Nic Dunn, CEO, Charle Agency
Quick Answer
To migrate to Shopify, pick one of three solutions based on store size and number of SKUs: a manual CSV backup and import for under 200 products, a migration app like Matrixify for most merchants, or a Shopify Partner company for Plus, B2B, or 10,000+ SKU businesses. Step 1 is always the same: take a full backup. Then move products, categories of collections, customer information, orders, blog posts, and pages. Build a complete 301 redirect map before cutover so SEO rankings hold. Most Shopify migrations complete in under three months according to Shopify, though full Plus replatforming projects with custom integrations typically run 8 to 16 weeks.
Why brands migrate to Shopify
Shopify has become the default ecommerce platform for ambitious businesses because it removes the management work that doesn't compound. Hosting, security patches, PCI compliance, checkout optimization, and infrastructure scaling all sit with the Shopify platform, freeing the merchant team to spend its time on growth instead of firefighting. The trade-off used to be customization. In 2026, that trade-off has largely disappeared: the app store ecosystem covers tens of thousands of plugins and integrations, Online Store 2.0 themes give sectioned design control, and headless options like Hydrogen and Oxygen open up fully custom storefronts for merchants that need them. The native features that ship with the platform, including multi-currency, Shop Pay, Markets, and a unified order data store, cover what legacy platforms charge extra for.
The business case at a glance
For most brands the migration delivers four wins: the world's best converting checkout, predictable store performance under traffic spikes, lower total cost of ownership versus a legacy platform, and an upgrade cycle handled by Shopify rather than your dev team. Why brands choose Shopify covers the strategic case in more detail, and the data on platform consolidation among US D2C brands has been consistent for three years.
When the transition isn't the right move
The transition is the wrong move if your current platform is fundamentally working and the data migration is being driven by trend pressure rather than commercial pain. The cost of a Shopify Plus replatforming project sits between $30k and $200k depending on complexity, and the opportunity cost of three months of distraction is real. Some brands with deeply custom B2B logic that doesn't map cleanly to Shopify's data model, or whose storefront features rely on platform-specific extensions, should pressure-test platform fit before signing. Keep the limitations of each option in mind before committing.
The three migration methods
Shopify themselves frame the migration process as three paths: manual CSV, a migration app, or a Shopify Partner. That framing holds. The right choice depends on catalog size, integration complexity, and how much risk you can tolerate at cutover. For example, the same store can use the CSV path for products and an app for orders.
Manual CSV import
The cheapest path. Shopify's native CSV importer covers products and customers, and you can paste page and blog content across by hand. It works for under 200 SKUs and a single founder doing the job over a weekend. The catch: orders, passwords, and saved payment methods don't carry over by CSV. If your customer base expects their order history to follow them, this path will frustrate them.
Migration app: Matrixify and Shopify's Store Migration app
Matrixify is the most-used migration app for stores in the 200 to 10,000 SKU band. It moves products, variants, collections, customer information, orders, discounts, draft orders, pages, blog posts, redirects, files, and custom data (metafields and metaobjects) using Excel templates. Pricing starts at $20 per month for the Basic plan, which covers 5,000 products per import with unlimited reruns. Shopify also ships a free Store Migration app, one of many apps in the app store, that pulls data directly from Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Wix, Amazon, eBay, Clover, and Lightspeed R/X (Vend); its handling of variants and SKUs has known limitations based on user reviews.
Shopify Partner agency
For Shopify Plus, B2B, headless storefronts, or 10,000+ SKU catalogs, a Shopify Partner agency is usually the right call. The total cost is higher, but the company owns SEO equity through cutover, custom integrations to ERPs and 3PLs, theme development against your brand system, and the rebuild of any logic that doesn't map cleanly to native Shopify. Search the Shopify Partner Directory for vetted experts with deep platform knowledge.
What transfers from each source platform
Different source platforms surrender different data cleanly. The cleanest moves are from Square, Wix, Etsy, and Squarespace, which Shopify supports natively through the Store Migration app or a CSV export. Magento, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud need either Matrixify or a partner-led migration because the schemas diverge sharply from Shopify's. WooCommerce sits in between: Matrixify has a dedicated WordPress connector that handles most stores with ease.
What always transfers
Products, customers, collections, blog posts, pages, and basic order history. With Matrixify or a partner-led migration, metafields, metaobjects, draft orders, gift cards, and store credits also carry across. SEO redirects can be bulk-imported into Shopify's native redirect manager via CSV, which is the single most important data type to get right.
What never transfers
Customer passwords cannot be migrated because they're hashed irreversibly on the source platform. Customers must reactivate their account via an email invite. Saved payment methods (stored cards, PayPal tokens, BNPL agreements) also stay behind for PCI compliance reasons. The first checkout on Shopify will ask customers to re-enter their payment details, which is the single biggest source of friction at cutover. Telegraph this to customers in advance.
Prepare and clean your data
Migration is a rare chance to ship a cleaner store than the one you're leaving. Most merchants carry years of catalog debt: duplicate SKUs, orphaned variants, inconsistent collection categories, broken product images, and metafields that no longer map to anything. Export everything into a master data spreadsheet, audit it ruthlessly, and decide what store data to bring across before the import, and what information is better left on the old platform.
The audit that actually matters
Run a deduplication pass on product titles and SKUs. Validate every image URL still resolves. Standardise variant option names so "Size: Medium", "Medium", and "M" don't end up as three separate variants on Shopify. Flag products you'd happily discontinue and don't migrate them. The general rule: if a product hasn't sold in 18 months and isn't a brand-defining hero, it probably doesn't deserve a slot in the new catalog.
Reshape your data to Shopify's model
The Shopify data model has limits worth knowing before you import. Standard products support up to three option types (Size, Color, Material) with up to 100 variants each. Shopify Plus removed the old 100-variant cap in late 2025 via Combined Listings, which now supports up to 2,048 variants per product with separate media and merchandising per child. If your source platform allowed more option types or richer metadata structures, decide whether to flatten the data or use metafields and metaobjects to preserve it. Walk every category of store data through this exercise: products, customers, orders, content. Each one needs a target home in the Shopify model before the import begins.
Import products and collections
Products come first, customers second, historical orders last. This order matters because Shopify links order line items to their associated products and customers at import. Reverse the order and you'll end up with orphan orders that don't reconcile against your catalog.
Products and variants
For Matrixify imports, run a Dry-Run first so the app generates a template Excel file with every field Shopify accepts. Fill in the data, validate it in Excel, then import. For catalogs over 5,000 SKUs, batch into multiple imports. Validate a sample of 50 products manually after each batch to catch image, variant, or pricing issues before they multiply.
Collections
The Shopify store structure supports two collection types: manual collections (products you assign by hand) and automated collections (rules based on tags, vendor, type, or price). Most legacy platforms don't have a direct collection-export equivalent, so you'll either rebuild collections manually in the new store or use Matrixify's collection import. Recreate URLs thoughtfully: collections that ranked well on the old platform should keep handle structure where possible to preserve link equity. Once imported into your new store, merchandise the order with an app like Sort'd Collection Merchandiser so new arrivals and bestsellers surface first instead of products appearing alphabetically.
Migrate customers and orders
The customer migration is where merchant teams underestimate the work. The customer data import itself is easy. The communications and customer service load around reactivation isn't, and the gap between the old platform's account experience and Shopify's is where most friction surfaces.
Customer accounts
Export customer records including names, email addresses, order history reference, account status, and marketing preferences. Import via CSV for under 5,000 customers, or via Matrixify or the Admin API for larger sets. Passwords stay behind. Use a tool like BAIS Bulk Account Invites Sender or Shopify's native customer account invite to send a branded reactivation email. Time the send for 24 to 48 hours after launch, not at the moment of cutover, so support teams aren't drowning on day one.
Historical orders
You can import historical orders for analytics and customer-service lookup, but they don't behave like native Shopify orders. You can't refund or re-fulfilll them through the standard flow. For most brands, importing the last 12 to 24 months is enough; older data is better held in a data warehouse or BI tool alongside Shopify. Subscriptions are a special case: they almost always require a dedicated subscriptions app and a coordinated migration plan to avoid double-charging.
Payments, shipping and tax
These three need to be live and tested before the DNS cutover. Payment gateway misconfiguration is the most common cause of revenue loss on launch day.
Payments
Shopify Payments is the default for most brands: it accepts cards and digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay) with lower processing fees than third-party gateways. If you were using Stripe, note that Shopify Payments is powered by Stripe under the hood, so you'll access it through Shopify's dashboard rather than Stripe's. For international stores, enable local payment methods (iDEAL, Bancontact, Klarna, Sofort) per market to lift conversion. Saved payment credentials don't transfer; customers will re-enter card details at first checkout.
Shipping
Define shipping zones first, then assign rates per zone. Shopify supports flat rate, free shipping thresholds, carrier-calculated rates (Shopify Advanced and Plus plans), and local delivery. If you use a 3PL like ShipStation or a fulfilllment partner like Shopify Fulfillment Network, connect the integration before launch and place test orders. Don't forget packaging weights and handling fees. These are routinely missed and surface as margin leaks weeks after launch.
Tax and international
Enable Shopify's automatic tax calculations and verify your registrations are entered correctly for each of your selling locations. For multi-region selling across countries, the Shopify Markets feature handles per-market pricing, languages, and checkout experiences. Shopify Markets Pro adds duty calculation and merchant-of-record handling for international markets, which removes a large operational burden from your operations team and keeps visitors converting at a similar rate across borders. Always validate tax setup with your accountant before launch, especially if you're operating across the EU or US state lines. These are the platform-level features that quietly justify the move for businesses selling across borders.
Protect SEO through cutover
This is the section where most migrations go wrong, and it's where Charle puts the most planning energy. A bad SEO migration can erase a year of organic growth in a week. A good one usually leaves you ranking higher than before because Shopify's technical SEO foundations (clean URLs, sectioned themes, schema support, fast Core Web Vitals) tend to outperform the legacy stack you're leaving.
The 301 redirect map is non-negotiable
Before launch, export every URL that has ever ranked or earned a backlink from Google Search Console and Ahrefs. Map each one to its closest Shopify equivalent. Avoid catch-all redirects to the homepage: Google reads those as soft 404s. Avoid redirect chains (URL A → B → C); always redirect once. Shopify's native URL Redirects tool supports CSV bulk upload, which is the fastest way to load a few thousand mappings.
Preserve what's ranking, sharpen what isn't
For pages ranking in positions 1 to 10, keep titles, H1s, meta descriptions, and core content structure consistent. The intent that earned the ranking is in that page; changing it casually invites a drop. For pages ranking 11 to 30, the migration is an opportunity to rewrite for better entity coverage, tighter intent, and stronger E-E-A-T signals.
Schema, sitemap, and Search Console
Validate Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, and FAQPage schema using Google's Rich Results Test before launch. Submit the new XML sitemap to Google Search Console on the day of cutover. Set up a fresh property for the new domain if applicable, and keep the old property live for at least six months to monitor crawl errors. Run a Screaming Frog crawl of the new site one week before launch to catch broken internal links, redirect chains, and orphan pages.
Common migration errors and how to fix them
The same handful of errors and challenges appear in nearly every Shopify migration. Shopify's own help center calls out three (products imported but unpublished, missing product details, failed variants), and we'd add four more from Charle's experience. Another point worth flagging up front: testing reveals most of these before they hit production.
Products imported but unpublished
If imported products are marked as hidden, they won't appear on the storefront until you make them available to sales channels. Fix: bulk edit the product list, filter by "Hidden", and publish to the Online Store channel.
Missing variant images and option mismatches
Variant images often fail to attach if the option names don't match between source and target. Standardise option naming before the import (always "Color" not "Colour" or "color", always "Size" not "size" or "Sz"). For products that import without variants, the source likely had a structural option Shopify can't represent. Add the product manually or remodel using metafields.
Broken redirect chains
If you migrated once before (e.g. Magento 1 → Magento 2 → Shopify), old redirects may now chain. Flatten them: every old URL should redirect once, directly to its final Shopify destination. Use Screaming Frog's redirect report to identify chains.
Tax miscalculation in new regions
Country-specific tax rules don't automatically transfer. Re-enter sales tax permits, VAT registrations, and tax overrides per region. Test checkout from each market with a representative address before launch.
Test, soft launch, then go live
A staged launch beats a big bang every time. Run a soft launch on a password-protected preview domain, then cut DNS to production once the critical steps in the testing checklist are complete.
Soft launch checks
Place real orders across multiple payment methods. Process a refund, cancel an order, partially fulfilll an order, and issue store credit. Test the abandoned cart flow end-to-end. Confirm GA4, Meta Pixel, TikTok, and any other tracking pixels fire on the right events. Run a checkout from a mobile device on cellular data and time it.
Pre-launch checklist
- Storefront password removed
- Domain connected and resolving to Shopify
- 301 redirects bulk-uploaded and verified with Screaming Frog
- XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console
- Product images, alt text, and metadata audited on top 50 products
- Test orders successful on every payment method
- App functionality verified (email flows, reviews, loyalty, subscriptions)
- GA4, Meta Pixel, and other tracking confirmed live
- Customer service team briefed on reactivation queries
- Site speed measured (PageSpeed Insights, Core Web Vitals dashboard)
- Schema validated via Google's Rich Results Test
- Post-launch monitoring set up (uptime, error tracking, GSC crawl errors)
Plan for a 30-day stabilisation window after launch. Rankings often fluctuate for two to four weeks, then settle. Don't make significant content or structural changes during that window. Let the dust settle so you can attribute any movement cleanly.
After 100+ Shopify migrations, here's what we'd do differently
The pattern across the migrations Charle has shipped is that success or failure is decided in week one, not week ten. The technical execution of moving products and customers is largely solved by Matrixify or a competent dev team. What separates the migrations that lift rankings from the ones that tank them is the discipline of treating SEO as a week-one workstream, not a launch-week cleanup.
The specific thing we'd push every brand to do: build the 301 redirect map in week one, not week nine. Pull the URL list from Ahrefs and Google Search Console, map each ranking URL to its Shopify destination before any theme work begins, and treat that map as a fixed constraint the new site has to honor. Every URL change after week one costs you twice: once when the theme changes, once when the redirect map has to catch up.
The migration we're proudest of last year was a lacrosse and field hockey brand moving from BigCommerce. We mapped 2,873 redirects in week one. Organic traffic dipped 5% the week of cutover, recovered within two weeks, and was up 47% nine months later. The migration we'd most like to redo was a beauty brand where the URL structure changed mid-build and we didn't catch every redirect. They lost 41% of organic in the first month and took six months to recover. The catalog migration was perfect. The redirect map wasn't. That's the whole game.
The second thing we'd change: cut the catalog before you migrate it, not after. Brands routinely import 8,000 products and then "rationalise" three months later. Cutting 2,000 dead SKUs before the import saves the theme team two weeks of merchandising, makes the search index leaner from day one, and removes the "we'll fix it later" debt that always becomes "we never fixed it".
Charle x Shopify migrations
Charle is a Shopify Plus partner specializing in store replatforms from Magento, Visualsoft, WordPress, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and bespoke builds. The team handles the full Shopify migration lifecycle and post-launch optimization of the new store. We bring developers, SEO strategists, integration engineers, and merchandising support into every migration. The team owns the migration end-to-end: discovery and audit, data architecture, theme and integration build, the 301 redirect plan, soft launch QA, cutover, and a 30-day stabilisation window post-launch.
Our standard approach maps to the 12-week timeline above for mid-sized Plus builds. Larger projects with B2B, headless, or complex international setups run 12 to 20 weeks. We integrate with Klaviyo, Patchworks, VL OMNI, and any ERP/3PL through Shopify's API or custom middleware where required.
If you're considering a Shopify migration, visit our page on Shopify migration services or get in touch for a scoping conversation. For migrations from specific platforms, we publish playbooks on migrating Magento to Shopify, the Shopify SEO migrations guide, and Shopify vs BigCommerce for brands evaluating the move.
