Replatform to Shopify without losing traffic, revenue, or data.

What migration actually includes

Replatforming is five projects in one: data, design, development, SEO, and team enablement. Skip any of the five and the “savings” arrive on launch day as a crater.

• Data. Customers, addresses, orders, subscriptions, loyalty points, gift cards, draft orders, reviews, tags, historical analytics. Every row has a migration strategy documented. Data that can’t fully transfer is named explicitly before kickoff.
• Design. Either a like-for-like visual migration (preserve the existing brand expression on Shopify) or a concurrent redesign. A concurrent redesign extends the project but is often the cheaper long-term call — you’re paying for the migration anyway, so layer the redesign into the same sprint.
• Development. The Shopify build itself — theme, apps, integrations, custom logic. Plus-specific work (B2B, Flow, Functions) if the destination is Plus.
• SEO. Migration SEO as a parallel workstream with development, not a post-launch audit. 301 mapping, schema parity, canonical reconciliation, staging crawls, launch-day monitoring, 30/60/90 recovery.
• Team enablement. Training the merchandising team, customer support, operations, and finance on the new admin before launch. Not a lunch-and-learn; a documented handover with recorded walkthroughs and a post-launch support channel.

Skip the SEO track and you lose 20%+ of organic traffic for six months. Skip team enablement and your CS queue explodes on day one. Skip data fidelity and you discover the problem three weeks later when a VIP customer emails about missing loyalty points.

Magento to Shopify

The most common migration and the one with the deepest customization debt. Magento stores typically run on an extension stack piled up over 5–10 years — some of it genuinely load-bearing, most of it vestigial from attempts that didn’t work.

Our Magento-to-Shopify discovery audits the extension list in three buckets:

1. Real logic we need to preserve — custom pricing, wholesale rules, fulfillment integrations, loyalty calculations. Each gets a Shopify equivalent: a native feature, a Shopify app, a Function, or a custom app we build.
2. Duplicate logic the merchant didn’t know about — two review apps, three analytics tools, two fulfillment integrations that have been running in parallel for years. Most get cut.
3. Dead code — extensions installed, never configured, still loading JS on every page request. Deleted.

Magento-specific SEO notes:

• Magento’s URL structure (category/subcategory/product) often collapses in Shopify’s flatter architecture. Decide per store: preserve hierarchy via breadcrumb metafields (display), or flatten (SEO + simplicity).
• Magento’s attribute system (color, size, custom attributes) maps to Shopify’s variants + metafields. Decisions documented per attribute.
• Magento’s layered navigation generates faceted URLs that may be indexed; 301 to canonical collection or noindex as appropriate.
• Historical orders from Magento Commerce (Enterprise) include complex pricing records (tier pricing, catalog price rules) — reconciled at import, not glossed over.

Timeline: 10–16 weeks typical. Magento Commerce (Enterprise) migrations skew longer (14–20 weeks) due to integration depth.

WooCommerce to Shopify

WooCommerce stores are WordPress sites with an e-commerce bolt-on. Migration is also content migration — blog posts, custom post types, media library, redirects for the WordPress permalink structures.

What’s different from Magento:

• Content migration is real work. WooCommerce stores often have hundreds of blog posts, custom post types (glossaries, FAQs, author bios), and media that needs to move to Shopify’s CMS — either as blog articles, products, pages, or metaobjects.
• Yoast SEO meta has to be exported and mapped — meta titles, descriptions, canonicals, per-post schema settings. Shopify metafields + the SEO field handle it once mapped.
• Permalink redirects are specific to WordPress patterns: /?p=123, /year/month/slug/, /category/subcategory/. Every variant needs a 301 target.
• Plugins replaced — Shopify’s ecosystem has direct equivalents for most WooCommerce plugins (reviews, subscriptions, email, shipping). Some need custom work.

WooCommerce migrations are often the cleanest of the four because WooCommerce stores tend to be smaller and less customized. Typical timeline 8–14 weeks.

BigCommerce to Shopify

BigCommerce has a narrower extension ecosystem but tighter native features. Migration is usually cleaner than Magento. URL structure and product attribute systems are the main reconciliations.

BigCommerce-specific notes:

• Product option sets — BigCommerce often exposes options as URL parameters that Shopify handles via variants. Reconcile with canonicals and 301s.
• Native features to replace — BigCommerce’s native reviews, abandoned cart, and wishlist functionality map to Shopify apps or custom logic.
• Category URL structure — typically flatter than Magento; fewer hierarchy collapses.
• Orders export — BigCommerce’s order export is straightforward; reconciliation is usually cleaner than Magento’s.

Timeline: 8–14 weeks for most BigCommerce migrations.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus

Enterprise SFCC migrations are the most complex. B2B companies/catalogs, enterprise integrations (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite), custom checkout logic, multi-market/multi-brand. Almost always a Shopify Plus destination.

What we reconcile:

• Cartridge logic — SFCC cartridges (custom pipeline logic) migrate to Shopify Functions (payment, cart transform, pricing) or Flow automations (order routing, fraud, ops).
• B2B migration — SFCC’s B2B feature set (Buyer Hub, contract pricing, account hierarchy) maps to Shopify B2B (companies, catalogs, price lists, customer-specific terms).
• Enterprise integrations — SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, SFDC integrations rebuilt on Shopify’s stack. Often the longest single workstream.
• Multi-market/multi-brand — SFCC site architectures (sites, realms, locales) map to Shopify Plus HQ topology (stores, markets).
• Performance expectations — SFCC merchants expect enterprise-grade CWV. We set budgets from day one.

SFCC migrations typically 14–20 weeks, starting $150k, with a dedicated squad including architecture review with Merchant Success.

Migration SEO

If you’re replatforming, SEO is where the money leaks. We run migration SEO as a parallel workstream with development — not as a post-launch audit.

The checklist:

• Pre-migration URL audit from GSC, crawl (Screaming Frog), and backlink data (Ahrefs)
• 301 map derived from the audit, bulk-importable to Shopify
• Schema parity — every structured data type on the old site gets a matching implementation
• Canonical reconciliation per template
• Staging crawl comparing coverage to prod
• Launch-day monitoring (GSC coverage, analytics, rank tracking, real-time for 48 hours)
• 30/60/90 day recovery with weekly checkpoints

Full playbook: how to replatform without losing rankings. Cross-reference: Shopify SEO service for ongoing work after migration.

Data integrity

Every row in the data table gets a migration strategy documented in the spec:

• Customers — including password reset requirement (security boundary, always explained upfront)
• Addresses — one record per customer, historical addresses retained
• Order history — orders, line items, fulfillments, transactions
• Subscriptions — ReCharge, Bold, Stay AI; handled via direct migration tools
• Loyalty points — Smile, LoyaltyLion, Yotpo Loyalty; each has a distinct migration path
• Gift cards — active balances migrated; past transactions preserved
• Draft orders — migrated where active; archived if stale
• Reviews — Yotpo, Okendo, Judge.me; migrated with original dates preserved
• Historical analytics — GA4 property bridging, or fresh start with old property archived
• Tags, metafields, custom attributes — mapped per use

What can’t cleanly move is named upfront: passwords (security), some platform-specific display data, attribution windows on pre-migration analytics.

Timeline and team

• Discovery (weeks 1–2): audit + spec
• Spec lock (end of week 2): timeline, data plan, SEO plan, risk log signed off
• Build (weeks 3–10 typical): theme, apps, integrations, data migration in parallel
• Staging test (weeks 11–12): staging crawl, schema validation, checkout parity, integration tests
• Launch (week 13–14): phased cutover over a scheduled window, 12–24 hour on-call
• Stabilization (weeks 15–18): 30-day bake with daily monitoring

Team: engineering lead, design lead (if redesign in scope), SEO lead, project lead, client PM. Enterprise Plus migrations add B2B lead + integration lead.

Risks and how we kill them

• Checkout parity — tested in sandbox with real credit cards and real 3PL handoff before launch
• SEO dips — mitigated by the migration SEO track running in parallel
• Inventory divergence — real-time sync tested before cutover; reconciliation job catches misses
• Integration outages — phased cutover where possible, not big-bang
• Team enablement gaps — training in week 10, recorded walkthroughs, post-launch Slack channel
• Data fidelity — spot-checked imports by sample across every table; reconciliation audit day 1, day 7, day 30

Post-launch stabilization

30/60/90 day stabilization built into every engagement:

• Week 1–2: daily monitoring, hotfix posture, on-call engineer
• Day 30: full retrospective report (performance, SEO trend, ops, customer feedback)
• Day 60: refinements based on live data — usually 2–4 small fixes
• Day 90: formal handoff or transition to retainer

The stabilization period is priced into every migration. It’s not a support add-on.

Migration case studies

• CLIENT, Magento Enterprise → Shopify Plus — 14 weeks, +18% organic traffic post-launch, LCP 4.1s → 1.6s.
• Full portfolio: selected work.