Magento to Shopify Migration: What Breaks and Costs

Your products, customers and order history will move. Your extensions will not. That's the whole Magento to Shopify migration problem in two sentences, and if you're a US mid-market brand staring at an Adobe Commerce renewal quote or an extension vendor who hasn't shipped a compatible release in two versions, it's the split you need to price before you sign anything. Data is cheap to move. Functionality is not.

What follows is the three-column version we use in scoping calls: what transfers, what has to be rebuilt or dropped, and what each side actually costs. Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source migrate the same way technically. The difference is the license clock and the B2B module, and both change the maths.

Column one: what transfers cleanly

Products, variants, images, collections, customers, addresses, order history, blog content. All of it moves with a well-configured import, and none of it is where projects go wrong.

Some caveats that bite anyway:

Customer passwords don't come across. Nobody's do. Shopify sends account activation invites and a meaningful share of your list never clicks. Keep guest checkout on for the first quarter and don't gate reorders behind an account.
Orders import as static records. You can't refund against them, and your CS team can't process a return through the Shopify admin for an order placed on Magento. Most teams we work with keep Magento running read-only for six to twelve months on a cheap host. Budget for that.
Configurable products with four or five attributes don't map to Shopify's option model without a decision. Colour, size, length is fine. Colour, size, length, fabric, finish is a restructure, either into separate products with a linked-product pattern or a metafield-driven picker.
Custom EAV attributes become metafields. That part's straightforward. What isn't straightforward is that every template referencing them has to be rewritten in Liquid.
Gift card balances import only on Plus. Store credit has no native equivalent at all and needs an app plus a manual balance load.

Column two: what has no Shopify equivalent

This is the column that decides your budget. Go through your Magento extension list line by line and put each one in a bucket: native on Shopify, app on Shopify, custom build, or dead.

Layered navigation. Magento's filtering on 40 attributes across a 6,000-SKU catalogue is genuinely good, and Shopify's native filters are thinner than merchants expect. This is the single most common surprise in a Magento 2 to Shopify migration. You'll need a filtering and search app, configured properly against your metafield structure rather than dropped in with defaults. Our own FilterPro handles the smart-filter and AI-search side of this; there are others, and the right answer depends on how your attributes are organised. What you cannot do is assume the out-of-the-box collection page will hold up.

Cart price rules. Magento's promotion engine is more expressive than Shopify's discount system. Tiered cart-level logic, conditional free gifts, stacking rules — on Shopify these become Shopify Functions, which means development, and Functions on checkout behaviour are Plus-only.

Multi-store setups. One Magento installation running four websites off shared catalogue becomes either Shopify Markets (if the difference is currency, language and tax) or separate stores (if the difference is catalogue and brand). The second option multiplies your operations cost. Decide early, because it changes the theme architecture.

CMS pages built with layout XML and widgets. Rebuilt as sections. No shortcut.

Checkout customisation. If you modified Magento's one-page checkout — custom fields, delivery-date pickers, address validation, PO number capture — none of it survives. Shopify checkout is extended through Checkout Extensibility, which is Plus, and it is deliberately constrained. Some of what you had you simply cannot rebuild. Find out which parts before you commit, not in UAT.

The US line items nobody puts in the first budget

Sales tax and economic nexus. If you were running AvaTax against Magento, you have a choice: keep Avalara and connect it to Shopify, or move to Shopify Tax. Shopify Tax is free under an annual US online sales threshold and then charges a fraction of a percent per order with a cap — check the current figures before you model it, because they've changed. Avalara wins if you have registrations in twenty-plus states, exemption certificate management, or marketplace filings to reconcile. Shopify Tax wins on cost and setup time for most sub-$10M brands. Either way, your nexus registrations don't migrate. Someone has to re-enter every state you're registered in, with the right start dates, and confirm product tax codes on categories where they matter — apparel in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, groceries, supplements.

ADA and WCAG exposure. A new theme is a new litigation surface. Demand letters over inaccessible storefronts are routine in the US and the plaintiff's bar scans for them. The recurring failures we find: keyboard traps in mega menus and filter drawers, contrast under 4.5:1 on sale prices, missing focus states, unlabelled form inputs, carousels that can't be paused. An audit plus a remediation pass on a new theme is real work. Price it at $4,000–$8,000 and do it before launch, not after the letter.

B2B price lists. Magento customer groups with tier pricing are common in US mid-market, and Shopify's answer is B2B — company profiles, catalogues, payment terms — which is Plus-only. If your wholesale is fifteen accounts on a flat 40% off, an app will do. If it's negotiated per-SKU pricing across two hundred accounts with credit limits, you're on Plus and you're building.

What a Magento to Shopify migration costs

Ranges are useless without a shape, so here's an actual scope. Mid-market apparel brand, 6,200 SKUs, 11 Magento extensions, three customer groups, ~$6M in annual online revenue, moving to Shopify Plus:

Data migration, mapping and reconciliation — $4,500
Theme build on a Dawn base with custom PDP and collection templates — $18,000
Filtering and search rebuild, configured against metafields — $2,000 setup
B2B price lists and company accounts — $6,000
Subscriptions re-platformed — $3,500
Tax configuration, product tax codes, state registrations re-entered — $2,000
Accessibility audit and remediation — $5,500
301 redirect map, 6,200 products plus 400 CMS and category URLs — $2,500
QA, launch, two weeks of hypercare — $4,000

That's $48,000 one-off. Recurring: Plus at roughly $2,300–$2,500 a month depending on term, plus $600–$900 in apps. Call it $37,000 a year.

Now put that against the renewal. If your Adobe Commerce license quote is $55,000, hosting is $18,000 and your maintenance retainer is $3,000 a month, you're at $109,000 annually before you build anything new. The migration pays for itself inside the first year and the gap widens after. That's the honest reason most of these projects happen, and it's a better reason than "Shopify is easier".

At the other end: a Magento Open Source store doing under $1M with 400 SKUs, no B2B and four extensions can move for $6,000–$14,000 onto Shopify Grow or Advanced. For a small business on Magento, the cost of staying is usually a developer you can no longer reach and a PHP version that's out of support. Move.

How to migrate from Magento to Shopify: the sequence that works

Export the extension list and classify every one. Native, app, build, drop. Get the drops signed off by whoever owns that function.
Pull a full URL inventory from Google Search Console and your server logs, not just from Magento. Twelve months of data, ranked by clicks.
Model the catalogue on Shopify first — options, metafields, collections — with 30 representative products. Import the rest only when the model holds.
Build the theme against the real data. Themes built on placeholder content break the moment a product has nine images and a 400-character title.
Rebuild the redirect map. Magento's /womens/dresses/blue-linen-dress.html becomes /products/blue-linen-dress, and the category paths and .html suffixes both need handling. Our first pass is usually about 90% right. The last 10% is category pages that never had a clean Shopify equivalent, and those get mapped by hand to the nearest collection.
Set up tax, shipping profiles and carrier accounts. Test a real UPS and USPS rate at checkout with a real address in a state where you're registered.
Accessibility pass. Then payments, then order routing to your 3PL or ERP.
Launch on a Tuesday morning. Watch Search Console coverage daily for three weeks.

One rule that overrides all of this: do not launch a replatform between the first week of October and the middle of December. BFCM is the only peak that matters in the US and a code freeze from October beats a heroic November recovery. If you're reading this in August, you're deciding between a September launch and a January one.

Is there a free Magento to Shopify migration app?

Shopify's own Store Importer handles Magento exports at no cost, and it's fine for products and customers on a simple catalogue. Matrixify has a free tier with row limits that will cover a small store. Cart2Cart and LitExtension charge by record count and are cheap relative to the project.

The tool is not the expense. On a serious migration the import itself is maybe 8% of the hours. The other 92% is the mapping decisions, the rebuilds and the redirects, and no app makes those for you. Anyone selling you a migration on the strength of their tooling is selling you the easy 8%.

Magento vs Shopify for enterprise: when staying is correct

We'll say it plainly because most agencies won't. Stay on Adobe Commerce if you have deeply attribute-driven catalogue logic across hundreds of thousands of SKUs, quote-to-order workflows where pricing is computed per line from an ERP, or a compliance requirement that forces self-hosting. Shopify's checkout is a walled garden by design. That's why it converts and why it stays up on Cyber Monday, and it's also why it will refuse things Magento would have let you do.

Everything else — most US DTC brands doing $2M–$50M, most brands with a straightforward wholesale arm, most catalogues under 50,000 SKUs — is better off on Plus. The total cost of ownership isn't close, and the engineering time you get back goes into merchandising instead of patching.

How long it takes

Eight to fourteen weeks for the scope above. Four to six for a small Open Source store with a stock theme. Twenty-plus if you're doing headless, multi-region and a B2B build at the same time — and we'd advise against doing all three at once. Sequence them.

The variable that moves the timeline most isn't development. It's how long your team takes to sign off the drop list. We've had projects sit for three weeks because nobody would confirm whether a store-locator extension still mattered.

Choosing who does it

Ask three questions and listen for specifics. What's your redirect strategy for parameterised layered-navigation URLs that Google has indexed? How do you handle order history that CS still needs to service? Which of my extensions have no Shopify equivalent at all? A partner who answers the third question with a list of things you'll lose is worth more than one who says everything can be rebuilt. Everything can be rebuilt. The question is what it costs and whether it earns its keep.

We've been building on Shopify since 2015 and run replatforming projects for brands in the US, UK, UAE and Australia, including Plus builds with B2B and checkout extensibility in scope. More on how we work with US merchants.

If you want a number rather than a range: send us your Magento extension list and a Search Console URL export. We'll come back with the three columns filled in for your store — what moves, what gets rebuilt, what gets dropped — and a cost against each. Request it here.

Magento to Shopify for US Brands: What Breaks, Transfers and Costs