Shopify Migration Cost in the UK (2026)

I’ve been building ecommerce stores for 27 years and migrating them to whatever platform is winning at the time. For the past few years, that platform has been Shopify. The price for that work is published below — fixed before the work starts, with the whole scope inside it rather than split across line items. Most migration quotes don’t work that way, which is what makes them hard to compare.

This guide is the pricing, straight. What migrations from each source platform cost. What’s included at that price. What tends to arrive as an extra elsewhere and why it shouldn’t. And the operational reason a fixed price is possible at all: the work runs through APIs and command-line tools, not through hours of clicking in the Shopify admin.

What Shopify Migrations Cost in the UK (2026)

Here’s the pricing by source platform.

These are the same figures as the Shopify migration service page — both render from one pricing source, so they cannot disagree.

Every price above is fixed before the work starts. No scope creep, no hourly rates that escalate, no surprise invoices — and if my own work takes longer than I expected, that’s my problem, not yours. What the fixed price doesn’t cover is the work I don’t control: rebuilding tracking, feeds or campaigns a previous agency configured; product data your old platform never held, like barcodes, weights or brand fields; Google Shopping, Amazon and eBay listing approvals, which sit with Google and Amazon rather than with me; content the source platform can’t export, which has to be written rather than moved; and time lost waiting for access or sign-off, which pauses the clock but never the price. I’ll tell you at the free audit which of those apply to you, and quote them separately before I start.

If your quote from another agency is significantly higher than these numbers, ask three questions: what’s included, what’s extra, and how do they actually do the data migration. The answers usually explain the price.

How to Read a Migration Quote

The quotes people bring me to compare rarely disagree about the work. They disagree about how many people get billed for standing near it, and about how much of the work sits inside the headline number.

Read down one and the shape is usually the same. An account manager, to be your point of contact, who isn’t doing the work. A project manager, to coordinate between the account manager and the developer. A discovery phase billed as its own line, which is the audit I do in the first hour. Theme customisation charged by the hour for anything past a template default. Redirect mapping split out because it’s “specialist”. Training priced as a half-day for a one-hour walkthrough. Post-launch support as a line item for answering the phone. And then the data migration itself — the only line on the page that is actually the job — priced as though every product gets typed into the admin by hand, because on that quote it does.

I’m not going to invent a breakdown of somebody else’s invoice. I don’t see their cost base and neither do you. What I can tell you is what happens to those lines when the work runs through the API instead of the admin screen: one of them survives, and it’s the last one. The rest is the layers.

A lower quote deserves the same read in the other direction. When a number comes in well under the others, the first question is what sits outside it — the redirect map, the order history, the training, and the month of post-launch support. Those are the parts a migration cannot safely skip, which is why they are the parts a thin quote skips.

That’s usually the whole difference between two quotes for the same store. Not more or less work — more people between you and it, or less scope inside it.

The API and CLI Difference

This is the bit the quote doesn’t tell you, because the work isn’t done this way.

Migrations done through the Shopify admin — clicking from product to product, copying images, pasting variant data, configuring tax rules screen by screen — take days. A 100-product migration done by hand is a full week of clicking. That hourly burn is what most quotes are paying for.

Migrations done through the Shopify Admin API and Shopify CLI take minutes. The same 100 products import in one programmatic run. The redirect map applies in bulk. The theme deploys via shopify theme push. The verification runs as a script that checks every URL, every product, every redirect. The difference between “two weeks of developer time” and “two weeks of build, mostly automated” is the difference between an estimate that escalates and a price that can be fixed before the work starts.

Concretely, what API and CLI workflows let me do that admin-click migrations don’t:

• Programmatic product import. A recent wellness ecommerce migration moved 96 products with 102 variants, 176 product images, and 4 variant family consolidations through the Shopify Admin API. Estimated time by hand: a full day of admin clicks. Actual time: 36 minutes from first extraction script to the last product created, including writing and testing the importer. Full audit log of every API call, reproducible if anything needs re-running.
• Bulk redirect mapping. Crawl the source site, generate the redirect map as CSV, push the entire map to Shopify’s URL redirect system in one API call. Compare to the alternative: pasting redirects one at a time in Shopify admin.
• Version-controlled theme work. shopify theme dev for live preview, shopify theme push/pull for deployment, theme code in git, every change reviewable, every change reversible. Compared to: editing theme code through the Shopify admin interface and hoping you didn’t break something.
• API-driven diagnostics. When something goes wrong post-migration — Google Ads conversion tracking breaks, a feed mismatches, a product approval drops — I query Google Ads, Merchant Centre and the Shopify storefront directly over their APIs. I can see all three in one sitting and tell you which one is actually at fault. The alternative — booking time with three different platform support teams, each of whom can only see their own end — is multi-day at best.
• Smoke tests as code. A test script that hits every critical URL, validates the canonical, checks the structured data, confirms 200 responses on the sitemap. Run before launch, run after launch, run on every deploy. Catches regressions agencies would only discover via customer complaints.

The throughline: work that takes hours of clicking takes minutes when scripted. The migration is no less thorough — it’s more thorough, because programmatic work has audit logs and verification built in. And predictable time is what makes a fixed price possible: you can only fix a number in advance when you know what the work takes.

What’s Included at the Fixed Price

Everything a migration genuinely needs:

• Store audit — every product, every URL, every redirect, every plugin or extension, every integration. The audit becomes the migration plan
• Shopify store build — theme selection, customisation to match your brand, payment gateway, shipping rules, tax configuration, app selection
• Full data migration — products, variants, images, customers, order history, content pages, blog posts, SEO metadata
• 301 redirect mapping — every source URL to its Shopify equivalent, plus your existing redirect rules lifted across. This is where your rankings survive the move, which is why it’s in the fixed price and not a line item
• Theme work — sections, layouts, brand colours, fonts, content blocks. Within the scope of customising a Shopify theme rather than building one from scratch
• App installation and configuration — review apps, email marketing integration, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Klaviyo connection. If your current store runs trade or wholesale pricing, that carries over too — it’s mapping, not rebuilding
• Testing — every product type, every variant, every checkout flow, every redirect, every email notification
• DNS cutover — coordinated to minimise risk, with the source site kept live as a safety net
• Training — Shopify admin walkthrough, content updates, order management, app management
• 30 days of post-launch support — anything that breaks gets fixed without an additional invoice
• Ranking monitoring — before the domain moves I record where you rank, so there’s a baseline to hold the migration to. Through launch week I check Search Console daily — crawl errors, coverage, any URL that has stopped resolving — and I re-check your tracked rankings against that baseline at the end of the first month. You get the before-and-after in writing. Anything that has slipped because of the move gets fixed without an additional invoice

That’s the scope. No line items split off for “professional services” or “specialist consultancy” or “premium support tier.”

What the First Year Costs

Migration is a one-off. Ownership is ongoing. Here’s what year one looks like at the SMB tier:

For comparison, a typical WordPress/WooCommerce setup at SMB scale routinely runs £1,500-£3,000/year just in hosting, plugin licences, and security services — before any developer time. Wix Business at £27/month plus transaction fees comes in similarly to Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments. The Year 2 onward cost on Shopify is just the £300 subscription plus optional apps.

When Migration Cost Is Genuinely Higher

The fixed prices above cover the typical case. There are legitimate reasons a migration costs more — ones I’ll always tell you about up front rather than mid-project:

• Custom integrations — bespoke ERP connections, custom OMS, niche third-party APIs that need bridging
• Complex B2B requirements — multi-tier pricing, customer-specific catalogues, quote workflows beyond what Shopify Plus handles natively
• Multi-store consolidation or expansion — Magento multi-store with shared catalogues moving to Shopify Plus expansion stores
• Migrations from less common platforms — Squarespace, BigCommerce, OpenCart, custom-built stores. Less common means less established pattern, which means longer audit and more bespoke work
• Very large catalogues — 5,000+ SKUs with complex variant structures push past the Standard Magento tier into Enterprise pricing
• Significant theme work — if you want a fully custom theme rather than customising a Shopify theme, that’s a separate quote
• Content rewrites — migrating content as-is is included; rewriting product descriptions, blog posts, or marketing copy is a separate engagement

The rule: any of these get flagged at quote stage. You’ll know before you commit, not after.

What You’ll Be Told You Need (And Probably Don’t)

Some agency quotes pad with services you don’t need on Shopify:

• Caching plugins — Shopify is on a CDN. No caching plugin needed
• Security plugins — Shopify handles security. No plugin needed
• Backup services — Shopify backs itself up. No third-party backup needed
• Dedicated hosting — included with Shopify
• Premium SEO tools — native Shopify SEO covers most of what’s needed; premium apps are optional, not required
• Maintenance retainer — Shopify maintains itself. You don’t need a retainer to keep the lights on. (You might want one for ongoing content, optimisation, and growth — that’s where the pay monthly model comes in)

If a quote includes any of these as line items for a Shopify migration, ask why.

Ready to See What Your Migration Would Cost?

Get in touch and I’ll give you a fixed price within 24 hours. The audit is free. The quote includes everything in the fixed-price scope above, with anything outside it flagged explicitly so you can decide whether you want it included.

If you want to see how the same approach plays out per platform first, the platform-specific guides cover the methodology in more detail:

• Wix to Shopify Migration Guide
• EKM to Shopify Migration Guide
• WordPress to Shopify Migration Guide
• Magento to Shopify Migration Guide

For the day-by-day timeline picture — what actually happens in each phase, why two weeks of build is achievable, and what zero-downtime really looks like — see the Shopify Migration Timeline UK 2026 guide.

The pricing in this piece is the pricing on each of those pages. No hidden tier, no special discount that ends Friday, no ranking based on which platform you’re searching for. Same fixed prices, same fixed scope, same API-and-CLI-driven delivery.