Brands rarely leave BigCommerce because it stopped working. They leave because the theme is hard to change, the app they need only exists for Shopify, or they cannot find developers. Both are capable platforms, so the migration itself is not the risk. The risk is the handful of things that look the same on both sides but are modelled differently — and the URLs, which change almost everywhere.
What moves across cleanly
- Products with titles, descriptions, SKUs, prices, stock levels, weights and images.
- Categories, which become Shopify collections — manual or rule-based.
- Customers with names, addresses and marketing consent. Passwords never move (see below).
- Order history, imported as historical orders so customers see past purchases in their account.
- Blog posts and content pages, plus SEO titles and meta descriptions.
None of this is difficult, but all of it should be counted. Before anything is imported we record how many products, variants, customers and orders exist on BigCommerce, so the numbers can be checked on Shopify before launch rather than discovered missing afterwards.
The five things that need a decision
1. Product options and modifiers
BigCommerce separates variant options, which create SKUs, from modifier options such as engraving text, a gift-wrap checkbox or a date picker, which do not. Shopify only has options and variants: up to three options and 2,048 variants per product. Variant options map directly. Modifiers become line item properties, added in the theme or by an app — and if a modifier changes the price, that logic has to be rebuilt deliberately rather than assumed to carry over.
2. Customer groups and price lists
Group pricing on BigCommerce usually becomes Shopify B2B. Since April 2026 every Shopify plan includes B2B with company profiles, payment terms and up to three B2B catalogues; Shopify Plus removes the catalogue limit. For simple cases, such as a staff discount, customer tags with an automatic discount are enough. How to set the full version up is in Shopify B2B on every plan.
3. Reviews
BigCommerce has native product reviews; Shopify does not. Export them and import them into a review app that supports CSV import, then check that the reviews actually render on the product page — review schema is only valid for reviews a visitor can see.
4. Filtering and custom fields
BigCommerce's product filtering often runs on custom fields. On Shopify, filters come from the Search & Discovery app and read product options, vendor, product type, availability, price and metafields — so custom fields should be moved into metafields as part of the import, not after. The SEO side of filters is covered in faceted navigation on Shopify.
5. Customer accounts
Password hashes cannot be exported, so nobody keeps their old password. With Shopify's customer accounts, customers sign in with a one-time code sent by email, which removes the problem: their account and order history are simply there. If you use classic accounts, send account invitations after launch and tell customers why in the same email.
URLs: the step that protects your traffic
Depending on the URL setting, BigCommerce serves products and categories from short paths at the root of the domain. Shopify uses fixed prefixes that cannot be removed, so nearly every address changes:
| Page | BigCommerce (typical) | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Product | /blue-linen-shirt/ | /products/blue-linen-shirt |
| Category | /shirts/ | /collections/shirts |
| Content page | /shipping-returns/ | /pages/shipping-returns |
| Blog post | /blog/post-title/ | /blogs/news/post-title |
Every old address that has traffic, rankings or backlinks needs a 301 redirect to its closest new equivalent — product to product, category to collection, never everything to the homepage. Build the list from three sources: a crawl of the live store, the pages report in Search Console for the last 16 months, and the pages other sites link to. Import it into Shopify's URL redirects as a CSV before the domain switches. Shopify only applies a redirect when no live page exists at the old path, so test a sample after launch rather than assuming. The full method is in migrating to Shopify without losing rankings.
A realistic timeline
- Inventory, one week: count everything and agree in writing what moves and what is archived.
- URL map, one week: old addresses mapped to new ones, redirect table ready.
- Build, two to three weeks: theme, data import, payments, shipping and tax, behind a password.
- Checks, one week: counts, prices, stock, shipping rates, a real test order, your sign-off.
- Launch, one week: DNS switch, redirects live, sitemap submitted, errors and traffic watched daily.
What usually goes wrong
- Product descriptions still contain hard-coded links to old BigCommerce addresses.
- Tax and shipping rules are recreated from memory instead of from the old settings.
- Tracking pixels and the cookie banner are forgotten until ads stop reporting conversions.
- Outstanding gift certificate balances have no plan; they need to be reissued as Shopify gift cards.
- Images lose their alt text in the import, which costs image search traffic quietly.
The fixed-scope version of all of this is our BigCommerce to Shopify migration service. For the general list of what breaks on any platform switch, see what actually breaks in a Shopify migration.