We move stores from Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and custom platforms onto Shopify Plus without losing rankings, order history, or revenue. We have delivered 75+ replatforms and new builds since March 2018.
A Shopify Plus migration moves your catalog, customers, order history and content from an existing platform onto Shopify's enterprise plan, then rebuilds the storefront, integrations and checkout on top of it. The work splits into four tracks: data migration, URL and redirect mapping, integration rebuild, and theme development. Data is the smallest of the four.
Most migration projects fail on the tracks people underestimate. Exporting products is straightforward. Rebuilding an ERP connection, preserving ten years of indexed URLs, and reproducing pricing logic that lived in custom platform code is where the time and the risk sit.
Solo Media Group is a Shopify migration agency at the Platinum tier — the top of Shopify's Service Track. We have delivered 75+ replatforms and new builds, and we plan redirect mapping and integration scope before any data moves, not after launch.
The reasons that actually come up in scoping calls, in the order we hear them:
On Magento or a custom build you pay for hosting, CDN, security patching, and a developer to keep it upright. Shopify Plus folds all of that into the platform fee. For teams already carrying their own infrastructure this is often cost-neutral or a saving.
Conversion work stalls when checkout is off-limits. Shopify Plus opens it up through Checkout Extensibility and Shopify Functions — custom discount logic, pricing rules, and flows built into checkout itself.
A Plus contract includes your primary store plus nine expansion storefronts under one organization. Running several brands or markets on separate platform licenses is usually more expensive and always harder to operate.
Shopify Plus has native B2B — company accounts, customer-specific price lists, payment terms — so wholesale runs on the same catalog and inventory as DTC instead of a bolt-on portal.
Teams migrate because shipping a landing page takes a sprint instead of an afternoon. Platform choice sets your marketing team's ceiling.
If your current platform works, your team can ship, and nothing on the list above is a live problem, a replatform is an expensive way to solve nothing. Migration is justified by a constraint you can name. If you cannot name one, a redesign on your existing platform will get you further for less.
| Platform | What makes it difficult |
|---|---|
| Magento / Adobe Commerce | Deep customization in platform code, complex attribute sets, and category-nested URLs ending in .html. The largest of the migrations we run and the most common. |
| WooCommerce | Product data spread across WordPress post meta, plus plugins doing work no one documented. Blog content and its URL structure usually need migrating alongside the store. |
| BigCommerce | Closest structural match to Shopify, so data maps cleanly. The work concentrates on rebuilding apps and integrations that have no direct equivalent. |
| OpenCart | Older installs with inconsistent data hygiene. Cleaning the catalog is often more work than moving it. |
| Custom and headless builds | No export tooling exists. We work from the database and API directly, and business logic has to be documented before it can be rebuilt. |
Magento is the migration we are asked about most. Our full Magento to Shopify Plus migration guide covers attribute mapping, .html URL handling, and the pitfalls specific to that move.
Ten to fourteen weeks for a typical mid-market store. The order matters more than the duration.
We crawl your live site, export every URL with traffic or backlinks, inventory every integration, and count products, variants, customers and orders. The size of that data decides the migration method. Nothing is built yet.
Every old URL is mapped to its Shopify destination in a spreadsheet you sign off on. This happens before design, not during QA, because it frequently changes the collection architecture.
Concepts, then full page design in Figma. Either a refresh or a faithful rebuild, depending on what the migration is for.
Products and variants first, then customers, then order history. Each import is verified before the next begins. Plus includes unlimited staging stores, so this never touches production.
ERP, POS, CRM, subscriptions, reviews, feeds. Rebuilt and tested against real data on staging.
Development against approved designs, then cross-device, cross-browser, checkout and integration testing.
DNS cutover during your lowest-traffic window. Redirects go live with the store, not after. Sitemap resubmitted the same day.
Daily Search Console checks for the first fortnight: coverage errors, 404s, index status, rankings on your top revenue URLs. Fixes on original scope are included.
Shopify uses fixed path prefixes — /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/ — and these cannot be changed on any plan, including Plus. Almost every URL on your site will therefore change, and every one that had traffic or a backlink needs a 301 redirect mapped before launch.
| Content type | Common source pattern | Shopify destination |
|---|---|---|
| Product | /red-shoes.html · /catalog/product/view/id/123 (Magento) · /product/red-shoes/ (WooCommerce) | /products/red-shoes |
| Category or collection | /footwear/sneakers.html (Magento) · /product-category/footwear/ (WooCommerce) | /collections/sneakers |
| CMS page | /about-us · /about-us.html | /pages/about-us |
| Blog article | /blog/post-title · /2024/03/post-title | /blogs/news/post-title |
| Faceted or filtered | /footwear?color=red · /footwear/color-red.html | /collections/footwear?filter.p.m.custom.color=red |
| Search | /catalogsearch/result/?q=shoes | /search?q=shoes |
A prefix change alone still requires a redirect. /product/red-shoes and /products/red-shoes are different URLs, and Google treats them that way.
Traffic loss after a replatform is a planning failure, not an inevitability. Six things decide the outcome.
Your platform export lists what is live now. Google has indexed a decade of URLs, including pages you deleted. We crawl the live site and pull Search Console and backlink data so discontinued URLs with referring domains still get redirected.
Standard Shopify plans cap URL redirects at 100,000. Shopify Plus raises that to 20,000,000. For a large catalog with a long history, this alone can decide whether a clean migration is technically possible.
Redirects only fire on URLs that return a 404, and Shopify blocks redirects from its own fixed paths — /products, /collections, /collections/all — and from prefixes including /apps, /cart, /orders and /services. Collection tag-filter URLs cannot be redirected either. Any of these in your mapping needs a different solution, found during scoping rather than after launch.
Shopify themes can render products at /collections/sneakers/products/red-shoes as well as /products/red-shoes, splitting signals across duplicates. We remove the collection scope in Liquid so every product resolves to one canonical URL.
Title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text and structured data do not travel with a product export. They are mapped and imported as their own workstream.
Redirects go live at cutover. A store that launches on Monday with redirects added on Wednesday has spent two days teaching Google its catalog is gone.
| Data | Notes |
|---|---|
| Products, variants, images | Including SKUs, barcodes, weights, inventory levels per location |
| Metafields and custom attributes | Mapped to Shopify metafield definitions; Magento attribute sets need remodelling |
| Collections and category structure | Often restructured deliberately, which is why URL mapping comes first |
| Customers | Accounts, addresses, tags, marketing consent state |
| Order history | Complete history including refunds and fulfilment status |
| Discounts and price rules | Rebuilt rather than imported; logic differs by platform |
| Blog content and CMS pages | With their redirect map |
| Reviews | Via your review platform's own migration path, not the store export |
| Subscriptions | Rebuilt on Stay.ai or ReCharge; contracts and billing dates need care |
| 301 redirect map | Imported in bulk before DNS cutover |
Customer passwords cannot be migrated from any platform. Shopify sends account activation invitations instead, and that communication should be planned as part of launch rather than discovered on day one.
Migration projects at Solo Media Group start at around $20,000 and are quoted as a line-item estimate. Shopify Plus itself is separate: Shopify publishes $2,300 per month on a three-year term or $2,500 per month on a one-year term, purchased directly from Shopify.
Our migration projects start at approximately $20,000. Ongoing retainers start at 20-hour engagements or $3,000 per month. Billing runs against milestones — a percentage on signing, at design approval, at development start, and at launch — with net 15 invoicing agreed in the statement of work before work begins. Our full Shopify Plus cost guide covers budgeting in more depth.
Catalog size and order history volume. Number of integrations to rebuild. Whether custom apps are required. Whether B2B or multi-store is in scope. Whether you want a faithful rebuild or a full redesign. Data hygiene on the source platform — cleaning a decade of inconsistent product data is real work, and it is usually underestimated.
Shopify publishes one figure: from $2,300 per month on a three-year term, $2,500 on a one-year term. Above a high monthly volume, billing shifts to a variable platform fee based on revenue and business model.
Shopify does not publish the threshold or the rates. Partner-reported figures put activation near $800,000 in monthly GMV with rates around 0.35% D2C on a three-year term and a cap near $40,000 per month, but these vary by contract and business type and should be confirmed with Shopify's Plus team rather than taken from any agency page, including ours. Additional expansion stores beyond the nine included are roughly $250 per month each.
The most common and most expensive mistake. Mapping is a scoping deliverable. By launch week there is no time to do it properly and no time to check it.
An ERP connection nobody documented surfaces in week eight and adds a month. A full integration inventory in week one prevents it.
Moving a decade of inconsistent product data reproduces every problem on a more expensive platform. Cleaning during migration is cheaper than cleaning afterwards.
A November cutover means the highest-stakes fortnight of your year runs on a platform nobody has operated yet. We push launches out of peak, or we wait.
Ranking damage is recoverable in the first fortnight and much harder at three months. Daily monitoring for two weeks is not optional.
Education · WordPress to Shopify
Education · WordPress to Shopify
Food and beverage · Replatform and redesign
Food and beverage · Replatform and redesign
Consumer packaged goods · WordPress to Shopify
Consumer packaged goods · WordPress to Shopify
Ten to fourteen weeks for a typical mid-market store, from scoping to launch. Simpler catalogs with few integrations can move in six to eight. The variables are catalog size, order history volume, number of integrations, and how quickly your team returns feedback.
Not if redirect mapping is done before launch and redirects go live at cutover. Shopify uses fixed URL prefixes, so nearly every URL changes and every URL with traffic or backlinks needs a 301. Traffic loss after a replatform is a planning failure, not a property of the platform.
Our migration projects start at around $20,000, quoted as a line-item estimate. Shopify Plus is billed separately by Shopify at a published rate from $2,300 per month on a three-year term or $2,500 on a one-year term.
No. Shopify's path prefixes — /products/, /collections/, /pages/, /blogs/ — are fixed and cannot be changed on any plan, including Plus. You control the slug after the prefix. This is not an SEO disadvantage; Google treats enforced subdirectory patterns as normal.
Standard Shopify plans allow up to 100,000 URL redirects. Shopify Plus allows up to 20,000,000. For large catalogs with long histories this difference can determine whether a complete redirect map is possible.
Yes. We migrate complete order history including refunds and fulfilment status, alongside customers, addresses, tags and marketing consent state.
No — passwords cannot be migrated from any platform. Shopify sends account activation invitations instead. That email should be planned as part of your launch communications.
Each is assessed during scoping. Some have direct Shopify equivalents, some need rebuilding as custom apps or middleware, and some turn out to be unnecessary once you are on Plus. We inventory all of them in week one rather than discovering them in week eight.
No. The new store is built on a staging store while your current store keeps trading. Shopify Plus includes unlimited staging stores. The only cutover is a DNS switch, scheduled for your lowest-traffic window.
Yes, and it is the migration we run most often. Magento carries the most complexity — attribute sets, category-nested .html URLs, and business logic living in platform code. Our Magento to Shopify Plus guide covers that move specifically.
Usually yes, because you are rebuilding the theme regardless. The exception is a fixed launch date or a brand mid-rebrand, where a faithful rebuild first and a redesign later reduces risk.
Every migration includes a 30-day post-launch support window for fixes on original scope, with daily Search Console monitoring through the first fortnight. Ongoing work continues on retainer.
