Migrating from WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento to Shopify

Moving to Shopify from WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento is mostly straightforward for products, customers and order history. The hard parts are the custom logic built into plugins and extensions, the URL changes, and customer passwords, which can't be migrated because each platform stores them differently.

The good news is that Shopify's newer customer accounts make the password problem much smaller than it used to be. The rest comes down to planning.

What moves across, and what doesn't?

What moves: products, variants and images, customer records, order history, categories as collections, blog posts and content pages, and reviews through most review apps' import tools.

What doesn't:

• Customer passwords. Platforms encrypt passwords in different ways, so they can't be carried over.
• Logic inside plugins and extensions. Anything that changes pricing, shipping, checkout or product options has to be rebuilt with Shopify apps, Shopify Functions or custom development.
• URLs. Shopify uses fixed paths like /products/ and /collections/, so nearly every URL changes and needs a redirect.
• Some product structures. Complex attribute setups often need to be remapped into Shopify's variants and metafields.

Which tools handle the migration?

Shopify's free Store Migration app covers several platforms, but migration guides note it doesn't support BigCommerce or Magento directly. For those, and for more complex WooCommerce stores, third-party tools like Matrixify, LitExtension and MigrationPro are the usual route. Some can also carry over URLs and set up redirects.

Whatever you use, run a trial migration into a development store first. It's much easier to spot missing fields and broken variants before customers can see them.

What's specific to WooCommerce?

Plugins. A typical WooCommerce store relies on a stack of them, and each one needs a Shopify equivalent or a decision to drop it. List every active plugin, what it does and whether you still need it. This inventory is usually the biggest single driver of project scope.

You'll also move away from managing hosting, security updates and plugin compatibility yourself, which is a large part of why many brands make the switch.

What's specific to BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is also a hosted platform, so the move is usually simpler than from a self-hosted store. The main work is mapping categories to Shopify collections, rebuilding any custom checkout or pricing rules, and reworking B2B features if you use them.

What's specific to Magento?

Support timelines are pushing a lot of Magento and Adobe Commerce stores to decide. According to Adobe, regular support for version 2.4.6 ended on August 11, 2026, with extended support running until August 31, 2027. Regular support for 2.4.7 ends on May 31, 2027. Several migration guides also point out that MySQL 8.0, which many Magento installations run on, reached end of support in April 2026.

Magento's flexible attribute system is usually the trickiest part of the move. Products built from many configurable attributes need careful mapping into Shopify's variants and metafields, and layered navigation filters need rebuilding with Shopify's search and discovery tools.

How much order history should I bring across?

Enough to serve customers and keep your marketing data useful, but not necessarily everything. Order history feeds customer lifetime spend in Shopify and in tools like Klaviyo, so dropping it resets how your best customers look to those systems.

A common approach is to import the last two or three years of orders and export the rest to an archive you can search if a question comes up. Whatever you import, make sure the migration tool doesn't send order confirmation emails for historical orders. Most tools have a setting for it, and missing it can mean thousands of confused customers.

How do I handle customer accounts?

Import customer records without passwords, then plan how people will sign in. Shopify's newer customer accounts are passwordless: customers enter their email and receive a one-time code, so there's no password to reset. For most customers the first login after the move just works.

Tell customers before launch anyway. A short email explaining that the store has moved and how signing in now works prevents confused support tickets. If your account area shows subscription or loyalty data, check it after this year's customer account changes.

How long does it take?

Published estimates put a full replatform at about 8 to 16 weeks. The biggest variables are the number of integrations, how much custom logic needs rebuilding, and how much content and order history you want to bring across.

We migrate stores to Shopify from WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento. Our Underbrush case study covers a full move to Shopify. Start with a free CRO audit.