For a 5,000-SKU store moving from WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify, budget ₹6.5–8.5 lakh plus GST if you want a custom-built theme, full order history and a redirect map that holds your rankings. A lean migration on a lightly customised premium theme lands around ₹2.8–3.5 lakh. A complex one, with B2B pricing tiers, an ERP sync and a multi-region setup, runs ₹13–16 lakh. Those are agency rates in India, billed against roughly 200, 470 and 950 hours of work respectively.
The reason most quotes for shopify migration cost look like a shrug is that agencies quote the outcome instead of the hours. Below is the same 5,000-SKU project broken into line items, with the hour count we actually book against each one. Take it apart, argue with it, remove what you don't need.
The rate you're multiplying by
Shopify development in India sits between ₹900 and ₹2,500 per hour. Freelancers and small shops at the bottom, Shopify Plus partners with in-house QA and architects at the top. A Select Partner blends out around ₹1,400–₹1,800 depending on how much senior time the build needs. Every figure below uses ₹1,500/hour as the blended rate, so you can rescale for whoever you're talking to.
Two things people leave out of the budget and then get surprised by: 18% GST on agency fees, and the migration tooling subscription. Matrixify runs roughly $50–$200/month depending on record volume, and you'll need it for two to three months, not one. Cart2Cart charges per record and gets expensive past a few thousand orders. Call it ₹20,000–₹45,000 of tooling for a catalogue this size.
What 5,000 SKUs actually means in data
The SKU count is the least useful number in the brief. What drives hours is the shape underneath it. A 5,000-SKU apparel catalogue is typically 900–1,200 parent products with size and colour variants, which Shopify handles cleanly. A 5,000-SKU industrial or auto-parts catalogue is 5,000 distinct products with 30 spec attributes each, and those attributes have nowhere to live except metafields you have to define, map and populate.
Before quoting, we count four things: parent products, total variants, total images, and the number of non-Shopify-native attributes. On a typical fashion or home catalogue that's about 1,000 parents, 5,000 variants, 18,000–22,000 images and eight custom attributes. Those are the assumptions in the numbers below.
Line items: data migration (122 hours, ₹1.83L)
- Discovery and source-data audit, 16 hrs. Export everything, find the rot. Duplicate SKUs, products with no images, variants with negative inventory, three different ways of writing "Rose Gold". On every migration we've run, the source data is worse than the client believes. This is the cheapest hour you will spend.
- Field mapping and extraction scripts, 32 hrs. Building the transform from Woo/Magento schema to Shopify's product model, including metafield definitions and metaobjects for anything that doesn't fit. This is senior work and the single biggest determinant of whether the rest goes smoothly.
- Product import and variant reconciliation, 28 hrs. Staged imports, then a row-by-row diff on a sample of 300 SKUs plus every product in your top 50 by revenue.
- Media transfer, 12 hrs. 20,000-odd images pulled, renamed to something SEO-legible, alt text carried across where it exists.
- Customers, 10 hrs. Note that passwords cannot come across. Every customer resets on first login. Plan an email for it.
- Order history, 14 hrs. This is for 24 months. Ten years of orders can double the line item and slow your admin down. Unless you have a genuine warranty or GST-audit reason, archive the rest to a spreadsheet in cold storage.
- Blog posts and content pages, 10 hrs.
Line items: the theme build (152 hours, ₹2.28L)
This is where 40–60% of the money goes, and it's the part founders under-scope hardest.
- Theme customisation on a premium base, 120 hrs. Buying a ₹30,000 theme and "just changing the colours" is a fantasy on any catalogue over a few hundred products. You will rebuild the PDP for your variant logic, rebuild collection pages for your merchandising rules, and build three or four custom sections your old site had and your new theme doesn't. A fully bespoke Dawn-based build is 200–320 hours instead. Worth it above roughly ₹5 crore of annual revenue, hard to justify below it.
- Collection architecture, navigation and filtering, 32 hrs. On 5,000 SKUs, filters are not cosmetic. Shopify's native filtering caps at five filter groups and depends on how well your metafields and tags are structured, which is why the mapping work upstream matters. If your customers shop by six or more attributes, or your on-site search has to understand synonyms and misspellings, you need a proper filter app. FilterPro is ours, built for exactly this catalogue size. Whatever you pick, budget the configuration hours, not just the subscription.
Line items: redirects and SEO parity (44 hours, ₹66,000)
The line item clients try to cut, and the one that costs the most to skip.
- URL mapping and 301 redirects, 26 hrs. Pull every indexed URL from Search Console, Screaming Frog and your server logs, not just the ones in your sitemap. Shopify forces
/products/and/collections/into your paths, so almost nothing maps one-to-one. On a 5,000-SKU store you're writing 6,000–9,000 redirect rules, including paginated collection URLs and old filter query strings that still earn traffic. - SEO parity check, 18 hrs. Title and meta carried across, schema rebuilt, canonical logic checked on variant URLs, hreflang if you sell into the UAE or the US from the same store.
A botched redirect map costs 30–60% of organic traffic and takes four to six months to claw back. Against a ₹66,000 line item, that maths is not close. Our full approach to sequencing this is on the Shopify migration page.
Line items: the India plumbing (48 hours, ₹72,000)
- Payments and COD, 24 hrs. Razorpay or Cashfree via Shopify Payments-adjacent setup, UPI intent flows tested on real devices, COD gated by pincode and cart value, partial-COD if you're taking a ₹100–₹200 advance to cut RTO. Add a COD OTP verification step. On most Indian catalogues that alone moves RTO by several points.
- Tax, invoicing and shipping, 24 hrs. GST-compliant invoices with HSN codes are not native to Shopify. You'll add an app, map HSN at the product level during import, and test an interstate order end to end. Then Shiprocket or Delhivery, serviceability by pincode, and your returns flow.
If you sell food, cosmetics or supplements, add FSSAI licence numbers and mandatory declarations to your PDP template and your invoice. Retrofitting that after launch is a week of nobody's favourite work.
Line items: apps, QA and launch (100 hours, ₹1.5L)
- App evaluation and setup, 24 hrs. Every Woo plugin has a Shopify equivalent, and each one is a monthly bill and a script on your storefront. Ten apps at $29 is ₹24,000/month before you've sold anything. Cut ruthlessly, and check what your theme already does natively.
- QA and UAT, 36 hrs. Cross-browser, real Android devices on 4G, checkout on every payment method, inventory sync, a live test order that gets fulfilled and refunded.
- Launch and 14-day hypercare, 20 hrs. DNS cutover in a low-traffic window, redirect spot-checks in the first hour, GA4 and Meta CAPI verified against real orders, then two weeks of fixing what only production traffic reveals.
- Project management and coordination, 44 hrs, roughly 12% of the build. Anyone quoting zero for this is either hiding it in the hourly rate or not doing it.
The total, three ways
The standard scope above comes to 466 hours, ₹6.99 lakh, or ₹8.25 lakh with GST. Add tooling and you're at roughly ₹8.5 lakh all-in, over a nine to eleven week timeline.
- Lean (about 200 hrs, ₹3 lakh + GST). Premium theme with light customisation, 12 months of orders, no custom metafield architecture, standard filtering. Right for a store doing under ₹2 crore a year that mostly needs off the old platform before renewal.
- Standard (466 hrs, ₹7 lakh + GST). The build above.
- Complex (900–1,050 hrs, ₹13.5–15.75 lakh + GST). Custom theme, B2B price lists, ERP or Tally sync, multi-currency for GCC and US buyers, subscriptions, a headless PDP. This is usually where Shopify Plus starts making sense, and where the platform fee stops being the deciding factor.
Platform costs sit on top: Shopify Basic is around ₹2,000/month in India, Advanced around ₹30,000, and Plus is quoted in USD from roughly $2,300/month. Below about ₹8–10 crore of GMV, Advanced plus good apps beats Plus on total cost. We say that to people who came in wanting Plus, fairly often.
What actually blows the estimate
Not the SKU count. It's these, in order of frequency:
Source data nobody has looked at in four years. Product descriptions with inline HTML tables and hardcoded old-domain image URLs. Attributes stored as serialised PHP. Every one of these adds cleanup hours that no one scoped.
Scope added after the theme is signed off. A size chart per category, a store locator, a wholesale form. Each is 8–20 hours. Five of them is a ₹90,000 change order and two weeks.
Approval latency. If content and imagery come from your side and arrive three weeks late, the agency's team gets reassigned and remobilised. That costs real money on a fixed-fee contract and delays on a T&M one.
An ERP integration described as "simple". It never is. Scope it separately, after the migration, unless launch depends on it.
Where you should spend less
Skip the full custom theme if your revenue doesn't support it. A well-configured premium theme with 100 hours of surgical customisation outperforms a rushed bespoke build almost every time. Skip ten years of order history. Skip the app that does one thing your theme already does. Skip the pre-launch blog migration if the posts get no traffic, and redirect them to relevant collections instead.
Don't skip: redirects, QA on real Indian handsets, and the data audit. And don't skip speed. A migrated store carrying over 4MB of hero imagery and eight app scripts will launch slower than the site it replaced, which is a hard conversation to have in week two. Worth reading our notes on Shopify speed optimisation before you sign off the theme, not after.
Before you ask for quotes
Export your product CSV, count parent products and variants separately, pull your indexed URL count from Search Console, and list every plugin currently active with its monthly cost. Send that with your RFP. Any agency that can't turn those four numbers into an hour-based estimate is guessing, and you'll pay for the guess in change orders.
If you want a second opinion on a quote you already have, send it over with the numbers above and we'll tell you which line items are light. Start with a free audit of the store you're moving off, or read how we price development work generally on the Shopify development cost page.