Why enterprise brands are leaving Magento
Magento built its reputation as the flexible, self-hosted platform you could bend to any requirement. That flexibility came with a bill that grows every year: hosting and infrastructure, a steady stream of security patches, extension conflicts, and a shrinking pool of senior Magento developers. For Magento Open Source teams, the maintenance burden never lets up; for Adobe Commerce teams, the licensing adds a second large line item on top of it.
Shopify and Shopify Plus invert that equation. The platform is fully managed and PCI-compliant, the checkout is the highest-converting in commerce, the app ecosystem covers most needs out of the box, and upgrades are not a project. The result is that engineering budget shifts away from keeping the lights on and toward growth. That is the real reason most of the enterprise replatforms we run start with a brand asking how to get off Magento.
Before you migrate: the plan that prevents disasters
A Magento migration fails or succeeds in the planning, not the build. Before a single product moves, an enterprise team should inventory exactly what exists and decide what survives the move.
- Audit the catalog: products, variants, attributes, categories, custom attributes, and the metadata that drives merchandising and search.
- Inventory every integration: ERP, OMS, PIM, CRM, tax, payments, search, reviews, email/SMS, and any custom extensions, with an owner for each.
- Map the URL structure of the existing site in full, because that map is what protects your SEO (more on this below).
- Define success criteria and a rollback plan up front, so cutover is a decision, not a gamble.
- Set a content and code freeze window around launch to keep the data migration consistent.
This is also where you decide architecture: a fast Liquid storefront, a headless build on Hydrogen and Oxygen, or a hybrid. Most brands do not need full headless; they need the right call for their team and their performance goals. See our take on Shopify Plus builds for where each fits.
Migrating the data: catalog, customers, orders, content
The data migration is the part everyone underestimates. Magento's data model rarely maps one-to-one to Shopify's, so the work is as much transformation as transfer.
Products, variants, and rich attributes map to Shopify products, variants, and metafields or metaobjects. Customers and their address books move with their relationships intact. Historical orders are migrated for service continuity. Content, blogs, landing pages, and CMS blocks, is re-modeled rather than dumped. Throughout, every record is validated and reconciled so nothing is silently dropped, which is the failure mode that erodes trust after launch.
Protecting your SEO: the redirect map
This is where most migrations quietly lose money. Magento and Shopify structure URLs differently, so without a complete redirect map, the rankings and backlinks you spent years earning point at dead pages the day you launch.
Done right, every old Magento URL, product, category, CMS page, gets a 301 redirect to its Shopify equivalent. You preserve URL equity, keep canonical tags clean, resubmit an updated sitemap, and monitor Search Console through the transition. We treat the redirect map as a launch-blocking deliverable, not a post-launch cleanup. It is the single biggest reason a replatform either holds its organic traffic or craters it.
Rebuilding the storefront and checkout
The storefront rebuild is the visible part, and the chance to fix the UX debt that accumulated on the old platform rather than port it forward. The bigger win is the checkout: moving onto Shopify's checkout typically lifts conversion on its own, and with Checkout Extensibility you can add the custom logic, upsells, and validation an enterprise needs without the fragility of the old checkout customizations.
For brands with a signature, business-defining experience, a configurator, a complex bundler, a custom catalog interaction, the goal is to carry it across intact. There is almost always a clean way to extend it onto Shopify rather than rebuild it from scratch.
Re-wiring the systems behind the store
A Magento storefront rarely stands alone. The migration is only real when the back office moves with it: the ERP, OMS, PIM, and CRM that actually run the business have to be re-integrated so orders, inventory, and finance stay consistent from day one.
This is the part that separates an enterprise replatform from a theme swap, and it is where we spend much of our effort, connecting Shopify to the systems of record through governed, monitored, event-driven flows. Explore our integration practice for the specifics across NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Manhattan, and more.
Testing and cutover without downtime
Cutover is sequenced like an enterprise systems migration, not flipped like a switch. A full staging environment mirrors production; data is migrated, reconciled, and re-synced in a final delta close to launch; and the DNS switch happens only after redirects, integrations, and checkout have been validated end to end. With a rollback plan ready at every step, the storefront stays online and selling throughout. We have run this play repeatedly, moving brands like Jenni Kayne, Peet's Coffee, Intelligentsia Coffee, Stumptown Coffee, and Blu Dot off Magento and onto Shopify, each without disrupting live trade.
After launch
Launch is the start, not the finish. The weeks after go-live are for watching Search Console for crawl and redirect issues, confirming analytics and consent are firing correctly, monitoring Core Web Vitals on real devices, and tuning the new checkout. A good replatform keeps improving on a platform that is finally easy to change.
How long it takes, and what it costs
Timelines scale with catalog size and integration depth. A focused mid-market move can land in a couple of months; a large enterprise replatform with deep ERP/OMS integration and millions of SKUs runs several months. Cost tracks the same drivers, integration complexity, data volume, and how much custom experience must be carried across, far more than the storefront design itself.
If you are scoping a move off Magento, our Magento to Shopify migration service page covers how we approach it, and our broader replatforming practice covers migrations from any platform.