Short answer: A Magento to Shopify migration moves your catalog, customers, and order history to Shopify, then rebuilds custom functionality with apps or Shopify Plus features. Plan 8 to 16 weeks for a mid-market store. The two failure points are unmapped 301 redirects and underscoped custom feature rebuilds. With Magento 2.4.6 support ending August 11, 2026, unpatched stores carry growing security and PCI risk.
01. The August 2026 Deadline: What End of Support Actually Means
Per Adobe's published software lifecycle policy, standard support for the 2.4.6 release line ends on August 11, 2026. The 2.4.5 line already reached end of support in August 2025, and 2.4.7 follows in April 2027. Adobe Commerce customers on paid licenses can buy extended support windows. Magento Open Source merchants cannot: when the date passes, quality patches stop.
End of support is not a switch that turns your store off. It is a slow leak. Concretely, an unsupported Magento version means:
- No more security or quality patches for your core version, so every newly disclosed vulnerability in Magento core or bundled libraries stays open on your store
- PCI DSS conversations get harder, because running unsupported software with known vulnerabilities conflicts with the requirement to maintain secure systems, and your acquirer can ask about it
- Extension developers stop testing against your version, so routine plugin updates start breaking things
- Hosting, PHP, and MySQL version upgrades eventually outrun what your Magento version supports, freezing your entire stack
The merchants most exposed are the ones on Magento Open Source 2.4.4 through 2.4.6 who have been deferring the decision. Staying put stops being the cheap option once the patch flow stops.
02. Your Three Options When Support Ends
There are three honest paths, and the right one depends on how much custom logic your Magento build carries and who maintains it.
Upgrade in place (2.4.7+ or Adobe Commerce Cloud)
What it involves: Version upgrade project every 12 to 18 months, ongoing developer retainer, infrastructure management stays yours
Who it fits: Merchants with deep custom logic that genuinely cannot be replicated, and an in-house Magento team to carry it
Migrate to Shopify
What it involves: One migration project, then a managed SaaS platform: hosting, security patching, PCI compliance, and checkout are Shopify's problem
Who it fits: D2C brands and retailers whose customization was mostly catalog, promotions, and theme work
Migrate to Shopify Plus
What it involves: Same migration, plus B2B company accounts and price lists, checkout extensibility, Carrier Service API, higher API limits
Who it fits: B2B distributors, manufacturers, multi-store operators, and anyone whose Magento build existed to serve wholesale
The pattern we see across migration projects: merchants overestimate how much of their Magento customization they still need. A feature audit usually finds that a third of the custom modules exist to patch problems Shopify does not have, a third map to native Shopify or Plus features, and the remainder is the real rebuild scope. Price the decision on that remainder, not on the size of the old codebase.
03. What Transfers, What Gets Rebuilt, What Gets Dropped
The data migration itself is well-trodden. The scope surprises live in the second and third columns.
| Asset | Transfers? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Products, variants, images | Yes | Magento configurable products map to Shopify variants; 100+ variant products need restructuring under Shopify's limits |
| Categories | Yes, as collections | Automated collections replace most category rules; layered navigation is rebuilt with filters or search apps |
| Customers | Yes, minus passwords | Password hashes cannot move. Plan an activation-email campaign at cutover so customers reset once |
| Order history | Yes | Imported for reference and lifetime-value continuity; historic orders are not editable transactions |
| CMS pages and blog | Yes, with cleanup | Content ports; page builder layouts are rebuilt in the theme or a Shopify page builder |
| Tiered and customer-group pricing | Rebuilt | Shopify Plus B2B catalogs and price lists replace Magento customer groups; on standard Shopify this needs an app |
| Custom modules and extensions | No | Replaced by Shopify apps, native features, or custom functions; this is the line item that moves budgets |
| ERP and CRM connectors | Rebuilt | New integration on Shopify APIs; see section 07 |
04. The 8-Step Migration Process
This is the sequence we run migrations on. Steps 1 and 2 are where projects are won or lost.
Audit the build
Inventory every custom module, extension, integration, and checkout customization. Classify each as: not needed, native on Shopify, app replacement, or custom rebuild. This document is your real scope.
Map the data model
Attributes to metafields, configurables to variants, customer groups to tags or B2B company records, categories to collections. Decide what order history depth to bring.
Export and stage
Extract products, customers, orders, and content from Magento. Migrate into a development store with a migration tool or scripted API import. Validate counts and spot-check records against the source.
Rebuild the storefront
Theme build or adaptation, navigation, filtering, and the content pages that drive organic traffic. Mirror or improve the conversion paths that worked on Magento.
Rebuild functionality
Apps and custom work from the step 1 audit: promotions, B2B pricing, shipping logic, search, subscriptions. Integrations are rebuilt in parallel here.
Build the redirect map
Every indexed Magento URL gets a mapped 301 to its Shopify equivalent. Export from the sitemap, Search Console, and analytics so nothing indexed is missed.
Test end to end
Orders across payment methods, shipping scenarios, tax jurisdictions, customer account flows, integration sync in both directions, and redirect spot checks. Run a full order-to-fulfillment-to-refund cycle.
Cut over and monitor
DNS switch in a low-traffic window, redirects live from minute one, submit the new sitemap, then monitor crawl errors, 404s, and conversion for 30 days against the pre-migration baseline.
05. SEO Preservation: The Part That Ruins Migrations
Almost every migration horror story is a redirect story. Shopify enforces its own URL patterns (/products/, /collections/, /pages/), so a Magento store's URLs change at cutover, all of them. Rankings survive when every old URL passes its equity to the right new URL, and they do not when the redirect map is partial.
- Export the complete indexed URL set: XML sitemap, Search Console performance report, and top landing pages from analytics
- Map one to one wherever the page still exists; redirect to the closest relevant category page, never the homepage, when it does not
- Preserve title tags, meta descriptions, and heading structure on the pages that earn organic traffic; migration tools drop these more often than teams expect
- Recreate structured data. Product schema comes with most Shopify themes, but FAQ, article, and custom schema from Magento need explicit rebuilding
- Keep the redirect table permanently. Backlinks to old URLs keep arriving for years
Expect a crawl-and-settle period of 2 to 6 weeks post-cutover while search engines process the move. What you should not accept is a step-change loss that persists past that window; that is a mapping defect, and it is findable in the 404 logs. If organic is a major channel for you, keeping rankings through a replatform deserves its own workstream rather than a checkbox in the build plan.
06. Costs and Timelines in 2026
Published agency pricing for Magento to Shopify projects in 2026 spans roughly $20,000 for a clean catalog move to $250,000+ for enterprise builds with ERP integration and custom B2B logic. The spread is scope: data migration is commoditized, while custom rebuilds and integrations are priced work.
Rules of thumb that hold across projects:
- Under 1,000 SKUs, no ERP, standard checkout: 6 to 8 weeks, lower end of the range
- Mid-market with one ERP or CRM integration and moderate custom logic: 8 to 16 weeks
- B2B with price lists, net terms, freight shipping, and multi-store: 3 to 6 months, budget led by integration scope
Weigh that one-time cost against what you stop paying: Magento hosting and DevOps, version upgrade projects every 12 to 18 months, security patching, and the developer retainer that exists to keep the platform standing rather than to ship revenue features. For most merchants in the $1M to $30M range, multi-year TCO comparisons favor the SaaS side; run the numbers on your own stack rather than trusting anyone's benchmark. Our pricing page shows how we structure fixed-scope migration quotes.
07. B2B, ERP, and the Integrations Layer
Merchants who ran Magento specifically for B2B used to have a real objection to Shopify. That gap has closed. Shopify Plus B2B now covers company accounts with multiple buyers, price lists per account, net payment terms, quantity rules, and vaulted cards, which replaces the customer-group and tier-price machinery most Magento B2B builds were made of. See our B2B wholesale services for how we structure those builds.
The ERP connector is the piece that gets rebuilt, not ported. Inventory, pricing, and order sync move onto Shopify's APIs, and the integration should be designed before cutover, not bolted on after, because order flow gaps between the storefront and the ERP are the most expensive class of post-migration bug. We build these integrations for NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Business Central, SYSPRO, and others; the full list is on our integrations page.
If your catalog ships freight, plan the shipping logic early: carrier-calculated LTL rates need Shopify Plus or a rating app, which we covered in our guide to automating LTL freight on Shopify.
08. After Cutover: Wiring Shopify to HubSpot
Migration is also the cheapest moment to fix the CRM layer, because customer and order data is already being restructured. Connecting the new Shopify store to HubSpot gives you: customers and orders synced as contacts and deals, abandoned checkout recovery with actual cart contents, lifetime value and order recency on every contact record, and workflows that trigger on real purchase behavior instead of form fills.
For B2B merchants, the combination is stronger: Shopify Plus handles ordering while HubSpot carries account management, reorder prompts, and pipeline visibility for the sales team. That architecture, and the sync failure modes to design around, is covered in our post on why orders fail to reach the sales pipeline. Our HubSpot implementation services handle the CRM side of the move.
09. Frequently Asked Questions
When does Magento 2.4.6 reach end of life?+
How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take?+
Will I lose SEO rankings when migrating from Magento to Shopify?+
What Magento data transfers to Shopify and what does not?+
Should I choose Shopify or Shopify Plus when leaving Magento?+
What does a Magento to Shopify migration cost?+
Can I keep my ERP and CRM integrations after migrating to Shopify?+
On Magento 2.4.6 with no upgrade plan?
eSolve runs fixed-scope Magento to Shopify migrations for D2C and B2B merchants: catalog, customers, order history, redirects, and the ERP and HubSpot integrations that come with them. Book a 30-minute assessment and get a migration scope, not a sales pitch.