DATA-SAFE REPLATFORMING

The Complete Guide to Migrating your eCommerce Store to Shopify

From Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Commerce Cloud

Replatforming is a major business decision. Done well, it can reduce technical debt, lower operating costs and give your teams significantly more freedom to move. Done badly, it can put years of customer data, SEO equity and operational stability at risk.

Our Complete Guide to Migrating Your eCommerce Store to Shopify walks through what businesses need to consider before making the move, from choosing the right migration strategy to protecting your data, integrations and search visibility at launch.

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Is Shopify the right next step for your business?

Legacy and heavily customized commerce platforms can become increasingly expensive to maintain. Upgrades require development resources, integrations become harder to manage, and even relatively simple changes can take longer than they should.

Shopify changes that operating model.

Its SaaS infrastructure removes much of the burden associated with hosting, security and platform upgrades, while giving commerce teams access to a mature ecosystem of apps, APIs and native functionality.

But replatforming is not simply a matter of moving products from one system to another.

The real question is how to make the move without losing what already works.

01

How Shopify compares to your current platform

Understand the differences between Shopify and platforms including:

  • Magento / Adobe Commerce
  • WooCommerce
  • BigCommerce
  • Salesforce Commerce Cloud
  • Custom and open-source platforms

We look beyond feature lists to consider infrastructure, development requirements, extensibility, checkout, internationalization and total cost of ownership.

02

Which migration approach makes sense

Not every business needs a complete rebuild.

The guide breaks migration into three strategic paths:

Lift and Shift
Move quickly and retain much of the existing experience.

Move and Improve
Migrate while selectively improving areas such as UX, mobile performance, checkout or SEO.

Redesign and Re-Architect
Use the migration as an opportunity to rethink the storefront, technology stack and operating model.

03

How to protect your data

Products are only one part of a migration.

We cover planning and validation for:

  • Products and variants
  • Customers
  • Historical orders
  • Collections and taxonomy
  • Content and media
  • Discounts and marketing data

You'll also see how reconciliation, dry runs and delta migrations help reduce risk before cutover.

04

How to preserve SEO and marketing performance

A migration should not mean starting again with Google.

The guide covers:

  • 301 redirect strategy
  • URL and metadata migration
  • Schema and structured data
  • Sitemap validation
  • Analytics and GTM migration
  • Paid media tracking
  • Post-launch SEO monitoring

The objective is simple: change platforms without throwing away years of digital equity.

05

How to handle integrations

ERP, WMS, CRM, email, loyalty, reviews, subscriptions, tax and fulfillment systems all need to continue working after launch.

We explain how to map the existing ecosystem and decide where Shopify-native functionality, third-party apps or custom integrations make the most sense.

Case Studies

Migrate

Redesign

Customize

Lonely Planet

We increased Lonely Planet’s revenue by 5x

Migrate

Redesign

Customize

Lonely Planet came to us after realizing their custom eCommerce platform required too much maintenance for not enough return.

They wanted to move to Shopify Plus to benefit from checkout features such as Shop Pay and loved the idea of a CMS their team could modify. The result was more than they could have imagined. Within the first year, revenue DOUBLED. On top of that, we were responsible for making sure information made it to one of six international warehouses...and that tracking made it back to Shopify.

Lonely Planet came to us after realizing their custom eCommerce platform required too much maintenance for not enough return. They wanted to move to Shopify Plus to benefit from checkout features such as Shop Pay, the ability to integrate with their ERP system and to take advantage of all the benefits of the Shopify ecosystem.

View Case Study View Case Study

Migrate

Redesign

B2B

Blue Ocean Traders

We successfully moved business operations for this b2b brand to Shopify Plus.

Migrate

Redesign

Customize

Blue Ocean Traders was on a custom platform with a custom Netsuite Integration. Needless to say it moved slow and any changes were basically impossible to make.

They tasked us with migrating to Shopify Plus and reworking their Netsuite integration with minimal change to their overall business process. The migration required detailed work on over 50,000 SKUs along with unique business processes. Order edits in Netsuite needed to flow back into Shopify to ensure the customer always had an accurate order history.

Blue Ocean traders was on a custom platform with a custom Netsuite Integration. Needless to say it moved slow and any changes were basically impossible to make. They tasked us with migrating to Shopify Plus and integrating their ERP.

View Case Study View Case Study
Three web pages displaying interior design products on a light blue background - Blue Ocean Traders Migration
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What migration actually involves

Get a practical view of the full migration lifecycle. The guide also covers governance, QA, UAT, stakeholder responsibilities and post-launch stabilization.

Discovery

Build

Data Migration

Integrations

Testing

Cutover

Hypercare

What does a Shopify migration cost, and how long does it take?

There is no universal answer.

A relatively straightforward WooCommerce migration may be measured in weeks. A complex enterprise implementation involving large catalogs, international storefronts and multiple business-critical integrations may take several months.

The guide explains the factors that have the greatest impact on both timeline and investment, including:

Catalog Complexity

Data Volume

Integrations

Custom Functionality

International requirements

UX and design scope

Stakeholder expectations

It also explains why defining an MVP and phasing lower-priority enhancements can significantly reduce migration risk.

It's an opportunity to rethink how your commerce ecosystem works.

Built for the people responsible for getting migration right

01

CTOs and technology leaders evaluating architecture, risk and technical debt.

02

eCommerce leaders responsible for platform performance and growth.

03

Operations teams managing integrations, fulfillment and business continuity.

04

Marketing teams concerned with customer experience, SEO, analytics and conversion.