Plenty of mid-market brands still run on Magento, whether that is Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce or an older version that has been patched for years. The reasons to leave are familiar. Hosting, security patches, upgrades and extension conflicts eat developer time that should go into growth.
Shopify Plus takes most of that away. Hosting, security and checkout become Shopify's job. The work is getting there without losing the data, rankings and integrations the business depends on.
Where Magento migrations go wrong
Magento's data model is flexible, and years of customization make it more so. Configurable and bundle products, custom attributes, multiple store views and extension tables rarely map one to one onto Shopify. We map them deliberately.
- Product structure. Configurable, grouped and bundle products translated into Shopify products, variants, metafields and bundles, with the approach agreed before any data moves.
- Store views. Languages and regions mapped to Shopify Markets, separate expansion stores or a mix of both.
- Order history. Past orders imported so customers see their history and service teams can handle returns and questions.
- Customer accounts. Accounts and addresses migrated, with an activation campaign because passwords cannot be carried across.
- URLs and SEO. Magento URL keys, category paths and rewrites mapped to Shopify's structure with 301 redirects.
Rebuilding what extensions did
Most Magento stores carry a long list of extensions and custom modules. We go through each one and decide whether Shopify handles it natively, an app covers it, a Shopify Function or custom app rebuilds it, or it can simply be retired. The list usually gets much shorter, and so does the maintenance.
Cutover
We rehearse the data migration in rounds and reconcile each one against Magento. Launch is scheduled away from your peak trading periods. A final delta of orders and customers runs at cutover, and we monitor checkout, payments, redirects and integrations closely after go-live.
After launch, the Magento instance can be kept read-only for a period if finance or service teams need to look something up, then switched off for good.
Magento moves are handled within our ecommerce replatforming service on Shopify Plus. For the data side in detail, see catalog and data migration, and for connecting Shopify to finance and stock, see ERP integration.
