A Magento to Shopify migration moves your products, customers, orders and content to Shopify, replaces your Magento extensions with apps, and redirects every old URL so search traffic survives. Devvista is a software development and growth agency that plans these moves for store owners in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and the UAE. For a mid-sized store the work usually takes weeks, not days, and the redirect map matters more than the theme.
This guide covers why stores leave Magento, what maps to what, the steps, the market-by-market checks, a worked cost example and how to measure the result.
01 Why Stores Leave Magento, and When They Should Not
The reasons are usually practical. Hosting, security patches and developer time for a Magento store add up, and every extension is another thing that must keep working after each update. For stores still on Magento 1 the choice was made for them: Adobe ended support for the Magento 1 line on June 30, 2020, which means no more security patches (Help Net Security and SC Media report the date).
If you are on Magento 2 or Adobe Commerce, the question is different: is the platform still earning its cost? Moving makes sense when your catalog is straightforward, your team wants to manage the store without a developer, and most of your extensions have a Shopify equivalent.
Staying makes sense when you run complex multi-store logic or heavy custom workflows that would have to be rebuilt from scratch. We tell store owners which side they are on after a short audit, before any migration work is quoted.
02 What Maps to What: Magento Features on Shopify
Most Magento concepts have a Shopify counterpart, but not a one-to-one copy. This table is the starting point for the audit.
| In Magento | On Shopify | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Simple and configurable products | Products with variants | Check how your option sets map before importing |
| Categories | Collections | Category paths change, so every URL needs a redirect |
| Custom attributes | metafields | Metafields let you add your own data to existing records, so decide which attributes are worth keeping |
| Store views (languages, currencies) | Shopify Markets | Markets controls currency, language, domains and taxes per region |
| Customer groups | Customer tags or segments | Decide which group rules still matter |
| Catalog price rules | Discounts, or Shopify Functions for custom logic | Custom apps that use Function APIs need a Shopify Plus plan |
| Extensions | Shopify apps, or a custom Shopify app | List every extension before you quote |
| CMS pages and blocks | Pages and theme sections | Keep headings and metadata for pages that rank |
| URL rewrites | URL redirects | Shopify caps redirects per store, covered below |
The extensions row causes the most surprises. A Magento store with eight or ten extensions will have a handful that need a different approach on Shopify, and one or two that become a small custom app.
03 The Redirect Map: Where Magento Migrations Lose Traffic
Shopify's migration guide warns that its link structure is likely different from your old store, so old links "likely won't load for customers." On a Magento store that means every product, category, CMS page and blog URL.
Google's guidance on site moves says to map each old URL to its new one, use permanent server-side redirects, and keep them for as long as possible, generally at least one year. If your domain stays the same, Google says you do not need a Change of Address in Search Console for path changes.
Large Magento catalogs run into a Shopify limit: Shopify's URL redirect help says a store can have a maximum of 100,000 URL redirects, and Plus stores can have 20,000,000. A catalog with tens of thousands of products plus categories and layered filter URLs can approach the standard cap, so we count URLs early and decide which filter pages deserve a redirect.
Build the map from three sources: your Magento URL rewrite export, your sitemap, and the pages that earned organic traffic and sales in the last year. Redirect the pages that earn money first and test them one by one.
04 The Steps: How a Magento Store Moves to Shopify
This is the order we follow. Each step has an output you can check.
- Audit and baseline. Export products, customers, orders, extensions, URL rewrites, and your top pages by organic traffic and revenue. This is the before picture.
- Decide what stays. Mark each extension and custom feature as keep, replace with an app, build custom, or drop.
- Clean the data. Fix duplicate SKUs, broken option sets and missing descriptions in Magento first, because an import repeats every mistake.
- Import in order. Shopify's migration guide says to import products first, then customers, then historical orders. After each pass, compare counts between the two stores.
- Build and connect. Set up the theme, navigation, checkout, payments, shipping and tracking, and install or build the replacements for your extensions.
- Test with real orders. Place test orders with each payment method, check taxes, shipping rates and emails, and open the redirect list in bulk to catch chains and loops.
- Launch and watch. Switch DNS, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, inspect your top URLs, and track clicks and orders against the baseline for several weeks.
Our Shopify migration services page sets out the same process with the checks and a second worked example.
05 Magento to Shopify in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and the UAE
The platform steps are the same everywhere. What changes is payments, tax and how you set up regions. Every row below comes from a Shopify help page linked after the table, and we recommend confirming tax treatment with your accountant in each country.
| Market | Shopify Payments | Tax tools on Shopify's tax page | Check before launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Listed as supported | Sales tax calculations can be set up to run automatically; Shopify says tax is your responsibility | Where you collect sales tax, and your Magento tax classes |
| United Kingdom | Listed as supported | Shopify Tax is available for the EU and the UK | VAT settings, whether prices show tax-inclusive, and returns handling |
| Australia | Listed as supported | Listed under Shopify's Basic Tax service; the page gives no GST detail | GST treatment, confirmed with your accountant |
| Canada | Listed as supported | Shopify Tax is available in Canada, with a separate Canadian taxes guide | Provincial tax rules for the provinces you ship to |
| United Arab Emirates | Listed as supported | Not covered on the tax page | VAT setup, confirmed with your accountant and Shopify support |
Sources: the Shopify Payments supported countries page lists all five countries, with the condition that your business is located in a supported country. The Shopify tax page gives the tax service details above, and says nothing about the UAE.
If your Magento store sells in several countries through store views, Shopify Markets is where that logic goes: it controls currency, product availability, theme content, domains, languages and taxes per market. Decide before the build whether each country gets its own domain or a path on one domain, because that choice affects your redirect map and your search setup.
06 What a Magento to Shopify Migration Costs
Devvista prices fixed projects from $500 to $100,000 depending on complexity, or hourly work from $10 to $100 an hour depending on the developer. Magento moves sit higher than most because of the number of extensions, attributes and URLs.
Worked example (an estimate, not a quote). Assume a Magento 2 store with 2,000 products, six extensions that need replacing, and two years of orders, using one illustrative rate of $40 an hour:
| Work | Hours |
|---|---|
| Audit, baseline and extension decisions | 20 |
| URL map and redirects | 30 |
| Product data cleanup and import | 45 |
| Theme, navigation and checkout setup | 40 |
| Replacing six extensions with apps or small custom work | 40 |
| Customer and order import with count checks | 25 |
| Testing, launch and the first weeks of monitoring | 25 |
| Total | 225 hours, about $9,000 at $40 an hour |
As an estimate, that scope needs eight to ten weeks of calendar time, because reviews and payment-provider setup take time on your side too. Every assumption above is yours to change: more extensions, more markets or more custom logic raise the hours.
07 How to Tell Whether the Migration Worked
Pick the numbers before the move and compare after. In Search Console, watch indexing errors, the new sitemap and clicks on your top pages week over week. In Shopify, check the redirect list and orders. In your analytics, confirm that purchase events fire on real orders.
Rankings can move for a few weeks after any platform change. A sustained drop on pages that were redirected correctly points to a missing redirect, a changed title or content that did not carry over. Keep the redirects in place for at least a year.
08 Where Devvista Fits, and Who It Is For
Devvista is a software development and growth agency that migrates Magento stores to Shopify, builds the custom apps that replace Magento extensions, and connects Shopify to ERP systems including Odoo as an official Odoo partner. We work with store owners in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and the UAE.
A good fit: a store with real organic traffic, a catalog that Shopify can model, and extensions that can be replaced. Not a fit: a store whose value is in complex custom logic that has no Shopify equivalent, where staying on Magento may cost less. We would rather say so than quote the work.
If you want the plan reviewed first, book a call and bring your extension list and top pages.
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