Public crawl data has us tracking about 5,186 stores making the trek from Magento to Shopify in the first half of 2026. Only 291 have gone the reverse direction. You could call that 18 to 1 ratio the most one-sided exchange in mainstream ecommerce; it is a sign the market has already decided. What those numbers don’t convey is the reality of the migration: it is harder, more costly and takes longer than you might be led to believe by a vendor’s pitch.
So if you are on the fence about moving to Shopify, forget the export tools for a moment. The questions worth asking are what your catalog is like under the hood, what your team can put down as far as manual work goes, what your top pages are built on and what you can afford to leave behind. We have put together this guide to talk you through the decision in the manner a senior team would with a client.
Why Magento Merchants Are Moving (And When Not To)
We see the same drivers from the merchants we work with and the practitioners we talk to. There is a shortage of Magento developers and their hourly rates reflect it. Then you have hosting and patching eating into the budget better spent on retention or acquisition. Adobe Commerce pricing has been enough to nudge mid-market stores to look elsewhere, while Shopify Plus has made its case at the higher GMV levels by closing the feature gap on things like B2B and Markets.
But Magento is still the winner for some. If you are running an intricate multi-store setup with custom logic per store, or a deeply customized checkout and layered B2B approval chains, the math for a move gets complicated. Shopify is an opinionated platform; its resources for product, order and customer are set in stone. What was a custom entity in Magento now has to be shoehorned into metafields, tags or private logic. If your business is built on that kind of flexibility, you will pay more to replicate it on Shopify than to stay where you are.
The test is straightforward: are you paying for Magento’s flexibility but not using much of it? Then Shopify is likely your best operating model. If you are using every bit of it, you are looking at a redesign of your business, not just a change of platform.
What Cannot Be Migrated, And Why You Should Know Early
You will read in most blogs that a switch to Shopify is just a matter of exports and imports. That is a convenient way to frame it but it obscures the parts of the project that tend to be the most surprising. Do yourself a favour and make a list of what will not be moving, get your stakeholders to agree to it and plan your communications accordingly.
The non-portable items are fewer than you think but they matter:
- Customer passwords. The hashing is different between the two systems and Shopify won’t take an imported hash. Your customers will have to reset them through the activation flow when you cutover.
- Stored card data and payment tokens. PCI rules mean you can’t do a vault-to-vault transfer. Subscriptions and the like will need re-authorization.
- The financial state of old orders. You can import the history as records but you can’t make a refund or credit memo live again as a financial object. It will end up as a note on the order.
- Loyalty and gift card history. There is no general way to import these. You will have to rebuild them in the new app and put out a notice to customers.
- Faceted navigation URLs. Magento’s filterable category URLs don’t translate one to one to Shopify’s fixed patterns such as
/products/{handle}. - Server-side logic. Liquid is a templating language and has no database access. Any PHP-based business logic has to be done over with an app, the Storefront API or Shopify Functions.
Make your mind up on these before you put a budget to it. Otherwise you will be paying for the privilege of week-of-launch panic.
The Catalog Is The Project
Your catalog data model is the best indicator of how much of a headache the migration will be. With its entity-attribute-value structure, Magento allows a team to have as many product types and attributes as they like. Shopify will not let you have more than 3 options and 100 variants on a product. Try to put a Magento configurable with four options and a few hundred variant combinations into Shopify and you will find there is no clean place for it to go. You have to break it down into separate products and put in place the metafields and apps to model them, or do a complete rebuild as a configurator so the customer never sees the constraint.
If you don’t do an audit first, you will find out about it when you go to import. The products will end up in draft, your filters and collection logic will be broken and you are looking at weeks of rework. A team that has done their homework will have made an explicit call on how to reshape each product family before writing a line of code. That is what the project is built on.
Here is a sensible way to go about it:
1. Go through Magento and make an inventory of every product type, noting the variants for each parent. 2. Put a flag on anything over the 100/3 limit and determine what its shape should be on Shopify. 3. Distinguish between attributes you use for filtering and merchandising and those that are there out of habit. Move the former to metafields and let the latter go. 4. Sort out your collections. You won’t get a one-to-one translation from Magento categories without some trimming. 5. Do a dry run with a sample set to confirm everything is where it should be – active, on the Online Store channel, in the right collections and filterable.
For a small to mid-sized catalog, Matrixify is a good bet. It is one of the more capable migration tools for a staged move from Magento and handles batched, resumable imports well; their Magento migration documentation is a fair guide for sequencing. But once you are talking 100,000 SKUs, multi-store logic or complex relationships, an off-the-shelf tool won’t cut it. You need a custom pipeline leveraging Shopify’s GraphQL bulk operations with idempotent runs, backoff and retries so you can re-execute the migration in safety.
The hard limit is API throughput, not the size of your CSV. The REST Admin API is on a leaky bucket of about two calls a second while the GraphQL side gives you a cost-based budget of 1,000 points a minute. If your pipeline doesn’t respect that, it will stall and foul up the import.
SEO Is Where Migrations Lose Money After Launch
Most post-migration regret has nothing to do with a faulty checkout. It is the 20 to 30 per cent drop in organic traffic in the weeks following cutover due to URL changes, a sitemap you forgot to resubmit, missing redirects or thin content on your collection pages. The impact is real: you see it in lower sessions and a weaker new-customer flow, which puts more strain on paid media.
A proper SEO plan has five parts and you can’t skip any of them:
* **URL inventory.** Your source of truth is not the Magento sitemap but the list of ranking and revenue-generating URLs you pull from Google Search Console and verify with internal analytics. * **301 redirect matrix.** Every key Magento URL needs a Shopify counterpart that aligns with search intent. No blanket homepage redirects or chains. Past 50,000 you will run into admin UI limits and have to manage it via app or API. * **Meta and schema.** You have to port and reconstruct your titles, descriptions, alt text and structured data in Liquid since Shopify themes don’t give you the same schema as Magento out of the box. * **Collection page content.** A Magento category page will have more depth and internal links than the Shopify equivalent. You need to decide on a page-by-page basis what has to be put back in order to hold your rankings. * **60-day monitoring.** Have someone on top of index coverage, crawl errors and landing-page performance for at least two months. You want to be aware of any movement in rankings in days, not after the quarter is in the books.
Then there is the matter of search visibility beyond the usual results. If you want to be cited by AI shopping experiences, your store needs the right robots rules, theme schema and content patterns for the likes of ChatGPT and Perplexity. If your catalog is something you want to be easily discovered, I would put down the standard SEO checklist for a moment and have a look at our piece on AI search optimization for Shopify.
Where Costs And Timelines Actually Land
You will see figures like these reported by agencies. They are not statistically sampled but hold up when you talk to any number of practitioners in the field:
| Store profile | Typical cost | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Small (simple catalog, under 1k SKUs) | $800 – $5,000 | 4 to 8 weeks |
| Mid-market (1k-10k SKUs with some custom logic) | $8,000 – $25,000 | 8 to 16 weeks |
| Enterprise or B2B (Plus, complex catalog and integrations) | $20,000 – $80,000+ | 3 to 6+ months |
To be frank, the size of the catalog is only a secondary concern when it comes to price. What really drives the bill is having to rebuild custom features. A 500-SKU store with a heavy B2B workflow and complicated tax and promotion rules will set you back more than a 5,000-SKU operation with a straightforward checkout. So if someone hands you a $2,000 quote for a complex build, be wary. At that price you are likely getting a CSV import with no validation or feature work to speak of.
Then there are the outliers. One practitioner put it out there recently about a migration that tied up nine engineers for close to a year, including two weeks of workshops just to sort out refund edge cases on returned items with vouchers. It is an exception rather than the rule, but a good reminder of how the long tail of edge cases can make a migration slip.
B2B, Promotions, And Tax: Where Parity Breaks
Shopify Plus has come a long way on the B2B front. Payment terms, net-payment workflows and the like are now native, which is all most mid-market companies need. But if you have ERP-tied quote-to-order pipelines or approval chains of any depth, you are going to have to write some private logic or use a custom app.
Promotions are much the same. You won’t find the kind of customer-group conditions and combinations in Shopify Functions that Magento’s cart price rules allow for; the scopes and performance budgets are too tight. The sensible thing to do is not try to replicate the old rules one for one, but to identify what actually moves the needle on revenue and let the rest go.
Tax is another area where Shopify is more of a stickler than Magento, limiting your ability to override things manually. If you have a multi-jurisdiction VAT setup with bespoke rules, expect to have to redesign it, perhaps with an outside tax engine. Put off that discussion and you will find at launch time that your B2B tax IDs or exemptions are not behaving as they should.
My advice is to map every business-critical feature to a destination before you start developing: is it a native or Plus-only function? A standard app? Or a custom job? If you can’t draw that map cleanly, you don’t know your scope yet.
Cutover, Staging, And The Parts Shopify Does Not Do Well
You won’t find a proper native staging environment in Shopify. The theme preview and duplicate functions are handy to an extent, but they have their limits. For the most part, teams put together a staging store that is in sync with production and make peace with the fact that some work has to be tested in production. You end up with strict content freezes before cutover, a narrow window for migrating orders and customers, and you need a manual plan to reconcile any orders that come in while DNS is propagating.
We have seen how big-bang cutovers fail; it is all too predictable. Letting things run in parallel with bidirectional sync will also get you there, just more slowly as data drifts apart. What holds up is a controlled cutover of short duration with a one-way delta migration right before you flip the DNS, and someone with a name on it keeping an eye on analytics, checkout, support and order routing for the first 48 hours.
Under pressure, you want a pre-launch checklist you can actually use rather than a long one you can’t:
- Storefront: check product status, pricing, images, inventory, navigation and search, collection filters
- Transactions: shipping, taxes, payment methods, discount logic and the confirmation emails
- Accounts: customer activation, order history, password reset messaging
- Tracking: ad pixels, conversion events, consent banner, connected domains and your analytics
- Operations: refund flow, notification emails, ERP or 3PL handoff, fulfillment routing
Don’t let “page loads” be your pass condition. A site can render without a hitch and still be bleeding revenue where it counts.
Where Refact Tends To Fit
In our experience, the ecommerce side of things gets underway well before a migration project is even scoped. We have done discovery for merchants and found the answer was to migrate, or in some cases to put down the platform and fix Magento, or even to simplify the business first.
Take Broya Living, a Shopify storefront we have been with for years. There the focus was on conversion – getting the collection logic and product page right, and a checkout made for subscriptions – not the platform itself. With Kinfire Chronicles, a build for a tabletop publisher, we had to restructure the catalog before the storefront could function. Both tell you the same thing: the platform is seldom the constraint. It is the model behind the catalog, the page architecture and the operational handoffs.
If you want to see how we sequence these moves at a founder level, our Shopify migration playbook goes into it. Our ecommerce migration services page will show you the scope we usually work in, and for those who want the technical bits like data or website migration priced out on their own, we have service pages for that.
The Short Version
Moving from Magento to Shopify makes sense if their operating model is better for your team and your margins and you are prepared to leave some old features behind. If you are still making use of Magento’s flexibility and haven’t done the legwork to see what translates, you should think twice about it or put it off.
The good projects don’t necessarily have the best tools. They have a solid SEO plan, validated data, a lean app stack, named owners for cutover and a 60-day watch after launch. The ones that go wrong are the CSV exports followed by a hasty launch.
Should you be in the decision phase and want a senior team to get the strategy in order before any code is written, that is what our ecommerce development and migration practice is for. We back the discovery with a money-back guarantee. It is the easiest way to ensure the conversation is honest before anyone puts pen to paper.
