If you are running a DTC brand on Magento, you already know the tax you are paying. Magento, now Adobe Commerce, is genuinely powerful, but it was built for a different era of ecommerce. It assumes you have developers on call, a hosting budget, and the patience to manage security patches, extension conflicts, and version upgrades that break things in ways you cannot always predict. For a lot of growing consumer brands, that overhead stopped being worth it a long time ago.
This guide walks through what a Magento to Shopify Plus migration actually involves: why brands make the move, what carries over, how to protect the search rankings you have spent years building, and how the whole process runs from start to finish.
What Is a Magento to Shopify Plus Migration?
A Magento to Shopify Plus migration is the process of moving a Magento or Adobe Commerce store, including its products, customers, orders, content, URLs, integrations, and SEO signals, to Shopify Plus. It also involves rebuilding Magento-specific functionality around Shopify's data model, apps, APIs, and checkout, then relaunching on a fully hosted platform without losing your data or your organic traffic.
Why DTC Brands Leave Magento for Shopify Plus
The reasons are almost always about total cost and speed, not features. Magento can do nearly anything, but every capability comes with engineering time attached. On Shopify Plus, most of that work is already handled by the platform, so your team spends its time on merchandising and growth instead of maintenance.
The common triggers we hear from brands leaving Magento:
- Hosting, security, and developer costs that keep climbing every year
- Upgrades and patches that are risky, slow, and expensive to apply
- A checkout that is hard to optimize and converts worse than it should
- Simple merchandising changes that require a developer and a deploy
- A tech stack that slows the team down instead of speeding it up
Shopify Plus flips that equation. The platform is fully hosted and maintained, the checkout is highly optimized and conversion-focused, and your team can make most changes without waiting on engineering.
Is Magento 1 Still Holding You Back?
If you are on Magento 1, this is more urgent than a preference. Magento 1 reached end of life in June 2020. That means no official security patches, a shrinking pool of developers willing to work on it, and mounting compliance risk every month you stay. Many brands on Magento 1 are running on borrowed time and know they need to move but keep pushing it off because the migration feels daunting. It does not have to be. A structured migration is how you get off an unsupported platform without losing your data or your traffic.
What Actually Moves From Magento to Shopify
A well-run migration brings your store across with its history intact. That typically includes:
- Products, variants, SKUs, and inventory
- Customer accounts and saved addresses
- Full order history for support, returns, and reporting
- Categories and collections, rebuilt with their rules
- Blog content, pages, and images
- Your existing URL structure, mapped to its Shopify equivalent
Passwords never transfer between platforms, so customers reset on their first login. Everything else, handled correctly, comes with you.
The Real Question: Will You Lose Your Rankings?
This is the fear that keeps most brands on Magento longer than they should be, and it is a fair one. A platform move does not automatically cost you rankings. Rankings drop when URLs change without redirects, content gets dropped, or SEO signals like titles, metadata, and schema are lost in the move.
The way you protect them is to treat SEO as part of the migration, not an afterthought. That means mapping every existing URL to its new Shopify equivalent, building a complete 301 redirect plan, carrying over your metadata and structured data, and monitoring rankings through launch. This is exactly what our Shopify migration services are built around, so the traffic you have earned moves with the store.
What Makes a Magento Migration Different
Magento stores are usually the most complex migrations we see, and that is not a warning, just a reason to scope carefully. Magento gives you deep control over attributes, attribute sets, customer groups, and catalog structure, and it is often extended with a stack of third-party modules and custom functionality built up over years.
The migration work is mapping all of that to how Shopify does things: complex attribute logic becomes Shopify variants, metafields, and apps; customer groups map to Shopify segments and, on Plus, to B2B; and bespoke Magento modules are replaced with Shopify equivalents or rebuilt natively. Third-party Magento extensions and custom modules need to be audited individually, because there is no one-to-one Shopify equivalent for every piece of functionality; each important extension is mapped to a Shopify app, a native feature, or a custom build. Shopify Plus specifically closes many of the gaps brands worry about, with greater checkout extensibility, B2B and wholesale capabilities, expansion stores, and higher platform limits.
When Shopify Plus Is the Right Target, and When Advanced Is Enough
Not every Magento brand needs Plus on day one. On cost alone, Plus pays for itself once your volume is high enough that its lower card rate outweighs its higher base fee. Below that point, Plus is a capability decision rather than a savings one. You can see exactly where that line falls for your store with our Shopify Plus break-even calculator. Most brands coming off Magento land on Plus for the checkout control, B2B, and multi-store features rather than the fee math, but it is worth knowing both numbers before you decide.
How a Magento to Shopify Plus Migration Works
A migration is a sequenced project, not a one-click import. The shape of it is consistent:
- Audit and scope your catalog, integrations, content, and URL structure
- Migrate products, customers, and order history with validation at each step
- Map every URL, build the 301 redirect plan, and carry over metadata and schema
- Rebuild the storefront as a custom, mobile-first Shopify build
- Run staged QA, then a watched DNS cutover with rankings monitored after launch
You can see the full breakdown of what is included on our Shopify migration services page, where the data move, SEO work, and storefront rebuild are quoted together as one fixed-scope project.
Signs It Is Time to Move Off Magento
If several of these are true, you are likely overdue:
- You are on Magento 1, or on a Magento 2 version you are afraid to upgrade
- Your hosting and developer costs feel high for the revenue you are doing
- Small changes take too long because everything needs engineering
- Your checkout underperforms and you cannot easily fix it
- You spend more time maintaining the platform than growing on it
What Comes Next
At Liquid Lemon, we move DTC brands from Magento to Shopify and Shopify Plus and rebuild the storefront in the same project. You get the platform migration, the SEO and redirect work, your integrations reconnected, and a completely custom storefront, all quoted upfront as one fixed scope. No open-ended hourly billing and no coordinating a separate developer for the move and another agency for the rebuild.
Liquid Lemon's Shopify migration services cover Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Volusion, and other ecommerce platforms. Coming from a different platform? See our guides to BigCommerce to Shopify migration, WooCommerce to Shopify migration, and Volusion to Shopify migration. If you want to see the kind of storefronts we build, take a look at our work.
Planning the move in detail? Our Shopify migration checklist walks through everything to move and verify, our guide to Shopify migration SEO covers protecting your rankings, and our guide to Shopify migration cost explains what drives the price.
Send us your current Magento store and we will tell you honestly what the move looks like and what it takes to do it without losing your data or your rankings.
Start Your Sprint now with Liquid Lemon.
Written by Andrew Zam, Co-founder of Liquid Lemon, a Shopify / Shopify Plus design + development studio for DTC brands.
