How Much Does a Shopify Migration Cost in the UK? (2026 Pricing Guide)

I’ve been building ecommerce stores for 26 years and migrating them to whatever platform is winning at the time. For the past few years, that platform has been Shopify. The reality of migration pricing in the UK is that most agencies have learned to charge £8,000 to £15,000 for work that costs £1,490 to deliver competently — because that’s what the market will bear, and because most agencies do migrations the slow way.

This guide is honest pricing. What migrations from each source platform actually cost. What’s included at that price. What you’ll get charged extra for at most agencies and shouldn’t. And the operational reason the price can be £1,490 fixed: 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.

Every price above is fixed before the work starts. No scope creep, no hourly rates that escalate, no surprise invoices. If the work goes longer than expected — that’s my problem, not yours.

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.

Why Most Quotes Are Inflated

Here’s how the £8,000 quote breaks down at most agencies:

• Account management (£800) — somebody to be your point of contact, who isn’t doing the work
• Project management (£600) — somebody to coordinate between the account manager and the developer
• Discovery phase (£900) — the audit I do in the first hour, billed separately
• Theme customisation (£1,500) — anything beyond a template default, billed by the hour
• Data migration (£2,200) — the actual work, but priced as if every product gets created by hand in admin
• SEO redirect mapping (£800) — billed separately because it’s “specialist” work
• Training session (£400) — a one-hour walkthrough, charged as a half-day
• Post-launch support (£600) — 30 days of “are you still there if something breaks?”
• Sales overhead and margin (~£200) — what gets left after everyone above takes their cut

Total: £8,000+. Same scope as the £1,490 fixed price. The difference isn’t the work — it’s the agency layers and the hourly rate of a developer doing migrations the slow way.

The API and CLI Difference

This is the bit most agency quotes don’t tell you, because most agencies don’t work 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 elapsed but mostly automated” is the difference between a £8,000 quote and a £1,490 fixed price.

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, 170 product images, and 4 variant family consolidations in a single Python run hitting the Shopify Admin API. Estimated time by hand: 8 hours of admin clicks. Actual time: 35 minutes including writing and testing the import script. 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 — direct API queries to Google Ads, Merchant Centre, and the Shopify storefront diagnose the problem in hours. A recent fire safety client’s tracking diagnosis ran through three platforms via API calls in 4 hours. The alternative — booking time with three different platform support teams — would have been 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: the work that takes most agencies 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. The price reflects the actual time, not the inflated time of doing it the slow way.

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
• 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
• 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 — daily checks for the first week, weekly for the rest of the month, with response if anything drops

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

Total Cost of Ownership: First Year

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 (£2,500-£5,000 depending on complexity)
• 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 a different conversation)

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 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.