Migrating from Magento to Shopify: a technical checklist

Magento migrations are a different animal from WooCommerce ones. Magento (now Adobe Commerce) tends to run bigger, more complex catalogues with deep attribute systems, multiple stores and years of accumulated custom development. The move to Shopify is usually driven by the cost and effort of keeping Magento alive — hosting, upgrades, developer dependency — but the data model doesn't map one-to-one, so the migration needs a real plan. Here's the technical checklist I work through.

1. Audit the catalogue before you touch anything

Magento's EAV model lets you attach almost unlimited attributes to products, and mature stores use that freedom heavily. Before migrating, list every attribute in use and decide its Shopify home: a variant option, a metafield or metaobject, or something to retire. Shopify caps variant options per product, so configurable products with many axes need a modelling decision, not a straight copy.

2. Map the data model

• Simple and configurable products become Shopify products with variants. Watch the variant limits.
• Categories become collections. Magento's nested category tree flattens; plan how deep hierarchies become collections and navigation.
• Custom attributes become metafields and metaobjects, with a definition per attribute so they're structured, not free text.
• CMS pages and blocks become Shopify pages and sections. Bring the content and its meta.
• Customer groups and tier pricing — if customer-specific pricing is core to how you sell, that's custom pricing work to scope deliberately, not a simple import.

3. Plan the URL and redirect strategy

This is where rankings live or die. Magento URLs (/catalog/product/view/id/… or rewritten SEO paths) won't survive the move. Export every indexed URL from the sitemap and Search Console, map each to its Shopify equivalent, and load 301 redirects for all of them. Large Magento stores can have tens of thousands of URLs — treat redirect mapping as a workstream with its own owner, not a launch-day task. The mechanics are the same as any replatform; I covered them in migrating without losing SEO.

Magento gives you infinite flexibility, which means infinite decisions to make when you leave. The migration is 20% moving data and 80% deciding what each piece becomes.

4. Replace extensions with apps or native features

Magento stores lean on extensions the way WordPress leans on plugins. List them, then sort into three piles: native on Shopify (a lot of merchandising and checkout behaviour now is), an app from the store, or custom development where nothing off the shelf fits. Don't assume a one-to-one replacement exists — sometimes a Magento extension's job is better done by a small custom app or by rethinking the flow entirely.

If you're coming from BigCommerce rather than Magento, the data maps far more cleanly but the URLs still don't — BigCommerce to Shopify.

5. Handle multi-store carefully

Magento's multi-store and multi-website setup often maps to Shopify Markets (for regions and currencies) or, when the catalogues genuinely differ, to separate stores or Plus expansion stores. Decide this early — it changes the whole data and URL plan.

6. Migrate customers, orders and history

Bring customers and order history for support, reporting and marketing continuity. Passwords are hashed and can't transfer, so plan a reset flow at launch. If finance needs full historical orders inside Shopify rather than a static export, scope that explicitly — it's more work than people expect, and it often overlaps with the ERP integration you'll want anyway.

7. Rebuild, don't just re-skin

A migration is the right moment to shed the cruft. Years of Magento customisation usually includes things no one uses anymore. Rebuild the storefront around what the business actually needs today — cleaner, faster, and far cheaper to maintain. The performance win alone is often dramatic; see the performance audit for what "fast" looks like on Shopify.

8. Test, launch, monitor

• Pre-launch: crawl staging, verify products, check a redirect sample resolves to live 200 pages with no chains.
• Launch: point the domain, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, confirm analytics and pixels fire.
• After: watch crawl errors and rankings for several weeks. Isolated drops almost always trace to a missing redirect.

The honest summary

Magento to Shopify is very doable and usually a relief — but it's a modelling project as much as a data transfer. The stores that come through it stronger are the ones that audited the catalogue, mapped attributes and URLs deliberately, and used the move to simplify. Rush those decisions and you inherit Magento's complexity on a platform that didn't need it.