What a migration costs in 2026, by store size

Migration pricing spans two orders of magnitude, and most of the variance is explained by three inputs: SKU count, custom functionality, and how much organic traffic you have to protect.

• 01
  Tooling is the cheap part: $29–$500 covers most app-based migrations. Matrixify runs $20–$200/mo, LitExtension $200–$400+ per project, Cart2Cart $150–$350 per project. Watch the add-ons — SEO URL migration, 301 redirects, and priority support are frequently priced separately and can double the quote.
• 02
  Agency-led migrations start around $5,000 and scale with complexity. Simple WooCommerce or BigCommerce moves land at $5K–$40K. Adobe Commerce and Salesforce migrations run $25K–$150K+, stretching past $250K for B2B, multi-store, and ERP-integrated builds. Shopify Experts marketplace projects range $1K–$10K for scoped work.
• 03
  Timeline by size: under 500 SKUs with no custom development, 2–4 weeks. 500–5,000 SKUs, 4–8 weeks. Shopify Plus with custom builds, 8–16 weeks. Enterprise moves from Magento or Salesforce with 50K+ SKUs, 3–4 months. Xgen Tech's data puts most successful US migrations on an 8–16 week track.
• 04
  Budget for variance, because the base rate is against you. With 83% of data migration projects failing or overrunning, a 25–40% contingency on both budget and timeline isn't pessimism. It's the observed distribution.
• 05
  The revenue math usually still works. A documented $5M-revenue, 2,000-SKU WooCommerce move cost $18K and cut hosting costs 40%. Post-migration checkout conversion lifts of 10–20% are the norm in agency data, and merchants leaving self-hosted stacks report 20–30% lower operational overhead. Run your own three-year numbers in the ECM platform calculator before any agency proposal anchors them for you.
• 06
  Pick your launch window now: never migrate into peak season. No BFCM migrations, ever. The safe pattern is launching by early October at the latest, or waiting until January. A migration that slips into November converts your busiest month into a QA environment.

Store Importer, Matrixify, LitExtension, Cart2Cart: an honest comparison

Most stores don't need an agency for the data transfer itself. They need the right tool and someone who reads the demo migration carefully. Here's how the options actually compare, ratings and gripes included.

The tool lineup

• →
  Shopify Store Importer (free): native, guided, and supports WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, and Square sources. Check it first. It moves the basics well and moves nothing sophisticated — no metafields, limited SEO data, no complex category trees.
• →
  Matrixify ($20–$200/mo): 4.9/5 average on the Shopify App Store, and the tool agencies reach for on large catalogs. Handles products, customers, orders, metafields, and bulk operations that other tools can't. The most-cited gripe is a steep learning curve — pick it if you have someone technical and a big catalog.
• →
  LitExtension ($200–$400+ per project): widest platform coverage at 140+ source carts, which matters if you're coming off OpenCart, PrestaShop, Zen Cart, or another platform mainstream tools skip. Capterra reviewers rate it 4.7/5 for support, with the caveat that support isn't actually 24/7. Free demo migration before you pay.
• →
  Cart2Cart ($150–$350 per project): 85+ supported platforms and strong automation. Trustpilot reviews are mixed — successful migrations praise it, but a notable cluster of 1-star reviews report failed jobs and refund disputes. Run the demo, verify the output, and keep expectations calibrated.

How agencies actually run the transfer

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  The working stack from agency practice: platform-native exporters on the source side (WooCommerce CSV Importer, Magento ImportExport, BigCommerce data export), Matrixify for the bulk import into Shopify, and the Admin GraphQL API for anything custom. The tools are commodity; the mapping decisions are the craft.
• →
  Attribute mapping is where projects burn time. Custom source-platform attributes map to Shopify metafields, variants, or tags — and the relationship is rarely one-to-one. Deciding which attributes become what, deliberately and before import, is the single highest-leverage planning hour in the project.
• →
  Always run the demo migration and spot-check it like an auditor: 5–10 random products for titles, variants, pricing, and images; a handful of customers with order history attached; every category level if your taxonomy nests deep. Tools are powerful and imperfect, and the demo is where imperfection is cheap.

What migrates cleanly, and what refuses to

Every migration horror story traces back to an assumption about data that turned out to be wrong. Here is the honest inventory, so the surprises happen in planning instead of production.

Moves cleanly

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  Products, variants, and images. Customers and addresses. Order history. Blog posts and CMS pages. Coupons and discount codes (often needing manual recreation of logic). Reviews, via a third-party app and CSV export. SEO metadata, if your tool's plan includes it.
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  One caveat that surprises operators: historical orders import as fulfilled archives. They preserve customer lifetime value, reorder attribution, and reporting — but they can't be modified, refunded, or used for live customer service. For most brands that's fine. Know it before support tickets arrive.

Does not transfer — plan the workaround now

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  Customer passwords. They're hashed on the source platform and can't move (LitExtension handles a few platform pairs; assume yours isn't one). Plan the password-reset email as a comms project: send it at launch, frame it as a security upgrade, and expect a temporary dip in returning-customer login rates.
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  Your theme, and all custom plugin or script logic. Design is a rebuild, not a transfer. Custom checkout logic, gift-card balances, loyalty points, and subscription billing each need a rebuild plan or a replacement app. List every plugin on the old stack against a proper tech stack audit and find each Shopify App Store equivalent before committing to a timeline.
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  Your exact URL structure. Shopify enforces /products/ and /collections/ paths. Every legacy URL changes, which is why the redirect map in the next section is the make-or-break deliverable of the whole project.
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  Product architectures past 3 options or 100 variants. Shopify's variant ceiling silently drops options that exceed it. Configurable products with four or more attributes must be restructured before import — audit for these first, because they redefine your scope.

The redirect work that decides whether rankings survive

Migrations don't lose rankings. Unvalidated redirect maps lose rankings. The recovery data on both sides of that line is consistent enough to treat as a rule.

• 01
  Build the 1:1 redirect map from a full pre-migration crawl, not from memory or a sitemap. Every product, collection, blog, and filter URL gets an explicit 301 to its Shopify equivalent, entered under Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects (or bulk-loaded via Matrixify). Regex handles dynamic and filter URLs.
• 02
  The observed pattern when this is done right: a roughly 15% organic dip in month one, full recovery by month three. Shero's Gen Y Hitch case (December 2025 launch) recovered and grew organic sessions 10.7% within three months. The pattern holds across documented cases — when every redirect resolves.
• 03
  The pattern when it isn't: hundreds of indexed 404s and a 2–6 month recovery. APPWRK's post-mortem across 110 migrations identifies unvalidated 301s as the single biggest failure mode in replatforming. Validate every redirect with a crawler against the live site before launch, not after Search Console starts complaining.
• 04
  Rebuild schema parity on day one. Shopify's native JSON-LD covers Product, Review, FAQ, and Breadcrumb markup, and well-structured product pages increasingly surface in Google AI Overviews without extra work. Confirm metadata, alt tags, and canonicals carried over; migration tools treat these as premium features and skip them on basic plans.
• 05
  If organic drives a meaningful revenue share, put a specialist on it. A migration-experienced SEO partner costs a fraction of a six-month traffic hole. Their whole job is the crawl, the map, and the validation — the three things DIY migrations skip.

The launch checklist that catches expensive mistakes

The final week is testing, not building. This is the QA sequence agencies run, compressed to the checks that actually catch revenue-affecting problems.

• 01
  Place real test orders through the full stack: payment capture, tax calculation by region, shipping rates against your carrier rules, and confirmation emails. This is where miscalculated tax settings and broken shipping zones get caught while they're free to fix.
• 02
  Verify the app stack replacements one by one. Email flows firing from the new platform, reviews displaying, subscriptions billing, inventory syncing with your 3PL or ERP. Each replaced plugin is a possible silent failure; test them as systems, not checkboxes.
• 03
  Spot-check content formatting. Shopify's editor strips certain HTML on import — bold text, embeds, and image alignment in migrated blog posts and pages need a human pass. Tedious, and cheaper than a customer finding it.
• 04
  Freeze the source store's data at cutover. Orders placed during the transfer window need a reconciliation plan; the clean pattern is a short maintenance window at your lowest-traffic hour with a final delta import of orders and customers.
• 05
  Set the 90-day measurement plan before launch: baseline checkout conversion, organic sessions, page speed, and support ticket volume against your core KPIs. The migration isn't done at launch. It's done when the numbers say the new stack beats the old one — and ECM tracks how these platform moves play out in weekly Insights.