Magento to Shopify Migration
What we've learned so far
Merchants leave Magento to stop paying for infrastructure, and the reasoning is sound. Self-hosted Magento demands continuous spend on hosting, patching and specialist DevOps, and the lifecycle has forced the issue: Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 reached end of support in April 2026 and 2.4.5 in August 2026, which turns an unsupported instance into a PCI compliance problem rather than a preference.
What merchants underestimate is the customisation. A Magento store live for years holds business logic in extensions, in overrides and in the database, and some of it is written down nowhere. Layered navigation can generate enormous numbers of crawlable URLs, and the catalogue often runs to tens of thousands of SKUs, so the chance of silent data loss is real. We audit the extension list against actual usage in the first week, because roughly half of what we find is unused or reproducible natively, and that audit changes the estimate more than any other hour in the project. The parts that genuinely do not port, complex pricing rules, multi-source inventory and anything assuming direct database access, decide whether the answer is Shopify, Shopify Plus or staying where you are. We would rather say that in week one than in month three.
This is not a lift and shift, it is an architectural translation: Magento's attribute model has to be expressed through metafields and metaobjects, and complex bundles are usually better resolved in the ERP than forced through the storefront. AI accelerates the translation work considerably. It does not tell you which of the old rules the business still depends on, and that remains the question the whole project turns on.
What this can involve
Mapping custom fields
Auditing plugins and finding replacements
Rebuilding pricing rules
Moving multi-language content
Reconfiguring payments, tax and shipping
Mapping URL redirects
Reporting and Insight Reviews
How we work
Audit the extensions against actual usage
Every installed extension checked for whether anyone still relies on it. Roughly half turn out to be unused or reproducible natively, and this changes the estimate more than any other hour in the project.
Decide what cannot port
Complex pricing rules, multi-source inventory and anything assuming direct database access. These determine whether the answer is Shopify, Shopify Plus or staying where you are, and we say so in week one.
Translate the attribute model
Magento attribute sets become metafields and metaobjects. Bundles are usually better resolved in the ERP than forced through the storefront. This is a rebuild of the data model, not a transfer.
Map the URLs, including the generated ones
Layered navigation produces enormous numbers of crawlable URLs. A crawl that only catches the catalogue will leave thousands of pages returning 404 on launch day.
Rehearse, reconcile, then cut over
Full runs against production data with counts and totals checked against Magento, because on a catalogue of tens of thousands of SKUs silent loss is easy to miss.
Where this isn't the right fit
If your store depends on complex tier pricing, deeply customised checkout logic and a catalogue driven entirely from the ERP, Shopify without Plus will fight you. Sometimes the honest answer is that the migration needs a bigger plan than a platform change, and occasionally that staying on a supported Adobe Commerce version is the cheaper route for another year.
If you are also replacing the ERP, do one at a time. Two moving systems is how orders get lost. And if nobody internally can say which of the old business rules still matter, the project will stall at the second step. We can find what the extensions do. We cannot decide which of them the business still needs.
