part of the migration rather than billing it as a separate project afterward, because a default theme rarely does a catalog this size justice. We stay on for 30 days after launch, since the edge cases tend to surface in that first month and you want someone reachable when they do.

And we scope honestly. Some Magento installs don’t move cleanly to standard Shopify and genuinely need Plus. We’ll tell you which tier actually fits during discovery, before you commit to anything.

How Much Does a Magento to Shopify Migration Cost?

Two numbers matter, and they move in opposite directions. The migration project is a one-time cost, usually in the mid-to-high five figures for an enterprise install, driven by catalog size, B2B complexity, and how many custom modules need a Shopify-side replacement. Against that sits what you stop paying: Adobe Commerce licensing, the specialist Magento developer rates that climb every year, and the hosting and security overhead a self-managed Magento install carries.

For most merchants the running cost drops meaningfully after the move, which is why the migration tends to pay for itself inside the first year or two. We give you a fixed scope after the audit, so the project number is settled before any code runs.

Related Reading

• BigCommerce to Shopify migration guide. The same territory for a BigCommerce source platform.
• WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide. The same territory for a WooCommerce source platform.
• How much a custom Shopify store costs in 2026. What the rebuild costs after the move.

Related Services

• Shopify migration agency. Our migration hub, covering WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce.
• Shopify Plus agency. For Magento Commerce migrations that need the Plus tier.
• Shopify app development agency. For custom modules that need a Shopify-side replacement.
• Shopify web design agency. The theme work that happens during migration.

Get a Migration Quote

Share details on your Magento install: version, SKU count, B2B setup, multi-store complexity, and any custom extensions. We’ll come back with a detailed scope, a timeline, and a quote. Request a migration quote.