Magento to Shopify Migration UK: A Practitioner's Guide for 2026

I’ve been building ecommerce stores since 26 years ago, on most platforms that have come and gone in that time. Not every Magento migration is the same — but the methodology I use for Wix to Shopify migrations, EKM to Shopify migrations, and WordPress to Shopify migrations applies to Magento with one important difference: the source platform is built for enterprise complexity rather than DIY simplicity, and the migration plan has to respect that.

Magento’s trap isn’t lock-in like Wix or maintenance burden like WordPress. It’s the enterprise tax — paying enterprise prices and maintaining enterprise complexity for a store that no longer needs either. Most Magento stores use a third of the platform’s capability and pay for all of it: the licence, the hosting, the developer retainer, the upgrade cycles, the extension marketplace. When the store stops growing into that capability, the spend becomes a sunk cost masquerading as infrastructure.

This guide covers what a Magento to Shopify migration involves, with honest numbers, the methodology I use, and the qualifiers about when Magento is genuinely the right place to stay.

Why Shopify Instead of Sticking with Magento?

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already done the spreadsheet. But here’s the honest comparison.

Magento was built for enterprise complexity. Configurable products, bundle products, multi-store, customer groups, tier pricing, B2B quote workflows, deep ERP integration — Magento can do all of it, given enough developer time. The platform’s flexibility is real and was the reason most current Magento merchants chose it in the first place.

Shopify caught up, then caught up again. Five years ago Shopify was the simple alternative for stores that didn’t need Magento’s depth. Today Shopify Plus matches Magento on most enterprise features (B2B catalogues, customer-specific pricing, automation flows, expansion stores) while the rest of Shopify (Basic, Shopify, Advanced) covers the SMB cases more cleanly than Magento ever did.

The pain points I hear most from Magento store owners:

• Hosting costs — proper Magento hosting starts around £200/month and climbs steeply with traffic. Shopify includes hosting. The hosting alone often pays for the Shopify subscription
• Developer dependency — Magento admin is dense enough that most merchants keep an agency on retainer (£500-£3,000/month) just to run the store. Shopify’s admin is designed to be merchant-operated
• Adobe Commerce licence — if you’re on the paid tier, the licence starts at $22,000/year and goes up. Shopify Plus is £2,000/month all-in including hosting
• Page speed — typical Magento Lighthouse scores sit at 30-60 unless heavily optimised. Shopify routinely scores 80-95 with no special effort
• Upgrade cycles — major Magento upgrades are projects, not patches. M1 to M2 was effectively a migration. Shopify upgrades happen automatically and never break what you’ve built
• The M1 situation — Magento 1 reached end of life on 30 June 2020. Stores still on M1 are running on an unsupported platform. The migration question stops being optional somewhere around the third unpatched security advisory
• Checkout conversion — Shopify’s checkout, especially with Shop Pay, converts measurably better than typical Magento checkouts

The Magento Export Reality

This is where Magento migrations differ from Wix to Shopify (where the platform fights export) or WordPress to Shopify (where everything’s there but in pieces). Magento gives you clean exports via CLI, API, and the admin — but Magento stores carry more data than other platforms because Magento was built to capture more.

Here’s what you’re actually dealing with:

• Products — Magento exports products via CLI, API, or the admin. Configurable, simple, virtual, downloadable, bundle, and grouped products each have their own structure. Variants, custom options, attribute sets, and attribute groups all map to Shopify but require care
• Customers — Magento’s customer entity is rich (groups, addresses, store credit, gift cards, loyalty, B2B accounts). Standard fields export cleanly; the richer fields need mapping decisions
• Orders — full historical order data exports, including line items, custom options, fulfillment status, and refund history. Shopify’s order import accepts the headline data; some custom fields become order metafields
• Categories — Magento’s category tree can be deep with anchor categories, layered navigation rules, and per-category SEO rules. Each maps to a Shopify collection (smart or manual) with different mechanics
• CMS pages and blocks — content is in the database, exportable. Shopify pages handle the equivalent. Static blocks become snippets or sections
• URL rewrites — your existing URL rewrite table is gold. Lift it directly into the redirect plan
• Customer groups and tier pricing — Magento’s customer groups become Shopify customer tags or B2B catalogues (Plus). Tier pricing becomes volume discounts, B2B price lists, or bespoke discount logic
• Multi-store — if you run multiple storefronts on one Magento install, each storefront gets a migration decision: consolidate into one Shopify, replicate into expansion stores (Plus), or use Markets for B2C international

The export is the easy part. The mapping is the work.

My Migration Process: Step by Step

The shape is the same as the other migrations in this series — audit, build alongside, migrate cleanly, redirect every URL, ship without taking the existing store down. The substance changes for Magento because the source data and feature set are richer.

1. The Store Audit

Before anything moves, the entire Magento store gets documented:

• Every product type and how many of each (simple, configurable, bundle, grouped, virtual, downloadable)
• Attribute sets and attribute groups — these define what variants and options exist
• Category tree, anchor categories, and layered navigation rules
• Customer groups and tier pricing structures
• B2B features in use — quote workflows, company accounts, contract pricing
• Multi-store configuration — how many storefronts, share ratio
• Active extensions and what each one does (this is the longest list)
• Magento version (Open Source vs Adobe Commerce, M1 vs M2)
• Hosting setup, server configuration, integrations (ERP, OMS, PIM, fulfilment)
• Current URL structure including custom URL rewrites
• SEO metadata across products, categories, CMS pages

This audit is more involved than a Wix or WordPress audit because Magento captures more. The plus side: the audit usually surfaces several extensions and features the merchant didn’t know they were paying for — savings before the migration even starts.

2. Shopify Store Build

While the Magento store stays live and trading, the new Shopify store gets built:

• Theme selection and customisation — a Shopify design that matches or improves on the Magento store. Shopify’s modern theme architecture (currently the Horizon family) handles complex catalogues without the rigidity Magento themes had
• Plan selection — Basic, Shopify, Advanced, or Plus depending on volume, B2B requirements, and multi-store needs (see the FAQ above)
• Payment gateway — Shopify Payments, plus any others your customers use. Magento’s payment provider is replaced; transaction fees usually drop with Shopify Payments
• Shipping rules — carrier rates, free shipping thresholds, shipping zones, weight-based logic. Mapped to match the Magento configuration before migration
• Tax configuration — UK VAT, EU VAT (if applicable), digital product tax rules, B2B tax exemption logic
• App selection — the Shopify equivalents of the essential Magento extensions identified in the audit. Often fewer apps than Magento extensions, because Shopify ships natively with what Magento required extensions to do

3. Data Migration

Magento data migrates in layers:

Products:

• Export the catalogue via CLI or API as structured data (CSV or JSON)
• Map product types: simple → simple, configurable → variants, bundle → Bundles app or fixed-component products, grouped → collections with display logic, virtual/downloadable → digital products
• Convert attribute sets and attribute groups into Shopify product types and metafields
• Download and re-upload product images to Shopify’s CDN
• Verify variants, pricing, inventory levels, weights, SKUs, and barcodes

Categories and collections:

• Map the Magento category tree to Shopify collections
• Decide where to use smart collections (rule-based) vs manual collections
• Carry across category SEO metadata and category-level descriptions

Customers:

• Export customer data including order history
• Map customer groups to Shopify customer tags or, on Plus, to B2B catalogues
• Import with order history preserved
• Customers need to set a new password on first login (security restriction on password migration), but their order history and stored details remain

Orders:

• Historical order data imports with full line-item detail
• Useful for analytics continuity, customer service history, and accounting reconciliation
• Refund and partial-refund records carry over where the data structure matches

Content:

• Magento CMS pages → Shopify pages
• Static blocks → Shopify snippets, sections, or theme settings depending on usage
• Blog posts (if you’re using a Magento blog extension) → Shopify Blog

4. SEO Redirect Mapping

The process:

• Crawl the entire Magento site to get a complete URL inventory, including category pages, product pages, CMS pages, and the full URL rewrite table
• Map each URL to its Shopify equivalent, accounting for the structural difference (Magento’s nested categories vs Shopify’s flatter structure)
• Set up 301 redirects in Shopify’s URL redirect system, in bulk where the pattern allows
• Transfer meta titles and descriptions for every page
• Lift the existing Magento URL rewrites wholesale — those URLs already moved once, they need to keep working after the second move
• Submit updated sitemaps to Google Search Console
• Monitor rankings for 30 days post-launch with daily checks for the first week

Magento sites that have run for years often have substantial SEO equity. The redirect plan protects it.

5. Testing

Nothing goes live until everything works:

• Product browsing — every product type, every variant, every option, every collection
• Cart and checkout — all product types add to cart correctly (configurable, bundle, grouped, digital each behave differently)
• B2B flows (if applicable) — customer-specific pricing, quote workflows, company accounts
• Customer accounts — login, password reset, order history, saved addresses
• Mobile experience — full checkout on phone and tablet
• Redirects — sample test of old Magento URLs resolving to correct Shopify pages, including category, product, and CMS pages
• Payment processing — live test transaction at low value, refund process verified
• Email notifications — order confirmation, shipping notification, B2B-specific templates
• Schema and SEO — structured data validates, sitemap submits, robots.txt allows what it should

6. Go-Live

The switch itself is straightforward. The preparation up to this point made it that way.

• DNS change points your domain to Shopify (takes minutes to propagate, hours to fully resolve globally)
• The first 48 hours get monitored for redirect errors, broken links, and 404s
• Google Search Console gets the new sitemap
• Magento hosting can be kept for a month as a safety net before cancellation
• Shopify admin training so you and your team are confident managing products, orders, B2B catalogues, and content from day one

What Magento Features Need Replacing

If you’re using Magento’s depth, here’s the mapping:

The pattern: Shopify Plus matches most of Magento’s enterprise feature set natively or via well-supported apps. Lower Shopify tiers cover the SMB cases that Magento was overkill for in the first place.

The Costs: Honest Numbers

Magento migrations cost more than Wix, EKM, or WordPress migrations because the source data is more complex and the redirect plan is larger. Here’s the pricing:

• Standard Magento Migration: £3,495 — up to 2,000 products, complete data migration, theme setup, 301 redirects, training. Two- to four-week delivery
• Enterprise Magento Migration: £5,995 — unlimited products, custom integrations, multi-store migration, priority support, extended training. Four- to eight-week delivery

That’s a fixed price at each tier. No hidden costs, no scope creep. 30 days of post-launch support included on both. For the cross-platform pricing picture and what makes Magento migrations cost more than Wix/EKM/WordPress, see the Shopify Migration Cost UK 2026 guide. For the day-by-day timeline of what happens in a migration — including why Magento timelines stretch to 2-8 weeks where the others fit in 2 — see the Shopify Migration Timeline UK 2026 guide.

You’ll also need a Shopify subscription:

• Shopify Basic (£25/month) — usually fits if you’re under £500k turnover, single storefront, mostly B2C
• Shopify (£65/month) or Advanced (£289/month) — for larger volumes, more staff accounts, deeper analytics
• Shopify Plus (£2,000/month) — for B2B at scale, multi-store, automation flows, expansion store needs

For context: a typical mid-market Magento store on Adobe Commerce might be paying $22,000+/year in licence, £200-£500/month in hosting, and £500-£3,000/month in agency retainer for ongoing development. The total annual cost often runs £30,000-£60,000. Shopify Plus at £24,000/year all-in is comfortably cheaper, with hosting included and far less developer time required to keep the lights on. Magento Open Source merchants save the licence fee but still carry the hosting and developer retainer — Shopify Basic at £25/month is dramatically cheaper.

When Magento Is Actually Fine

Magento isn’t always the wrong answer. If any of these apply, the migration question is genuinely worth pausing on:

• Very high volume B2B with deeply custom catalogue logic and ERP integrations that have taken years to bed in
• Genuine multi-brand multi-store complexity that Shopify Plus expansion stores wouldn’t simplify
• Active development team already comfortable with Magento, where switching costs include team retraining
• Custom modules representing genuine competitive advantage that a Shopify app rebuild would degrade
• Enterprise integration footprint (PIM, OMS, ERP, custom WMS) that’s tightly coupled to Magento-specific extensions

Three or more of those, and the migration analysis needs more depth than this guide can give. Stay if Magento is genuinely the right tool for the work.

But if you’re a single-store SMB merchant on Magento because that’s what was recommended in 2018, paying agency retainers to keep a platform running that you don’t fully use, and watching Adobe ramp the licence fee year over year — the migration pays for itself fast.

What About Magento 1?

If you’re still on Magento 1, the migration question isn’t optional anymore.

Magento 1 reached end of life on 30 June 2020. No security patches since. No official Adobe support. Every plugin author who supported M1 has either moved to M2 or stopped maintaining their work. Stores still running M1 are running on a known-vulnerable platform — a single targeted exploit and you have a security incident to manage and a customer data breach to disclose.

The choice on M1 is migrate to M2 (also a migration project, with all the costs and risks of any migration) or migrate to Shopify (a migration project that ends with a platform that maintains itself). When the cost and complexity of moving is a constant either way, the destination matters more than the move.

Ready to Move?

The methodology described in this guide is the same one I use across every migration — audit thoroughly, build alongside, migrate cleanly, redirect every URL, ship without taking the existing store down. The work changes when the source platform is Magento; the discipline doesn’t.

If you’re thinking about moving from Magento to Shopify, get in touch. I’ll look at your current store, audit the catalogue, the extensions, and the integrations, tell you honestly which Shopify tier fits and whether the move makes sense, and give you a fixed price before any work starts.

If you’d rather see how the same process plays out on different starting platforms, the Wix to Shopify guide, the EKM to Shopify guide, and the WordPress to Shopify guide cover the parallel journeys with their own platform-specific traps.

No hard sell. If Magento is genuinely the right platform for what you’re doing, I’ll tell you that too.