The Magento-to-Shopify-Plus conversation has come up four times this year, all from mid-market merchants between five and fifty million in annual revenue, all on Magento 2 installations that are three to seven years old. The pattern is consistent. The Magento site is doing the job, but the cost of running it — extensions, hosting, developer retainer, security patches — has crept up to where the merchant starts asking whether the platform is still the right call.
We have shipped all four migrations in 2023. Here is the working playbook, the cost lines clients never expect, and the parts that always go sideways no matter how much we plan.
The honest reason most migrations happen
It is not features. Magento has more features than Shopify Plus in most categories. The reason migrations happen is the total cost of ownership math.
A mid-market Magento store runs an annual operating cost of roughly 180,000 to 350,000 dollars when you add hosting, extension licenses, developer retainer, security patch cycles, and major version upgrade projects. The same merchant on Shopify Plus runs 60,000 to 120,000 dollars in platform plus apps plus a smaller retainer.
The platform fee on Shopify Plus is higher than Magento Open Source. The total cost is meaningfully lower because Shopify operates the infrastructure, the security, and the platform updates. The customizations that used to require a developer to write a Magento module now live in apps, Shopify Functions, or theme customizations that the merchant team can manage in-house.
The four-month timeline
A mid-market Magento-to-Shopify-Plus migration runs four to seven months end to end. The shape of the timeline:
- Month 1: Data audit, discovery, app and customization roadmap, theme design kickoff.
- Month 2: Product data migration to staging, customer data migration, order history if required, theme build start.
- Month 3: Customizations (Functions, scripts, app builds), integrations (ERP, CRM, 3PL), theme finish, content migration.
- Month 4: Full data refresh, redirect mapping, payment provider testing, soft launch on a subdomain.
- Month 5 (if needed): Final cutover, DNS swap, post-launch monitoring, secondary cleanup.
The ‘month 5 if needed’ is the cushion every project ends up using. We have not shipped a migration this year that did not slip into the fifth month for one reason or another.
The data migration: where it always goes sideways
Magento and Shopify have fundamentally different data models. Magento’s flexible attributes, multi-store-view structure, custom product type system, and tier pricing logic do not map cleanly to Shopify.
The mappings that always cost more time than expected:
Configurable products in Magento → variants in Shopify. Magento allows arbitrary attribute combinations on a configurable product. Shopify limits a product to three option dimensions with up to 100 variants total. Most mid-market catalogs have a few products that exceed this. They need a strategy — splitting into multiple products, using metafields with custom variant selectors, or denormalizing into separate listings.
Custom attributes in Magento → metafields in Shopify. Magento’s attribute system is unlimited. Shopify’s metafield system is capable but the per-resource metafield count, metafield types, and the relationship to the storefront editor are all different. The migration usually involves consolidating dozens of Magento attributes into a smaller, more deliberate set of metafields.
Customer groups in Magento → customer tags + Shopify Plus B2B catalogs in Shopify. The B2B Catalog and Company features Shopify rolled out in 2022 have changed this conversation. Customer-specific pricing that used to require a custom development is now native on Shopify Plus. But the migration is not automatic. The customer group hierarchies, the price list assignments, the tax exemption rules — all of it needs a clean re-mapping.
Order history. Whether to migrate the order history is the single most-debated decision on every project. The pro side: customer service can answer ‘where is my past order’ questions in the new admin. The con side: the migration is expensive, the data fidelity is imperfect, and the orders are not truly editable in Shopify the way new orders are. The compromise we have shipped on three of four projects: migrate the last 18 months of orders into Shopify as ‘imported orders’ and keep the Magento admin running in read-only mode for older history.
The customizations: where the platform really differs
Magento merchants typically have ten to thirty custom modules. Each one needs an answer in the new stack. The answers fall into four buckets:
- Replaced by native Shopify feature: roughly 30 percent of customizations. Things like multi-currency, B2B, custom shipping rates by SKU.
- Replaced by Shopify app: roughly 35 percent. The Shopify app ecosystem is mature for most mid-market needs.
- Rebuilt as Shopify Function or theme customization: roughly 20 percent. Things like custom cart logic, free-gift rules, dynamic pricing rules.
- Rebuilt as a custom Shopify app or storefront customization: roughly 15 percent. Things that are truly bespoke to the business.
The 15 percent custom-app bucket is where the budget surprises live. A complex Magento module rebuilt as a Shopify private app is real software engineering — sometimes 200 to 400 hours per module. Two or three modules in this category can add 100,000 dollars to the project that nobody anticipated at kickoff.
The SEO and redirect map
Same playbook as the WordPress-to-Shopify post we wrote in 2019, scaled up. Magento URL structures are deeper than WordPress. A mid-market Magento store typically has 30,000 to 100,000 indexed URLs. Every one needs a destination on Shopify, mapped, tested, and verified.
We run two crawls before launch — one on Magento to capture the source URLs, one on the staging Shopify site to verify every redirect lands on a real page. Shopify Plus has a higher redirect limit than standard Shopify (100,000), which is necessary for migrations this size.
The cost lines clients never expect
Three lines that consistently show up in actuals but not in initial budgets:
Payment gateway migration. Existing Magento merchants often have payment provider integrations that do not exist as Shopify apps, or that exist with different feature sets. The conversation with the payment provider and the testing of the new integration runs four to eight weeks of part-time work that clients underestimate.
ERP and 3PL re-integration. Most mid-market merchants have an ERP (NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP Business One) and a 3PL connection. The integration needs to be rebuilt against Shopify’s API, which is different. Plan for 80 to 200 hours per integration.
Training and change management. The merchandising team has worked in Magento admin for years. The Shopify admin is different. Plan for two to four training sessions, a written runbook, and a few weeks of soft-launch hand-holding. It is a real line item in our proposals now because we have seen it consistently get skipped and consistently bite the post-launch period.
The honest verdict
For mid-market merchants whose primary complaint about Magento is total cost of ownership and operational overhead, the migration pays back within 18 to 30 months. For merchants who have built genuinely Magento-specific differentiation — bespoke checkout flows, multi-store complexity that Shopify does not match, deep ERP integration that would be brutal to rebuild — staying on Magento may be the right call.
The conversation is no longer ‘Magento vs Shopify.’ Both platforms work. The conversation is which of the two is the right home for the specific merchant for the next five years, given what they actually sell and how they actually operate.