Magento 2 → Shopify
Leave Magento without losing
your catalogue or your rankings.
Magento's attribute model doesn't map onto Shopify by itself, and the URL rewrite table is where rankings quietly die. We've done this twice onto Shopify Plus — once with roughly 70,000 SKUs and an ERP that had to stay in charge throughout.
- Magento 2Shopify Plus
Drum Center of Portsmouth
~70,000 SKUs, Brightpearl ERP retained
- Magento 2Shopify Plus
The Suit Depot
Why merchants leave
You probably already know which of these is yours
The bill nobody can justify any more
Dedicated hosting, a Commerce licence, a search service, an agency retainer to keep it patched. Merchants routinely find the running cost of Magento exceeds what Shopify Plus would cost outright — before counting the developer hours.
Every change needs a developer
Adding a section, changing a promotion rule, adjusting a template. On Magento that's a ticket and a deployment. Your merchandising team waits on engineering to do merchandising.
The upgrade you keep postponing
Security patches and version upgrades break extensions, so they get deferred. Deferred long enough, upgrading stops being routine maintenance and becomes a project nobody wants to fund.
Extension sprawl
Twelve third-party modules, three of them abandoned by their vendors, two overriding the same core class. Every one is a dependency you cannot upgrade past and a place bugs hide.
What maps to what
Magento concepts, and where they land
Most of a Magento migration is deciding these correctly. Get the attribute model wrong and you spend the next year working around it.
The biggest structural difference. Magento's EAV model has no direct equivalent, so attributes are mapped deliberately — some become variant options, some metafields, some are merged or dropped because nothing was ever reading them.
Configurable maps cleanly to variants. Grouped and bundle products need a decision per product line rather than a blanket rule.
Wholesale tiers survive the move. Which mechanism depends on whether you're going to Plus.
Straightforward rules map to native discounts. Anything unusual becomes a Function — code, but code that lives in a supported extension point.
Exported wholesale and mapped before launch. This is the single biggest cause of ranking loss when it's skipped.
Worth scoping early. A multi-store Magento install is a materially bigger migration than a single-store one.
Content moves; the way it's assembled changes. Static blocks usually become reusable sections your team can edit without a developer.
A real audit usually finds a third of installed extensions replaced by native Shopify behaviour, and another third nobody remembers enabling.
Your ERP stays the system of record. We rebuild the pipe, not the business logic.
How we do it
We count everything, twice
- 01
We count what you have first
Before anything moves, we inventory the source: every product, variant, collection, image and URL. On stores with no usable export we reconstruct it from the live site — that's how we found thousands of products sitting in categories nothing linked to.
Gift4Soul: 6,965 products recovered from a site with no export
- 02
We rebuild the structure, not just the rows
Collections, hierarchy and navigation are recreated to match, and every existing URL is mapped to its new home with a 301. We don't redesign your information architecture and change platform at the same time — that's what actually kills rankings.
Every URL mapped before launch, not after
- 03
We count again, and show you the numbers
After import we re-run the same count against Shopify and compare it to the source, category by category, until the two agree exactly. You get that reconciliation. If the numbers don't match, it isn't finished.
0 products or categories lost across 5 migrations
Questions
What Magento merchants ask first
Is Magento 2 harder to migrate from than WooCommerce?
Yes, materially. WooCommerce keeps products in a fairly flat structure you can export. Magento's EAV model spreads a single product across many tables, product types behave differently from each other, and the URL rewrite table has to come across intact. It's also why most agencies who advertise Shopify migrations have only ever done WooCommerce. We've taken two Magento 2 stores to Shopify Plus, one of roughly 70,000 SKUs.
What happens to our SEO?
Magento's URL rewrite table is exported and every entry mapped to its Shopify destination as a 301 before launch — not retrofitted after someone notices traffic dropping. We also deliberately do not redesign your category structure during the migration. Changing platform and information architecture at the same time is the most common cause of ranking collapse, and it's avoidable by doing them in sequence.
Can we keep our ERP?
Yes, and usually you should. On the last Magento 2 to Shopify Plus migration we did, the ERP stayed the system of record for inventory, pricing and fulfilment throughout — the storefront moved out from under Magento without the ERP noticing. Replacing your ERP at the same time as your storefront is two risky projects pretending to be one.
How long does it take?
Four to eight weeks for most Magento 2 stores. The variable is almost never catalogue size — it's how many custom extensions carry business logic, whether you run multiple store views, and how clean the attribute model is. The audit tells you which of those apply to you before you commit to a date.
Do we lose customer accounts and order history?
No. Customers, addresses and order history migrate with the catalogue, so returning customers don't land on a store that has never heard of them. Passwords can't come across — Magento hashes them differently — so customers set a new password on first login, which is standard for any platform move.
Do we have to go to Shopify Plus?
Not necessarily, and we'll tell you if you don't need it. Plus earns its cost when you need checkout customisation, B2B catalogues, or the higher API limits a large catalogue demands. Plenty of Magento merchants are running complexity they inherited rather than complexity they need, and standard Shopify is the right answer.
Send us your Magento store
You'll get a written assessment back: how clean your attribute model is, how many extensions actually carry business logic, what the migration would involve and roughly what it costs. No call, no obligation — including 'stay where you are' if that's the honest answer.