Leave Magento without leaving your rankings behind.

Three reasons come up repeatedly: the maintenance burden of version upgrades and security patches, total cost once hosting, extensions, and developer retainers are added together, and the fact that merchandising changes need a developer. Shopify Plus trades low-level control for a hosted platform your own team can operate.

Magento 1 reached end of support, which means no official security patches. Running it now is a risk decision rather than a cost saving, and PCI compliance becomes harder to evidence. Most Magento 1 stores we speak to are choosing between a Magento 2 upgrade and a move to Shopify Plus, and the cost gap is smaller than expected.

Sometimes yes. If you rely on deep native B2B features, a very large catalog with complex attribute logic, or custom modules central to your operation, Magento 2 may fit better. We will say so. The migration is worth it when the platform maintenance itself is the constraint rather than any specific feature.

Shopify Plus is the most common destination for Magento merchants, trading extension-level control for a hosted platform with no upgrade cycle. BigCommerce suits mid-market catalogues wanting native B2B without the licence cost. Adobe Commerce itself remains the answer where merchandising depth is genuinely required. Open-source alternatives such as WooCommerce or PrestaShop reduce licence cost but keep the maintenance burden that most Magento teams are trying to escape.

Self-serve tools such as LitExtension, Cart2Cart, and Matrixify move records but leave attribute mapping, extension replacement, URL redirects, and ERP integration to your team. Agencies including Meetanshi, Magefan, DigitalSuits, and Fourmeta run full projects, as we do. For a small catalogue with no extensions or ERP, a tool is often genuinely sufficient and cheaper, and we will tell you when that is the case.

Adobe Commerce is the paid, Adobe-supported edition; Magento Open Source is the free self-hosted one. They share a codebase, so the migration path to Shopify is broadly the same. Adobe Commerce stores usually carry more native B2B configuration, which adds scoping work around contract pricing and company accounts.

Products with configurable and simple variants, categories, images, customers and address books, order and invoice history, CMS pages and blog content, discount rules, reviews, and existing URL redirects. Magento attribute sets and custom attributes need mapping to Shopify metafields, which is usually the largest single piece of data work.

Shopify has no direct equivalent, so attributes become metafields, variant options, or tags depending on how each is used. Magento stores typically accumulate attributes over years, many unused. We audit which are actually populated and referenced before mapping, rather than porting the whole set and inheriting the mess.

Yes, though Shopify limits how many options a variant can carry. Most configurable products map directly. Where a product exceeds Shopify's variant model, we either restructure it or implement the configuration as a metafield-driven selector. We identify these during the audit so there are no surprises at build time.

No, and no agency can honestly promise otherwise. Magento stores passwords as one-way hashes that Shopify cannot import. Accounts migrate without passwords and customers go through a reset at launch. We plan the customer communication in advance so it does not look like a breach notification.

Yes. Historical orders can be imported so customers see past purchases and your team keeps reporting continuity. Very large order archives sometimes import as a summarised record with the full detail kept in an exportable archive, which we agree with you rather than deciding silently.

Not if the URL mapping is complete. Magento and Shopify use different URL structures, notably around category paths and product suffixes, so almost every URL changes. We crawl every indexed URL first, map each one to its equivalent, and implement single-hop 301 redirects before launch rather than after a traffic drop.

Magento commonly serves products at a category-nested path with a configurable suffix, while Shopify uses fixed prefixes such as /products/ and /collections/. That means the mapping is structural rather than cosmetic, and layered navigation URLs from Magento need deliberate handling so they do not become a mass of soft 404s.

Magento layered navigation can generate large numbers of indexed filter URLs. We identify which of those actually hold rankings or links, map those to the nearest Shopify collection, and let the rest resolve cleanly rather than redirecting thousands of low-value URLs into a chain. Mapping everything indiscriminately creates more problems than it solves.

Yes, and this is routinely missed. Magento stores usually carry years of accumulated redirects from past URL changes. Those have to be flattened and re-pointed at the new destination, otherwise you get two-hop chains where an old URL redirects to another old URL that then redirects again.

Schema often lives in the Magento theme and quietly disappears in the new Shopify theme, taking rich results and AI-citation eligibility with it. We inventory what structured data exists, rebuild it in the new theme, and validate it before cutover rather than discovering the loss in Search Console weeks later.

Most can. Company accounts, shared catalogs, requisition lists, and quote workflows have Shopify Plus B2B equivalents, though the implementation differs. Contract pricing and account hierarchies are the parts most often lost or corrupted in migration, so we reconcile them against your ERP both before and after cutover.

They do not transfer. Every extension needs an equivalent Shopify app, a custom build, or a decision to drop it. Auditing the extension list is usually where the real scope of a Magento migration becomes clear, because stores typically run extensions nobody remembers installing and a few that are genuinely load-bearing.

Yes. An integration written against the Magento API has to be rebuilt against Shopify. We treat this as part of the migration, not a follow-up phase, because a storefront that is live but not sending orders to NetSuite, SAP, Dynamics, or Epicor is not actually migrated.

Depends what it does. Custom modules that express business rules usually get rebuilt as Shopify Functions, apps, or metafield logic. Modules that patched around Magento limitations often turn out to be unnecessary on Shopify. We categorise each one during the audit rather than assuming everything must be recreated.

Most run from a few weeks to a few months. Catalog size, attribute complexity, the extension list, and ERP integration depth drive the estimate. Data quality moves it more than anything else, which is why we audit the source data before quoting rather than after.

It depends on catalog size, how many extensions need replacing, whether B2B pricing is involved, and how deep the ERP integration goes. We scope it on a short call and send a fixed proposal before any work starts, so the figure does not move mid-project.

No. We build and test on staging, run a full data migration, then a delta sync of anything that changed during the build, and switch DNS at a low-traffic window. The Magento store stays reachable until the new store is verified, which keeps rollback to a DNS change.

Sometimes. Content and blog can move ahead of the store, and multi-store Magento setups can migrate one storefront at a time. A single store with one catalog is usually cleaner as a single cutover, because running two systems against one inventory pool creates reconciliation problems worse than the risk it avoids.

Admin access or a full database export from Magento, a list of every integration touching the store including ones marketing set up independently, and ideally a crawl of your indexed URLs. Having those ready shortens scoping considerably and surfaces surprises while they are still cheap to handle.

Yes. You own the code, the data, and the platform accounts. Nothing is rented back to you and there is no proprietary layer you cannot maintain without us.