If your Magento upgrade estimate has started to look like the cost of a new store, a move to Shopify is worth investigating. But hosting and maintenance are only part of the comparison. You also need to know what happens to the custom pricing, integrations, and catalog rules your business uses every day.
This guide walks through those decisions. Some parts of the store transfer with straightforward mapping. Others need a different approach, and it’s better to find those before you commit to a launch date.
Check your upgrade deadline
Check your exact version and edition against Adobe’s Commerce lifecycle table. Read the support terms as well as the dates; an extended support arrangement may cover less than your team expects.
Then ask your current developers for an upgrade estimate. Compare that with the cost of moving, including the work needed to replace custom features. You’ll have a more useful decision than a comparison between a hosting bill and a Shopify subscription.
When staying on Magento is the right call
There are good reasons to keep an established Magento store. Staying may make more sense if:
- Your business depends on deep customizations that would be expensive to rebuild anywhere
- You have an in-house team that knows the codebase well and has capacity
- Complex B2B logic, quoting, or multi-warehouse rules are central and work today
- You recently completed a major upgrade and the platform is stable
Write down what you expect the move to improve: maintenance cost, publishing speed, reliability, or something else. Check that Shopify can deliver that improvement while supporting the workflows you need.
What maps cleanly
Products and variants. Magento configurable products usually become Shopify products with variants. Simple products map directly. Check Shopify’s current option and variant limits against your largest configurable products early.
Categories to collections. Magento’s category tree becomes Shopify collections, either manual or rule-based. Deep hierarchies often flatten. That’s a chance to rethink navigation around how customers shop.
Custom attributes to metafields. Magento attribute sets become Shopify metafields and metaobjects. Plan this mapping carefully: it decides what your team can edit and what the theme can display.
Customers and order history. Customer records and historical orders can be migrated. Decide how much order history you actually need in Shopify and what can be archived.
Content. CMS pages and blog content move, but formatting, embedded widgets, and image paths usually need cleanup.
What needs a different approach
Customer passwords. Passwords don’t transfer between platforms. Customers will need to activate their accounts or set a new password on Shopify. Plan the emails, the timing, and the support script before launch.
Multi-store setups. Magento’s websites, stores, and store views don’t map one-to-one. Depending on what each store view does, the right Shopify answer may be Markets in a single store, separate expansion stores on Shopify Plus, or a mix. Decide this before any data moves.
Extensions. Every extension you rely on needs a replacement: a Shopify app, a native feature, or custom work. Inventory them by the workflow they support, not by name. Some will turn out to be unnecessary. Others will be the hardest part of the project.
Customer groups and tier pricing. If pricing differs by customer group, look at B2B on Shopify Plus or an app. Map every pricing rule explicitly. These are easy to miss and expensive to discover after launch.
Checkout customizations. Anything custom in the Magento checkout needs a new home. On Shopify, checkout changes go through checkout extensibility, and the deeper options require Plus.
Protect search traffic
Magento URLs often include .html suffixes and category paths. Shopify uses fixed structures like /products/ and /collections/. Almost every URL will change, so every valuable URL needs a redirect.
Build the redirect map from several sources: a full crawl of the current site, analytics landing pages, Search Console, and pages with backlinks. Preserve titles, meta descriptions, and on-page content for your highest-traffic pages. Then test the redirects before and after launch.
The Shopify migration checklist includes a downloadable redirect map template and the rest of the launch sequence.
Plan the integrations as their own project
Magento stores often sit in the middle of an ERP, a warehouse system, a PIM, accounting, and marketing tools. Each connection needs a decision: replace with an app, connect through middleware, or build a custom integration.
Allow time for the people responsible for those external systems to take part. List every system, what data flows in which direction, how often, and who owns it. Test each one end to end with real orders before launch.
Budget for the real scope
The cost of a Magento migration is driven by data complexity, extensions, integrations, storefront scope, and launch constraints, not by product count alone. Our migration cost guide breaks down each driver. If you’re comparing teams to run the project, our questions for choosing a migration agency will help.
Put the requirements in writing
Before asking for a final price, document the data, extensions, integrations, URLs, and proposed Shopify setup. Include anything you’re unsure how to replace. Those open questions need investigation before they become commitments in a contract.
That’s the purpose of our Shopify Migration Readiness Review. The plan is yours to use even if another team does the migration. Moving from WooCommerce instead? Our WooCommerce to Shopify guide covers that path.