Magento to Shopify Migration: A 2026 Guide for Store Owners

What moves from Magento to Shopify and what doesn't

Every Magento store is shaped by its extensions, so check this list against your own install. This is how the core records usually map.

• Simple and configurable products: move. Configurable products become Shopify products with variants, and their attributes become options. Shopify allows up to 2,048 variants and three options per product, so check your largest configurables first.
• Bundle, grouped and virtual products: move with mapping. They are rebuilt with a bundles app, metafields or custom logic, depending on how customers buy them.
• Categories: move. They become collections. Filterable attributes become metafields that drive storefront filters through Shopify's Search & Discovery app.
• Customers and addresses: move.
• Customer passwords: don't move. Magento stores them as one-way hashes, so customers activate their Shopify accounts or sign in with a one-time code.
• Order history: moves, but not through Shopify's native CSV import. It needs an import tool or the API, and orders should be imported without sending emails, taking payment or changing stock.
• Customer groups and tier prices: move with mapping. They become Shopify B2B companies and catalogues, customer tags or discounts.
• Cart price rules and coupons: rebuilt as Shopify discounts, or with Shopify Functions when the logic is complex.
• Websites and store views: move with mapping to Shopify Markets and translations. Separate brands may need expansion stores.
• Inventory sources: become Shopify locations.
• CMS pages, blocks and Page Builder layouts: content moves to pages, blogs and metaobjects. Layouts are rebuilt as theme sections.
• Reviews: move into the review app you choose.
• Gift cards, store credit and reward points: partly. Balances are reconciled and recreated.
• Custom modules: don't move. Each one needs a Shopify feature, an app or a custom build.

Magento's own admin export (System, Data Transfer, Export) covers products, advanced pricing, customers, customer addresses, customer finances and stock sources. It does not export orders. For full order history with line items, use a migration app, a direct database extract or the API.

Pre-migration checklist

Before anything moves, get answers to these. Each one changes scope.

• Which Magento version and edition you run, and whether you are on Adobe Commerce Cloud.
• A list of every extension and custom module, with what it does for the business and who uses it.
• Product counts by type: simple, configurable, bundle, grouped, virtual and downloadable.
• Your largest configurable product and its variant count.
• Every website, store and store view, with its languages and currencies.
• Customer groups, tier prices and any shared catalogues.
• Integrations: ERP, PIM, warehouse, tax, payments, search, email and reviews.
• A full crawl of the live site, plus 12 months of landing page data from Google Search Console and analytics.
• Customer, order and subscription counts, and how many years of orders you need.
• Who signs off each area on your side, and your quietest trading weeks for launch.

Step-by-step Magento to Shopify migration

This is the sequence we follow. It works for a mid-sized Magento Open Source store and scales up to Adobe Commerce with B2B.

1. Audit the store. Crawl the site, list the extensions and pull data samples. Write down every business rule that lives in code, such as pricing, shipping and stock logic.
2. Design the Shopify target. Decide how each Magento concept lands in Shopify: products and variants, collections, metafields, markets, B2B catalogues and locations. Get sign-off before building.
3. Choose your tooling. Cart2Cart and LitExtension connect to Magento and copy common records. Matrixify has a documented Magento process: you export from Magento, run a dry run that generates a Matrixify template, check it and import. For complex stores we combine these with our own scripts.
4. Build the storefront. Build the theme, configure apps, set up Shopify Payments or your gateway, tax, shipping profiles and markets.
5. Run a rehearsal import. Import a full copy of the data into the new store. Reconcile counts, prices, stock, images and customer-to-order links. Fix the mapping, not the output, then run it again.
6. Test end to end. Place real orders across each market and customer type. Check B2B pricing, discounts, tax, email notifications and every integration.
7. Freeze and cut over. Agree a short content freeze, run the final delta import of new orders and customers, publish redirects, connect the domain and switch DNS.
8. Monitor. Watch 404s, Search Console coverage, conversion rate, payment errors and support tickets daily for the first two weeks.

Keep Magento read-only throughout. If you need to roll back, it has to be exactly as you left it.

SEO: mapping Magento URLs to Shopify with 301 redirects

This is where most Magento migrations lose traffic. Shopify uses fixed URL patterns, so almost every Magento URL changes.

What Magento URLs look like

• Products: /product-name.html by default. If "Use Categories Path for Product URLs" is turned on, you also get /category/product-name.html.
• Categories: /women/tops.html, nested by category path, with the .html suffix by default.
• Store codes: /en/ or /uk/ prefixes if "Add Store Code to URLs" is enabled.
• Layered navigation: query strings such as ?color=52&size=167.
• CMS pages: /about-us, often without a suffix.
• Search: /catalogsearch/result/?q=.

Where they go on Shopify

• Products go to /products/handle.
• Categories go to /collections/handle.
• CMS pages go to /pages/handle.
• Blog posts go to /blogs/blog-name/handle.
• Store-code prefixes usually become Shopify Markets subfolders such as /en-gb/.

How to build the redirect map

1. Export every indexable URL from your crawl and from Magento's url_rewrite table, including old rewrites that still receive links.
2. Match each URL to its new Shopify URL by SKU or product ID, not by name.
3. Prioritise by traffic and backlinks from Search Console.
4. Send retired products to the closest category, not the homepage.
5. Import the list in Shopify under Content, Menus, URL redirects, Import. Shopify allows up to 100,000 redirects per store, or 20 million on Shopify Plus.
6. After launch, test the full list with a crawler and check for chains and 404s.

One Shopify detail catches people out. A redirect only fires when the old path returns a 404 on Shopify. If a live page exists at that path, the redirect is ignored. Some paths, such as /products and /collections/all, can't be redirected at all.

Carry meta titles, descriptions, image alt text and structured data across too. Rankings follow content as well as URLs.

Apps and integrations that replace Magento features

You will replace a lot of extensions with native Shopify features. Start with what Shopify does out of the box, then add apps only where there is a clear gap.

• Layered navigation: Shopify's Search & Discovery app, with filters driven by metafields.
• Multi-store and multi-currency: Shopify Markets, with Translate & Adapt or a translation app for content.
• B2B pricing and companies: Shopify B2B, which is built into Shopify Plus, with company accounts, catalogues and payment terms.
• Cart price rules: Shopify discounts, or Shopify Functions for logic that native discounts can't express.
• Page Builder content: theme sections and metaobjects your team can edit without a developer.
• Reviews: Judge.me, Okendo or Yotpo.
• Subscriptions: a Shopify subscription app. Whether saved payment details transfer depends on your gateway.
• Workflows and automation: Shopify Flow.
• ERP, PIM and warehouse: a native Shopify connector where one exists, otherwise middleware or a custom app on the Shopify Admin API.

If your setup needs Plus features, our Shopify Plus agency page covers what changes at that level.

Timeline and team

A Magento to Shopify migration typically takes 4 to 6 weeks, depending on catalogue size, integrations and design scope. Adobe Commerce stores with B2B, several store views and an ERP sit at the long end or beyond. We confirm the timeline after the risk assessment.

On your side, you need:

• A project owner with authority to make scope decisions quickly.
• Someone who knows the catalogue, usually from merchandising or product data.
• Someone who knows operations: fulfilment, customer service and finance.
• Your developer or hosting partner for data extracts, and to keep Magento stable until cutover.

On ours, a Magento migration usually involves a project lead, a solution architect, Shopify developers, a data migration specialist and QA. For larger replatforms, see how we approached MOD Lighting's Shopify Plus headless migration in four checked phases.

Common Magento migration mistakes

1. Rebuilding Magento on Shopify. Copying every extension leads to a slow, app-heavy store. Rebuild the business need, not the old feature.
2. Ignoring the variant and option limits. Configurables with more than three attributes need a plan before import, not during it.
3. Redirecting everything to the homepage. Search engines treat that like a 404. Map each URL to its closest match.
4. Forgetting old rewrites. Magento's url_rewrite table often holds years of legacy URLs that still carry links.
5. Importing orders that trigger emails or stock changes. Always import historical orders with notifications off and inventory untouched.
6. No rehearsal. The first full import always finds problems. Make sure it isn't the launch import. Our JellyBean Tanning migration write-up shows how dry runs catch them early.
7. Launching in peak season. Pick a quiet trading window and leave two weeks of support after go-live.