Why are so many brands migrating from Magento to Shopify?

Magento's total cost of ownership is the primary driver. Hosting, server management, security patches, developer costs for updates, and the accumulating complexity of a self-hosted platform add up significantly. Shopify removes most of that overhead. Adobe's acquisition of Magento and the shift to Adobe Commerce has also pushed many mid-market merchants to reconsider whether the platform still fits their scale.

Can Shopify match Magento's flexibility?

For most merchants, yes. The honest answer is that the majority of Magento customisations exist to solve problems that Shopify handles natively or through its app ecosystem. The edge cases where Magento genuinely has no Shopify equivalent tend to involve highly complex B2B pricing logic, deep ERP integration, or very large attribute-heavy catalogues. For standard DTC brands, Shopify handles everything Magento can at lower cost and complexity.

What happens to my Magento SEO during migration?

Your SEO is preserved or lost based almost entirely on how well you handle URL redirects. Magento URLs often include category paths (e.g. /clothing/mens/shirts/product-name.html) which differ from Shopify's flat /products/product-name structure. Build a complete URL map before migration and implement 301 redirects before the new store goes live. Monitor Search Console closely for the first 8 weeks.

Magento to Shopify Migration: A Step-by-Step Guide

Magento to Shopify is one of the most common enterprise replatforming moves we see in the market. It is also one of the most complex. Magento stores tend to have years of customisation layered on top of the base platform, integrations built to Magento-specific APIs, and URL structures that differ significantly from what Shopify produces by default.

Getting it right requires more planning than most merchants expect. Here is the full picture.

Why Merchants Are Moving

The catalyst is almost always total cost of ownership. A Magento Open Source store with proper hosting, security management, and a development retainer for platform updates costs £2,000 to £5,000 per month before any feature development. Adobe Commerce (the paid tier) adds licensing costs on top.

Shopify Plus at $2,300 per month handles hosting, security, and platform maintenance. The savings fund the migration cost within 12 to 18 months for most merchants.

Phase 1: Audit Your Magento Store

Before writing a line of migration code, document everything your Magento store does. This includes:

Data inventory: products, variants, attributes, customer records, order history, CMS pages, blog posts.

Custom functionality: any feature that was built by a developer rather than installed as a standard Magento extension. These are the things that will not have a direct Shopify equivalent and will require the most migration planning.

Integrations: every system connected to Magento. ERP, WMS, CRM, marketing platforms, accounting tools. Document what data flows where and how frequently.

URL structure: extract every indexed URL from Google Search Console and your Magento sitemap. This is your redirect source list.

Phase 2: Data Migration

Magento's data model is more complex than Shopify's. Products in Magento use a flexible attribute system (EAV) that allows any number of custom attributes. Shopify uses metafields for custom product data, which works but requires a remapping of your attribute structure.

For core data (products, customers, orders), use a dedicated migration tool such as Cart2Cart or LitExtension. These handle the data mapping automatically and have been tested against Magento exports specifically. Attempting a manual CSV migration for a store with more than a few hundred products is not practical.

Test the migration on a Shopify development store first. Validate that product counts match, that variant data is correct, and that customer records have imported completely.

Phase 3: Rebuild Integrations

Every Magento-specific integration needs to be rebuilt or replaced. This is the phase that most commonly causes migration timelines to extend.

Start with your most business-critical integrations: inventory sync, order management, and fulfilment. These need to be operational from day one. Secondary integrations (CRM sync, marketing platforms, reporting) can often be migrated in the weeks following launch.

Check whether your integration partner or the platform vendor (NetSuite, SAP, etc.) has a native Shopify connector. Many do, which significantly reduces the development work required.

Phase 4: URL Mapping and Redirects

Build a complete spreadsheet of every Magento URL that has external links or indexed traffic, mapped to its Shopify equivalent. Magento URL formats to watch for:

/catalog/product/view/id/123/ style legacy URLs
Category-pathed URLs like /mens/shirts/blue-oxford.html
CMS pages at /path/to/page.html
Blog posts under /blog/post-title.html

Shopify redirects are managed under Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects and support bulk CSV upload. Upload and test your full redirect list before launch.

Phase 5: Theme and Front-End

Do not attempt to replicate your Magento theme in Shopify. Build a new theme from scratch based on what you actually need. Use this migration as an opportunity to audit your front-end: what do customers actually use, what was built for legacy reasons, and what can be simplified?

Based on performance data from Shopify stores that migrated from Magento, stores that used this as a front-end rebuild opportunity typically see a 15 to 25 point improvement in PageSpeed scores versus those that tried to recreate their existing design.

Post-Launch Monitoring

For the first 8 weeks after launch, monitor Google Search Console daily. Watch for:

Crawl errors on old URLs that are not redirecting correctly
Indexing drops on key category or product pages
Significant ranking changes on target keywords

Some volatility is normal. Consistent errors that do not resolve within 4 to 6 weeks indicate a structural issue with the redirect implementation that needs to be addressed.

Compare your new store's performance against Magento stores and Shopify stores in your category at CommerceRank.ai.