Magento to Shopify: catalog, customers, orders and URLs.

What transfers from Magento to Shopify, and what does not?

You can move your products, customers, historical orders and categories, which become collections. Blog posts, pages and discount codes can move too. But what cannot move is a different list: your customers' passwords, store design, custom extensions, payment card details or admin accounts. Your product CSV must be UTF-8 and under 15 MB per file, so you will split a large catalog. Import order matters. You will import products first, then customers, then orders.

Your orders reference both products and customers. That is why that order holds, and why skipping it breaks things. You will also meet limits you did not have in Magento: Shopify allows 100 variants and three options per product, so your configurable products may not fit. Your grouped and bundled products need manual restructuring. Each extension gets rebuilt as an app or custom code, and you will set up tax rules, shipping zones and payment gateways by hand.

How do you plan the URL map and redirects so your search traffic survives?

You plan it before you build. Map every old URL to its new URL, load that table as 301 redirects and keep them for at least a year. Your table needs one row per category, product, page and post. Internal links must point at the new addresses, so you do not send visitors through chains. Google also asks you to publish a new sitemap. And then you watch traffic on both sites (the old one tells you what you lost, the new one what you kept).

Shopify sets rules you must plan around, and they are specific. You can import your redirects by CSV under Content, Menus, URL redirects, up to 100,000, or 20,000,000 on Plus. Redirects only fire from URLs that return a 404, so you cannot redirect a path that still loads a page. Some paths are blocked. You also cannot redirect anything starting /cart, /orders or /shop, and your collection tag-filter URLs will not redirect. So check that your canonicals use new URLs, remove staging noindex, and test your redirects with a script.

How is content moved from Magento: export, API or crawl?

You move content by export when records are structured. If your data is too tangled for CSV, you use an API or an automated app. For pages that exist only as rendered HTML, you crawl. Your products, customers and URL redirects all have CSV routes on Shopify, so you will usually export from Magento, reshape the columns to Shopify's template and import. Format matters, and it is unforgiving. If your headers are missing or the format does not match, your import fails.

Watch the overwrite option. If you tick 'Overwrite products with matching handles', it replaces every column in your CSV for those products, so a half-filled file can wipe good data. Your images need public URLs, up to 250 per product, so you can copy your current image URLs into the file. Do a dry run first. Import into a development store, test, fix problems, then repeat on your live store. A crawl of your public pages shows you what the export missed, such as editorial blocks you built by hand.

What do your editors get on Shopify compared with Magento?

Your editors get a hosted admin. Products, collections, pages and blog posts are native there, and you stop patching a server. But what your editors lose is the Magento structure you built: grouped and bundled products and custom extensions have no direct equivalent, so you will model them as variants, metafields or apps. Shopify caps your products at three options. Your catalog editors will feel that first (probably in the first week).

If your needs go past a store, you have other routes. I plan and run moves like this one, and I move legacy and WordPress estates to Astro for content and marketing sites. For an application, personalization or many editors, I move to Next.js with Sanity or Contentful. Your editors give up the visual canvas, plugins and Shopify's hosted admin there, and you gain a content model shaped to your pages. The free assessment reads your current pages, so you see what your editors work with today, not what a sales deck promises.

How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take, and what drives the effort?

Published guides put a straightforward move at four to eight weeks and an enterprise move with complex integrations at three to six months, so you should size your own estate by its drivers rather than by a headline number. Your first driver is URL count. Every category, product, page and post needs a row in your redirect table. For your second driver, look at content types, because each one needs a place in your Shopify model.

Media is your third driver. Your image URLs must stay public, and you can attach up to 250 images per product. Next come your integrations, since you rebuild each extension as an app or custom code, and you rebuild custom checkout logic through Shopify Functions on Plus. Locales multiply your work. You need a map and a parity check for each language. And then budget for your customers: the password reset gives you a 30 to 60 day friction window, so you should plan two to four weeks of extra support and a temporary conversion dip.

When should you not move from Magento to Shopify?

You should not move if your Magento store runs on a supported version. Stay if your catalog depends on structures Shopify cannot hold, and your team already patches and upgrades without pain. Adobe lists 2.4.8 standard support to May 31, 2028 and 2.4.9, generally available May 12, 2026, to May 31, 2029, so you may have years before your version forces you to decide. Catalog shape matters most. If your configurable products exceed 100 variants or three options, you will be rebuilding your catalog, not copying it.

You should also stay if you cannot absorb the trade. Shopify Advanced is $299 a month billed yearly and Plus is $2,300 a month on a three-year term, so you are paying for hosting in fees instead of patches. Shopify's guide cites one retailer that saved $108,000 in a year, but your own volume and apps decide your result. Version risk is a separate question. If you run 2.4.4 or 2.4.5, you have limited security-only fixes until May 31, 2027, which Adobe says to treat as migration time.

Questions, answered.

Your next read.

1. 01Shopify alternativesBy store size, with the keep-the-checkout option.
2. 02Core Web Vitals testLCP, INP and CLS from what the page ships.
3. 03Website health checkThe general read, all eight pillars.