E-commerce migration
Migrate to Shopifyfor hassle-free, scalable eCommerce
Moving to Shopify means fitting your catalogue into its product model, redirecting most of your URLs and asking customers to sign in a new way. Here is what changes and how we check it.
The product model is the first thing that changes
Shopify allows three options per product, and by default up to 2,048 variants per product. That limit used to be 100. A catalogue from Magento or WooCommerce with four or five attributes on one product cannot be copied across as it stands: something has to become a metafield or a separate product, or be handled by an app or theme customisation.
The higher limit also has a catch. Shopify warns that apps not using its current GraphQL product APIs may behave badly on products with more than 100 variants, so every app in the proposed stack gets checked against the catalogue's largest product before anyone commits to it.
Stores with a very large catalogue should also read the variant throttle: once a store holds 500,000 variants, no more than 10,000 new ones can be created per day on any API, unless the store is on Shopify Plus. On a big import that decides the schedule.
What doesn't carry over
- Customer passwords. They are encrypted on the old platform, and Shopify says they can't be migrated by CSV. On the current customer accounts, shoppers sign in with their email address and a one-time code, so no password is needed. Stores on legacy accounts send invitations to set a new one.
- URLs. Shopify fixes its paths under /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/, so most old URLs change and each one needs a redirect. Faceted and paginated URLs need a decision too, rather than a blanket rule.
- Custom checkout and pricing logic. Plugin behaviour has no direct equivalent and is rebuilt with an app, custom development or a change of process. We list each one with the owner before pricing the work.
The order we run it in
Shopify's own guidance is to import products, then customers, then historical orders, so that orders connect to the right records. Historical orders arrive through a migration app or the Admin API. Staff who receive new-order notifications get an email for every imported order, so those notifications are switched off first and back on afterwards.
We rehearse on a development store, then compare product, customer and order counts and order totals against the source. Sample records are opened by hand as well, because counts can match while tax lines or variant mappings are wrong. The last delta of new orders and customers runs at cutover, with the old store kept available until the numbers agree.
What we can show you
We have no published Shopify replatforming to point to. Our closest published e-commerce work is three years of WooCommerce maintenance and Microsoft Dynamics integration for a Belgian retailer, which covers the order and customer data flows you would have to preserve. We say this up front so you can weigh it. What we offer here is an engineering plan and a data check that you can audit line by line.
Shopify migration questions
Can our customers keep their passwords?
No. Shopify says passwords can't be migrated from another store by CSV. Customers on the current accounts sign in with an email code; stores on legacy accounts invite customers to set a new password.
Do we have to fit our catalogue into three options?
On a standard product, yes. Beyond that you remodel: split the product, move an attribute to a metafield, or use an app or theme customisation. We model your largest products first because they set the approach for everything else.
Send us your largest product and your plugin list
Those two things show most of what will need remodelling. Tell us the current platform and we will say what fits Shopify as it is and what doesn't.
We reply within one business day (IST).