Magento to Shopify Migration: The Complete Guide To Migrate Your Store

Can you quickly migrate from Magento to Shopify with zero data loss? In a nutshell — yes. However, there are several nuances and moments to keep in mind. As you migrate from Magento to Shopify, consider that these platforms are different. The ways of using the stored data also differ, and there's no uniform option for every new case. Migrate your History safely and do it correctly. This post will go through all the necessary aspects of data migration and introduce a special Magento to Shopify migration checklist. We guarantee quick and easy migration with it!

How to migrate from a Magento to Shopify platform: our experience

When our development team received the task to migrate data from Magento to Shopify, we researched this case thoroughly.

We could understand the pains entrepreneurs deal with during the data migration process, thanks to this. The research results and insights helped our partners, too — that's why it could be helpful for you.

Let’s dig deeper and learn how to migrate Magento to Shopify with no hassle!

What tools does the market offer to solve this problem?

So how to migrate from Magento to Shopify? Are there any tricks that you may use? Indeed there are.

• If you're a Shopify Plus customer, you're lucky. You can save your money through the migration service from Shopify as well as the Transporter app
• Use a ready-made application for automatic migration, for example, Cart2Cart
• Use the virtual assistants' services in case you have a small amount of data
  

If you've already used the standard Magento package with no integration or customization options, you can just close this article as those solutions can completely solve your problem.

However, looking at our experience with partners, we can say for sure such cases are quite rare. It's in the interest of any company to ensure the effectiveness of marketing and operational tasks. That's why we need to use stock management apps, CRM, marketing tools, product customization features, and user/order records that are linked to Magento. It requires more patience and attention — just like working with a technical partner.

What else to consider besides data when moving from Magento to Shopify?

To ensure efficient work at all stages, pay attention to key control points. For example, if you plan to migrate products from Magento to Shopify, it's not just a simple data transfer process but also something that could help you gain more traffic, conversions, and loyalty from your clients. Here's a quick overview of such control points that could help your business strive:

• SEO. It generates organic traffic to your webpage. To help your online shop succeed, think of developing a new site structure or prepare 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Your page's search results and organic growth will start improving right away.
• Adapting the old content to a new theme. It may retain tags left from the previous platform, and while migrating data, you'll definitely think of moving them to a new marketplace too. However, there's no guarantee it'll land on the new platform very well. So think in advance about how you can fix this after migrating this data and before launching the new store.
• Moving graphic content: product descriptions, blogs, categories, etc. This is not on the surface, as this information is not stored in the database. The content you move might contain links to the images. It is essential to transfer these images to a new platform and replace all links with the correct ones.
• Transferring static source collections to automatic collections in Shopify. It's an advanced directory management tool. If you don't consider this during migration, you'll need to manage the directory manually.
• Integrations and automation. This reduces your operating costs which is quite necessary for many businesses. And if you neglect it, you'll most definitely face difficulties processing orders and managing balances.

How to organize the migration process correctly?

The process of moving from Magento to Shopify consists of four major phases. Below, we'll show you how to do this step-by-step.

Step 1

Analysis of data migration from Magento to Shopify

Firstly, decide what kind of data you want to migrate from Magento to Shopify. This will help pick the most convenient migration option.

At this point, it is essential to engage a technical migration partner in the analysis process. This will save you time and budget. A technical partner will analyze the data, customization features, and integration types and draft an optimal migration plan by selecting the right tools.

What kinds of data can you transfer from Magento to Shopify?

• items (product name, description, quantity, price, images, etc.);
• visual product elements (color, size, shape);
• data on orders that contain payment information, a list of purchased goods, information about customers, and the total amount of the purchase;
• content of the pages, including Contacts, About Us, and Blog;
• embedded images;
• customer information (names, email addresses, phone numbers, etc.);
• information about discounts and benefits;
• SEO settings;
• integration with various services.

Step 2

Moving from Magento to Shopify

Moving your site from Magento to Shopify.
Finding the best migration way depends entirely on the previous step.

It could be:

• Using only ready-made migration applications
• A mix of ready-made apps for one data selection and native apps for other information
• In some cases — virtual assistants
• In the most challenging situations, a fully custom solution is implemented.

What KPIs should you use to pick the best option?

• Price. As you move data from Magento to Shopify, remember — expensive doesn't always mean good. If you can complete any part of the process for a lower price, better do that.
• Speed. This is sometimes a critical factor.
• Quality and completeness of data.
• Balancing among these criteria, you will determine the best way for you together with your technical partner. Take care of your History doing safe migration.

Case of Magento to Shopify migration

Here is one of our cases, when using a ready-made solution for migration, our partner failed to solve the task. This application did not allow our Shopify developers team to flexibly customize data migration. Our client set the task to transfer the data in a new form with a new structure, which is simply impossible to accomplish in Cart2Cart. Due to these circumstances, we continued to look for other solutions.

Challenge

The project we worked on contained the Linnworks inventory management system. We researched it and found the opportunity to create a custom data migration solution. This tool can transfer data in a variety of ways. For instance, it migrates the export data to another server for additional processing. In addition, you can do this regularly if you need to maintain the databases of both systems in the same state.

Solution

To accomplish this, we built our own application that could upload the data and transfer it to Shopify. We implemented this as a Shopify application that's accessible from the admin panel of ​​the store.

There, the owner may create a list of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) they need to migrate. This, by the way, is one of the requirements — that's why Cart2Cart didn't work for us. Our development team was set to export only the required products instead of everything.

Plus, we retained the relation between Shopify product identifiers to the SKU of goods in Linnworks. We did this so we could update products in Shopify once they're updated in Linnworks. This ensures complete product synchronization in both databases.

As you can see, the option of writing your own application is resorted to when you need to solve non-trivial tasks related to data migration. The better way to keep your data and history safe is cooperation with experienced developers who truly may ensure the right process.

Step 3

Data transfer

This one depends on how you decide to migrate Magento to Shopify. The duration of the data migration process will depend on the amount of this data and can last from several minutes to several hours, sometimes even days.

Step 4

Implementing page redirection and keeping search result positions

As you move data from Magento to Shopify, saving the current site position in the search engine's system is crucial and ensuring 301 redirections to a new address. The user automatically lands on the new page address as you enter the old domain address. All the old page's properties remain the same in this case. 

With the help of the correct setting of the redirect, you will save the authority of your domain name as well as your current ranking in the search engines.

Challenges of Migration from Magento to Shopify

If you want to move from Magento to Shopify, you could make use of the Magento to Shopify migration checklist we’ve shared above. These four key steps will help avoid plenty of pains during data migration. However, you might still face several challenges in the process.

Incompetence of the team

While migrating from Magento to Shopify, it’s super important to work with a professional team that fully understands the responsibility. This team must have extensive expertise in this area to easily handle the process.

Huge masses of information

To migrate products from Magento to Shopify, it’s important to transfer a huge amount of information and data. However, be extremely careful — losing even the tiniest piece of data may result in a disaster.

Losing control over the process

Are you sure that the information about the previous orders was saved during migration? Are you sure you have installed only the necessary apps? Have you followed Magento to Shopify migration checklist strictly? If the answer is no, perhaps you are losing control over the process.

How much does migration from Magento to Shopify cost?

This is quite a difficult question. Each case of moving from Magento to Shopify is unique and always takes a different amount of time. Focus on the hourly costs of your partners and the quality of their action plan. You can definitely compare several teams too. If there's a big discrepancy between those teams' plans and schedules, one of them didn't consider all the points for safe migration. Thus, it will affect both the job quality and budget changes.

Conclusion

As you can see from this review, the process of migration data from Magento to Shopify depends on your goals and objectives. When you prepare to migrate from Magento to Shopify, you must answer a number of questions:

• What data types do you want to move?
• How much data?
• How necessary is it to maintain the data relevance in the source database after the transfer?

The answers to these questions will directly influence how exactly this process would go and what results you can expect.

So, can you migrate your Magento store to Shopify quickly and easily? Of course, you can. However, the successful implementation of this process without data loss is possible if you thoroughly know the technical part of the store and the method of migration that is right for you.

Feel free to ask questions — we are open to dialogue. And our experts are ready to guide you through the migration process. Whatever Magento to Shopify migration service you might need, we have them all!

Migrate your History safely. Do it correctly.