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Store Migration to Shopify: Step-by-Step Guide (2026)
Store migration means moving your products, customers, orders, and content from one ecommerce platform to another. To migrate to Shopify from Magento, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce, you export your data, import it with a tool like Cart2Cart or hire a migration service, then redirect your old URLs so you keep your search rankings.
That last clause is where most migrations go wrong. Moving the data is the easy part now; every major platform exports to CSV, and automated tools do the transfer in hours. The hard part is landing on the other side without losing the SEO, the customer logins, and the checkout conversion you spent years building. This guide walks the full store migration, platform by platform, and covers one thing the migration-service pages skip: how to migrate once and come out the other side able to run a marketplace, not just a store.
What a store migration actually moves (and what it can't)
Before you touch a single tool, get clear on what crosses the gap. A migration moves your data. It does not move your setup.
Here is the honest split:
| Moves across cleanly | Rebuilt on the new platform | Never transfers |
|---|---|---|
| Products, variants, images | Theme and page design | Hashed customer passwords |
| Categories and collections | Apps, plugins, extensions | App-specific data and settings |
| Customers (profiles, addresses) | Discount and promotion logic | Server configuration |
| Orders and order history | URL structure (needs remapping) | Reviews tied to a plugin's format |
| Blog posts and pages | Payment and shipping setup |
The column that surprises people is the middle one. You are not copying a store; you are rebuilding it and pouring your old data in. That reframe sets realistic expectations for both time and budget, and it explains why a 500-product store and a 50,000-product store can take a similar number of weeks. The work lives in the rebuild, not the row count.
One detail worth flagging early: customer passwords cannot be migrated, because platforms store them hashed and salted for security. On Shopify, your customers keep their accounts and simply reset their password on first login. Plan a short email to warn them, and you avoid a wave of confused support tickets.
Step 1: Audit before you export
Do not migrate your mess. A migration is the one moment you get to leave the dead weight behind for free, so start by taking inventory of what you actually have.
- Count your real catalog. Pull a list of products, then filter out the discontinued, the out-of-stock-forever, and the duplicates. Migrate the store you want, not the one you accumulated.
- Export a URL list. Crawl your current site (Screaming Frog does this well) and export every indexed URL. This becomes your redirect map later, and it is the single most important artifact of the whole project.
- Note your integrations. List every app, plugin, and third-party service touching the store: email, reviews, ERP, analytics. Each one needs a Shopify equivalent lined up before launch, not after.
- Record your traffic baseline. Screenshot your organic traffic and top landing pages from Google Search Console. You will want the before picture to measure the after.
Skip this step and you migrate broken links, orphaned products, and integrations that quietly stop firing the day you switch. An hour of auditing saves a week of firefighting.
Step 2: Choose your migration method
There are three ways to move the data, and the right one depends on catalog size, data complexity, and how much of your own risk you want to carry.
| Method | What it is | Rough cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual CSV | Export from the old platform, import via Shopify's Store Importer | Free, plus your hours | Small, clean catalogs |
| Automated migration app | A tool like Cart2Cart transfers data between platforms | Usage-based, scaled to catalog size | Most mid-sized stores |
| Migration service | An agency or Shopify Partner runs the whole replatform | $2,000 to $20,000+ | Large, custom, or B2B stores |
Shopify's own Store Importer handles CSV imports and direct transfers from a handful of major platforms, and it is free. For anything beyond a simple catalog, the Cart2Cart store migration app is the default choice: it moves products, customers, orders, and reviews from 80-plus platforms, usually in a few hours. When the data gets complicated (custom attributes, multiple storefronts, B2B pricing), ecommerce store migration services earn their fee by handling the edge cases a script would silently drop.
A rule of thumb: pick the method by your risk, not your budget. If losing three months of rankings would sink the business, the agency is cheap insurance.
Step 3: Migrate by platform
The mechanics differ enough by source platform that a generic guide will steer you wrong. Here is what changes depending on where you are coming from.
Magento store migration
Magento (and Adobe Commerce) carries the most complex data of any common platform: EAV attributes, multiple store views, tiered and B2B pricing, and often a stack of custom extensions. A straightforward catalog moves through an automated tool in hours. The trouble is rarely the products; it is the custom attributes and business logic bolted on over the years.
For a clean Magento store migration, Cart2Cart or the Shopify Store Importer will do. For a store running custom attributes, B2B accounts, or ERP integrations, Magento 2 store migration services are worth the spend, because the failure mode is a pricing rule that quietly breaks, not a product that fails to appear. Agency timelines for a full, complex Magento replatform run 12 to 24 weeks. If you are moving off Magento specifically to run a multi-seller site, the seller mechanics matter as much as the data, and our guide to building a Magento B2B marketplace covers what the Magento route costs to run and why teams leave it for a hosted app.
Migrate a WooCommerce store
WooCommerce is the friendliest source, because WordPress exports cleanly. To migrate a WooCommerce store, use its built-in product CSV exporter, or run Cart2Cart for customers and order history in one pass. The gotchas here are WordPress-specific: your permalink structure (usually /product/name) differs from Shopify's (/products/name), so the redirect map matters more than usual, and any content built with a page builder like Elementor has to be rebuilt in Shopify's editor.
A full WooCommerce project typically runs 8 to 12 weeks end to end. If you are weighing whether to leave WooCommerce at all, our honest WooCommerce vs Shopify multi-vendor comparison lays out where WordPress still wins, because sometimes staying put is the right call.
BigCommerce store migration
BigCommerce sits in the middle: cleaner than Magento, more structured than WooCommerce. A BigCommerce store migration exports products, customers, and orders through native tools, and Cart2Cart supports it directly. Watch two things. BigCommerce's URL structure and its handling of product options and variants differ from Shopify's, so option-heavy catalogs need mapping attention. Budget 8 to 16 weeks for the full move including theme and testing.
Step 4: Protect your SEO, or lose a third of your traffic
This is the step that separates a migration that pays for itself from one that sets you back a quarter. When you change platforms, your URLs change. If Google follows an old link and hits a 404, that page's rankings evaporate.
The numbers are stark. A poorly managed migration can shed 20 to 50 percent of organic traffic for months, and by one analysis only 5 percent of stores complete a migration with no detectable traffic loss at all. The flip side is the good news: well-planned migrations often see a traffic increase of around 40 percent by month three, from faster load times and cleaner structure. The variable that decides which camp you land in is URL mapping coverage. Complete beats partial, every time.
Your SEO checklist for the switch:
- Map every old URL to its new one. Use the crawl from Step 1. Every product, collection, and content page needs a destination.
- Set 301 (permanent) redirects, not 302s. Shopify handles redirects in
Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects, or in bulk by CSV. - Keep titles, meta descriptions, and heading structure. Migrate the on-page SEO, don't reinvent it.
- Submit a fresh XML sitemap in Google Search Console the day you go live.
- Watch coverage reports for two to four weeks; rankings wobble, then usually recover by month two or three.
If your new store is a marketplace with vendor and product pages at scale, the crawl-budget and duplicate-content rules shift. Our post on marketplace SEO covers ranking a multi-vendor store specifically, which a single-brand migration guide won't.
Step 5: Test on a development store, then go live
Never migrate straight onto your live domain. Shopify lets you build on a myshopify.com URL first, so do the whole thing there: import the data, rebuild the theme, install the app equivalents, and place ten test orders across different products, shipping zones, and payment methods.
Your pre-launch checklist:
- Spot-check 20 random products against the old store: images, price, variants, description.
- Run a full test order end to end, including a refund.
- Confirm every redirect resolves (a bulk redirect checker catches the misses).
- Verify analytics and tracking pixels fire.
- Switch DNS during your lowest-traffic window, never mid-sale-season.
Then watch. The first two weeks are the nervous ones; hold your nerve, check Search Console daily, and fix redirect gaps as they surface.
The part migration pages skip: land as a marketplace
Here is the opportunity nobody selling a migration mentions. If you are already replatforming, changing the store's whole shape at once, it costs almost nothing extra to land on the far side as a marketplace instead of a plain store. You are rebuilding the theme, reimporting the catalog, and reconnecting payments regardless. Adding the seller layer during that rebuild is far cheaper than bolting it on a year later.
Garnet Marketplace, a Shopify multi-vendor marketplace app, adds vendor onboarding, per-vendor commissions, split payments with automated payouts, and vendor dashboards on top of the Shopify checkout you are migrating to. Several operators arrived exactly this way. The Bradery, a European flash-sales marketplace, moved brands off PrestaShop and Shopify and imported 25,000 products in five months by letting sellers connect their existing stores rather than re-keying anything. Bazaa, an Australian furniture marketplace, scaled from $1M to $5M in annualized sales within a year of running this model.
If that is your direction, Garnet's team also runs the data migration itself through the switch-to-garnet migration service, so the move and the marketplace build happen as one project. For the mechanics of the seller side, our guide to building a multi-vendor marketplace breaks down the four systems that make a store a marketplace. And the Shopify marketplace pillar goes deeper on why the app route beats a rebuild from scratch.
You do not have to become a marketplace to migrate. But if it was ever on the roadmap, the migration is the cheapest moment you will ever get to do it.
How long store migration takes and what it costs
Time and cost track complexity, not catalog size. Here is the realistic picture across the common source platforms, splitting the fast data transfer from the full project.
| Source platform | Data transfer (automated tool) | Full project (rebuild, test, launch) |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce | Under a day | 8 to 12 weeks |
| BigCommerce | Hours | 8 to 16 weeks |
| Magento / Magento 2 | Hours to a day | 12 to 24 weeks |
The gap between the two columns is the point. The Cart2Cart transfer finishing in an afternoon is real, and it lulls people into thinking the migration is done. It isn't. The weeks live in theme work, redirect mapping, app rebuilding, and testing. Budget for the project, not the data transfer, and you will not be caught short.
Where store migrations go wrong
Most failed migrations fail in the same handful of ways. Every one is avoidable.
- No redirect map. The number-one traffic killer. Old URLs must 301 to new ones, without exception.
- Migrating the junk. You import 8,000 products and 3,000 are dead. Audit first.
- Skipping the test store. Cutting over live and discovering the checkout is broken is a story every agency has heard.
- Cutting over in peak season. Migrate in your quiet window. A December go-live is a resolution you will regret.
- Forgetting the password reset email. Customers can't bring passwords across. Warn them, or field the support wave.
- Treating SEO as a post-launch task. By the time you notice the rankings drop, you are already weeks into recovery. Bake it into the plan.
Get the redirect map and the test store right, and you have handled 80 percent of the risk. The rest is diligence.
FAQ
How do I migrate a WooCommerce store to Shopify?
Export your WooCommerce products, customers, and orders (WooCommerce ships a built-in CSV exporter), then import them into Shopify with the free Store Importer app or an automated tool like Cart2Cart. Rebuild your theme, set up 301 redirects from every old WordPress URL to its Shopify equivalent, and test on a development store before you switch DNS. A small catalog moves in a day; a large one runs longer.
What is the best method for a Magento store migration?
Magento holds the most complex data of the common platforms: custom attributes, multiple stores, and often B2B pricing. For a simple catalog, an automated app like Cart2Cart moves the data in hours. For custom attributes, extensions, and B2B logic, Magento 2 store migration services (an agency or Shopify Partner) are worth the cost, because the risk sits in the edge cases a script skips, not the product rows.
Does the Cart2Cart store migration app move everything?
The Cart2Cart store migration app transfers products, variants, categories, customers, orders, reviews, and more from 80-plus platforms into Shopify, usually within a few hours for a mid-sized catalog. What it cannot carry across is anything platform-specific: your theme, apps and extensions, discount logic, and hashed customer passwords. Those you rebuild, and customers reset their passwords on first login.
How long does a BigCommerce store migration take?
The data transfer itself takes hours with an automated tool. A full BigCommerce store migration, including theme rebuild, testing, redirects, and go-live, typically runs 8 to 16 weeks for a mid-market store, according to agency timelines. The variable is not the product count. It is how many custom apps, integrations, and URL structures you have to rebuild and remap.
Should I use ecommerce store migration services or do it myself?
Do it yourself if your catalog is small, your data is clean, and you can follow a redirect map. Hire ecommerce store migration services when you have thousands of SKUs, custom attributes, B2B pricing, or revenue you cannot risk. The break-even is usually risk, not size: a botched migration can cost 20 to 50 percent of your organic traffic for months, which dwarfs an agency fee.
Will store migration hurt my SEO?
It can, if you skip URL mapping. The single biggest cause of lost rankings is old URLs that 404 instead of redirecting to their new home. Map every old URL to its new one, set up 301 redirects, keep your page titles and structure, and submit a fresh sitemap. Done well, migrations often lift traffic; done carelessly, they lose a third of it.