When you ask why so many stores are eyeing an exit from BigCommerce in 2026, the answer has nothing to do with the platform’s merits. It is simply a matter of the math.
Take the new Open Payment Provider Fee on BigCommerce: if you are not using an embedded gateway, you will be on the hook for 2% per order on Core, 1% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. At the same time they have ratcheted down the GMV caps – $50k to $30k on Core, $180k to $100k on Growth. If you are doing offline B2B or non-embedded checkout, that eats into your margin.
Consequently, the talk of migrating to Shopify is no longer about preference but operating cost. But there is a danger in thinking of it as a simple theme swap. You would be wrong. It is a business transformation involving your entire catalog, customer base, integration stack and redirect map. We see the same failure patterns in nearly every project that is not done right. This playbook is here to show you what changes between the two, where you can lose revenue and how to scope things so the store is up and running at 9am on launch day.
Why the BigCommerce to Shopify Migration Is Happening Now
Do not get me wrong, BigCommerce has not caved and Shopify is not some magic money-saver. The trend is more precise than that.
With the 2026 fee structure, BigCommerce is going to charge you even on manual or offline B2B orders. So a merchant putting 50 or 70% of his revenue through purchase orders is paying platform fees on transactions that never see a card. Over on Shopify Plus, the equivalent third-party gateway fees run about half a percent and there is no platform fee if you use Shopify Payments. For high-AOV and B2B operations, that spread can put a migration in the bank in less than a year.
Then you have the numbers. Shopify’s checkout completion rate is in the neighbourhood of 72.5%, well above the 62.6% industry average. Call it a ceiling rather than a promise; there is no rigorous study to separate the platforms, and the 15% uplift is a function of the platform itself. Still, for a store with poor customisation today, the gain is tangible. And with Shopify Plus putting on 34% growth to some 47,000 enterprise stores, all the third-party capital is flowing into its ecosystem around AI and Shop Pay.
None of this is to say you must make the move. It is to say the cost of standing still is rising while the cost of moving has levelled off. If your people are already at odds with BigCommerce over app sprawl or B2B workflows, the economics now make sense. For a wider view on the decision, have a look at our Shopify migration services playbook.
The Hard Parts Are Not Products. They Are the Data Model.
Founders like to think the catalog is the whole migration. In truth, products and collections transfer with enough fidelity. Where you get stung is in the underpinnings of BigCommerce that Shopify does not model in the same way.
Variants and modifiers do not map cleanly
The standard Shopify model puts a hard cap of 100 variants and three options on a product. BigCommerce has no such limit. But if you are using modifiers for engraving, file uploads or date pickers, those are not going to become Shopify variants. They will be line item properties you have to capture at the cart with an app or some theme work. Do not rely on automated tools like Cart2Cart for this; they will tell you one-to-one mapping fails on complex catalogs.
Get ahead of it. If personalisation is part of your offering, you need to rework the catalog before you touch the storefront. Put them in the wrong order and you will blow your timeline on the theme rebuild.
Customer passwords cannot move
You cannot import password hashes from BigCommerce via API and expect Shopify to take them. Every account comes in without a password and needs a reset. Make of this a launch campaign, not a technicality. If you ship a migration without a coordinated email to activate accounts, you will see returning-customer logins fall by double digits in month one. That is reorder and subscription revenue gone. Tell finance to brace for a dip in repeat-buyer conversion and time your comms with the cutover.
Historical orders behave as second-class objects
Orders you bring into Shopify are marked “imported” and do not play nice with the tax engine or analytics. Your finance team will want historical reports to tally and they will not. The best approach is to lock BigCommerce data in a warehouse and let Shopify be the source of truth only for post-cutover orders. Most operators find twelve months of history in the live platform is enough for returns and support. Five years of it is rarely worth the trouble.
Multi-storefront has no native equivalent
With BigCommerce you can have distinct storefronts on different domains with their own price lists and themes, all sharing inventory. Shopify Plus will let you create multiple stores in an org and use Markets for localisation, but it is not a native “manage once, publish many” setup. Multi-brand names will need a PIM or headless CMS in front of Shopify to get that workflow back. Ignore that and you will be looking at operational silos and mini-migrations by the sixth month.
B2B parity is closer, but not equal
As for B2B, Shopify Plus has come a long way since 2023. You have your company profiles, payment terms and customer-specific pricing. You will find the RFQ and quote side of things to be a soft spot, as is any complex price-list logic – think per-customer-group minimums or tiered discounts with multiple layers. That is where you are going to need Shopify Functions or a B2B app. Do not assume parity until you have put your actual B2B workflows on paper. There is a world of difference between “we have customer groups” and having an approval-chain driven quoting system.
Cost and Timeline: What Realistic Looks Like
Agencies that are open about their numbers put the ranges like this:
- Simple DTC (under $1M GMV, 1k–5k SKUs): $15k–$30k in 2–8 weeks.
- Mid-market ($1M–$10M with B2B/ERP): $30k–$60k over 12–18 weeks.
- Enterprise Shopify Plus, full B2B or multi-store: $75k to well over $150k, 16–24+ weeks.
Do not read the variance as vendor mark-up; it is a function of how much business judgment the project demands. A $20k job is largely a CSV export, some theme work and a redirect map. At $120k you are looking at a catalog and B2B workflow rebuild, re-integrating the ERP and a phased cutover for several stores. The risk is of an entirely different order.
And those 2-week, zero-downtime stories you see on X in 2025 and 2026? They are true for a very specific set of circumstances: small catalogs, no B2B, an embedded checkout and little customisation. For the rest of us, it is marketing spin. Go to the Reddit or Shopify Community threads and you will get the unvarnished account of the grind: redoing variant mappings, rebuilding apps and weeks of tidying up after launch.
SEO Is the Single Largest Determinant of Post-Launch Revenue
Put your resources where they count. If you do one thing right, make it the 301 redirects, metadata and content parity. Done well, you will have your search traffic back in 4 to 8 weeks. Make SEO a last-minute afterthought and you could be down 20 to 60% of your organic volume for half a year. Google will tell you a 301 doesn’t cost PageRank if it is “properly executed,” but there is a lot of work in that phrase.
It is a mechanical exercise:
- Crawl pre-migration. Use Screaming Frog on the live BigCommerce store to get every URL, status code, canonical, internal link and the like.
- Map your URLs. Shopify has its own way of doing things. Products are /products/slug, collections are /collections/slug. Blogs and filters change. You need a destination for every old URL.
- Build the redirects. Put the 301 map in before you launch, not after. Test it on staging.
- Keep the metadata. Move over the titles, descriptions and structured data. Don’t let the new theme step on them.
- Post-launch check. Crawl within 48 hours of cutover and put the new sitemap in Search Console. Be on the lookout for 404s in the first fortnight.
Watch out for the edge cases where stores tend to bleed: vanity URLs marketing has forgotten about, legacy landing pages from a campaign two years ago, or blog slugs that don’t follow the pattern. Get them in the map.
The Five Mistakes That Make Migrations Expensive
The post-mortems tell a consistent story of what goes wrong, and it is all avoidable.
Making it a theme swap. The theme is a small part of the equation. The work is in the orders, the integrations, the customers. When teams put design timelines first they lose control of the data.
Recreating BigCommerce in Shopify. Trying to hold onto every old quirk will give you a bloated app stack and a slow storefront. If you need five apps to do something BigCommerce had built in, change the workflow.
No dress rehearsal for cutover. Testing the happy path on one product and one discount zone tells you nothing. Put some realistic data and active integrations on staging and try to refund a test order through the new stack. If you haven’t done that, you haven’t tested for launch.
Lack of an owner. On a multi-brand project without a program manager to make the hard calls without a meeting, you end up with three disjointed mini-migrations.
Under-staffing hypercare. QA can only predict so much. In the first few weeks the promotion and tax logic will fail in ways you didn’t see coming. Have people on hand for it.
What a Workable Migration Plan Looks Like
There are no surprises in a well-run project, just discipline in the execution.
Start with discovery. Lay out the B2B rules, the promo logic, the SEO footprint. You will likely find 20 to 30% of your legacy complexity is no longer needed. Then run a sample migration – 50 products, 100 customers, some orders. Wipe it and start again. Anyone worth their salt on Reddit will tell you not to trust the first full import.
For the real thing, use the Bulk API. REST loops on a 50,000-SKU catalog are a non-starter given the throttling on the Admin API. Sequence your imports: catalog, then customers, then historical orders. And do a full dress-rehearsal cutover on staging with the redirect map and test payment gateways in place. If it breaks there you can fix it. On launch day you can’t.
Freeze window and delta import. We put a content freeze on BigCommerce N hours before cutover, then run the final delta for any order or customer updates. After that it is a matter of switching the DNS, making sure the redirect map holds up, and monitoring the results.
Hypercare with named owners. This is two to four weeks of close watching over everything from 404 spikes and failed payments to checkout drop-offs and the volume of support tickets. You will find most of the long-term value in this hypercare period; after all, Refact’s typical client relationship is two years or more. The migration hands you the new platform, but hypercare is where it actually starts to work for your business.
Where Refact Has Done This Work
The patterns we see are not theoretical. We have put them to use for more than 100 founders looking to build or migrate their ecommerce. Take Broya’s five-year Shopify build, for instance: the platform was not the hard part, it was tuning the collection flow and subscription product page to real conversion data. Or Oh La La! Macarons, which had to accommodate workshop bookings, custom orders and corporate gifting in one storefront when they left Squarespace for Shopify. Different platforms, same lesson: scoping a migration is simple, doing it well is another story. The value is in what the new store can do for you that the old one couldn’t.
If you are weighing related options, our Magento to Shopify migration guide has similar ground to cover with different data trade-offs. For those more concerned with the integrity of historical data and the catalog than the look of the storefront, there is the data migration service. And if you are an early-stage founder, you might want to read up on how Shopify development scopes work before you think the build will be a straight shot.
DIY, Tool, or Partner
A prudent merchant with under 200 SKUs, no B2B and a tidy URL structure can DIY the move. There is no need for anything more than CSV exports, the Store Importer and a redirect file you put together by hand. The work is there but it is contained.
But once you have thousands of SKUs with modifiers, integrations to speak of, and SEO traffic you cannot afford to lose, the math is different. Migration tools can do the heavy lifting, they won’t make the call on what to redesign or let go. That kind of judgment is what separates a better operating model from an pricier version of what you already have. A cheap migration tends to turn into an expensive cleanup.
At Refact’s ecommerce practice, we begin every project with a strategy phase (and a money-back guarantee) because the choices you make before the first CSV comes off BigCommerce will tell you whether launch day is under control or a free-for-all. If you want to put some pressure on your scope before you commit to a build, the ecommerce migration services conversation is for that.
