Magento gives you enormous control and charges for it in developer hours, hosting and upgrade projects. When a merchant decides that trade is no longer worth it, the migration itself is what they fear. Done properly, it is a well-understood sequence.
Audit before you touch anything
Document product count and attribute complexity, order history depth, customer accounts, custom modules in use, current organic traffic and top landing pages. This audit determines both the price and the risk profile of the whole project.
Attributes are the hard part
Magento's EAV model allows product structures Shopify does not express natively. Configurable products map to variants. Shopify raised its limit to 2,048 variants per product in October 2025, but a product can still have only three options — and Magento stores routinely build configurable products from more attributes than that. The answer is usually metafields and metaobjects — planned upfront, not discovered mid-import.
Products, customers, orders
Matrixify handles the bulk import reliably. Orders come across as historical records so reporting stays continuous. Customer accounts transfer, but password hashes cannot move — every customer gets a reset email, and the copy for it matters more than people expect.
The redirect map decides whether you keep your traffic
This is the step that separates a clean migration from a disaster. Every Magento URL needs a 301 to its Shopify equivalent: category pages to collections, product pages to products, CMS pages to pages. Export your top 500 URLs from Search Console and map them by hand. Automated mapping misses exactly the pages that earn money.
Rebuild structured data, do not port it
Magento's schema output is usually incomplete. Rather than replicating it, build Product, BreadcrumbList and Review schema properly in the new theme. Most merchants come out of a migration with better rich-result coverage than they went in with.
Cutover and the first 48 hours
Switch DNS at your lowest-traffic hour. Then watch Search Console coverage, 404 reports, order flow and payment capture continuously for two days. Expect a one-to-two week ranking wobble; expect it to recover above the previous baseline once speed gains land.
What it costs
Small catalogues under 500 products start from £5,400; a mid-size Magento store — under 5,000 products with order history — is typically around £12,000, plus theme development. Set against Magento hosting and maintenance, most merchants recover that inside a year.
Extensions and integrations
List every Magento extension in use and write down the business function it provides — layered navigation, customer-group pricing, ERP sync, reviews, gift cards. Most have a Shopify app equivalent; ERP and pricing logic often need a custom app or Shopify Functions. Decide each one before the build, because an extension discovered during cutover becomes an emergency.
We run this as a fixed-price Magento to Shopify migration. The SEO side is covered in more depth in migrating to Shopify without losing rankings.