Every migration conversation starts the same way: excitement about leaving a slow, expensive, or limiting platform, followed almost immediately by anxiety about everything that could go wrong in the move. Both reactions are reasonable. Migrations done carelessly do lose rankings, break order history, and take stores offline. Done properly, none of that is inevitable, it's a matter of a specific, well-understood process.
What Actually Moves, and How
Products, variants, and collections transfer via API, rebuilt natively in Shopify's product model rather than dumped in as raw data. This is usually the most mechanically straightforward part, and the part with the least drama.
Customer accounts and order history migrate so nothing resets for returning customers on launch day, no lost loyalty status, no confused support tickets about missing past orders.
Every existing URL gets mapped to its Shopify Plus equivalent with a 301 redirect. This is the highest-stakes piece of the entire process, a missed URL becomes a dead link that quietly stops ranking, and the traffic loss often goes unnoticed for weeks.
Custom functionality, bespoke pricing logic, custom checkout steps, modules built specifically for Magento or a WooCommerce plugin stack, has to be rebuilt natively using Shopify Functions and Scripts rather than copied across, since the underlying architecture is genuinely different. This rebuild work is where migration timelines most often get underestimated.
Where Each Source Platform Has Its Own Gotchas
From Magento: the biggest risk is custom modules and checkout customisations built specifically for Magento's architecture that have no direct Shopify equivalent and need genuine re-engineering, not a copy-paste. Budget real time for this, not just data migration time.
From WooCommerce: the product data maps relatively cleanly, but functionality handled by a stack of WordPress plugins, custom pricing rules, specific shipping logic, needs its own migration plan per plugin, either a Shopify app equivalent or custom development.
From BigCommerce: generally the most straightforward of the three, since the underlying commerce model is closer to Shopify's, but custom theme work and any BigCommerce-specific API integrations still need deliberate rebuilding.
A question worth asking any agency proposing your migration: "Walk me through what happens to our custom [specific feature] during the move." A vague answer, or one that assumes it "should just work," is a sign the custom functionality hasn't actually been scoped yet, and it's exactly the kind of gap that turns into a mid-project surprise.
The Cutover Itself
The new Shopify Plus store runs fully built and tested in a private environment while your current store keeps serving live traffic normally. With proper DNS pre-warming, the actual cutover is a matter of minutes, not hours of downtime. This part is genuinely a solved, low-risk problem when planned properly, the risk in a migration lives almost entirely in the data and redirect work that happens before cutover, not the cutover itself.
Timeline and What Drives It
Most Shopify Plus migrations run 8 to 16 weeks, with catalogue size, integration complexity, and how much custom functionality needs rebuilding as the main variables. Rankings and traffic get monitored closely for a period post-launch specifically to catch any redirect gap fast, rather than assuming the map was perfect.
FAQ
What's the hardest part of migrating from Magento to Shopify Plus?
Custom functionality, bespoke pricing logic, checkout customisations, and custom modules built specifically for Magento's architecture, since these can't be copied over, they need to be rebuilt natively using Shopify Functions and Scripts. This rebuild work, not the product data migration itself, is usually where project timelines and cost estimates go wrong if it's underestimated at scoping.
Will our product reviews and ratings survive a migration?
Reviews can migrate, but the process depends heavily on which review platform you're using and whether it has a Shopify-compatible import path. This is worth confirming specifically during discovery rather than assuming, since losing review history and social proof is a common and avoidable migration casualty.
How is a WooCommerce to Shopify Plus migration different from a Magento one?
WooCommerce migrations are often simpler on the data side, since WooCommerce's product model maps more directly onto Shopify's, but they frequently involve untangling custom logic that was previously handled by a specific plugin stack. Each plugin's functionality needs its own migration plan, either a Shopify app equivalent or custom development.
Can we migrate our wholesale/B2B customers along with D2C?
Yes, and it's worth planning explicitly rather than as an afterthought. Company accounts, tiered pricing, and net payment terms need to be mapped from your current platform's B2B setup into Shopify Plus's native B2B functionality, which works differently enough from most legacy B2B implementations that a direct one-to-one migration usually isn't possible.