REPLATFORMING · MAGENTO / ADOBE COMMERCE → SHOPIFY
Magento to Shopify, without the surprises.
Magento gives you a data model that assumes you will extend it. Shopify gives you a data model that assumes you will not. That single difference explains almost every difficult decision in this migration: the work is less about moving rows than about deciding what to do with the logic your Magento build accumulated in extensions, attribute sets and custom tables.
What transfers
- Simple and configurable products, with variants mapped to Shopify options
- Customer accounts and address books
- Order history, as read-only records
- Category structure, flattened into Shopify collections
What does not
- Attribute sets — Shopify has no equivalent; these land in metafields and need a deliberate schema
- Cart price rules, which Shopify's discount model cannot reproduce one-to-one
- Multi-store setups, which become separate Shopify stores or Markets, and the choice is structural
- Anything in a Magento extension, which is a rebuild rather than a migration
- Layered navigation, which is an app decision on Shopify
The sequence.
Attribute audit
List every attribute set and decide, per attribute, whether it becomes a Shopify option, a metafield, or is dropped. This is the single decision that most affects how much rework follows.
Extension reckoning
Every Magento extension is either replaced by a Shopify app, rebuilt, or abandoned. Price all three options before committing — some are cheaper to abandon than anyone expects.
Product and customer import
Configurables become variants. Reconcile variant-level pricing and inventory explicitly; this is where silent data loss hides.
URL map
Magento URLs carry suffixes and category paths that Shopify's fixed /products/ and /collections/ structure does not. Every indexed URL needs a mapped destination.
Markup rebuild
Magento's structured data came from your build; Shopify's comes from the theme. Treat it as new work, not a carry-over.
Cutover and measure
Hold the baseline you took beforehand open for a quarter.
The part nobody scopes
What this move does to your AI visibility.
Magento stores are often old, and age is exactly what makes them citable — years of accumulated category and guide pages that assistants have learned to reference. Shopify's URL structure cannot reproduce Magento's category paths, so this migration changes more URLs than most. The citation exposure is proportional: the pages most likely to be quoted are the deep, long-lived ones, and those are the ones a session-ranked redirect map drops first.
The mechanism is the same on every path. Assistants cite specific URLs; change the URLs and those citations point at pages that are gone. They re-read on their own cadence rather than on your launch date, so a redirect map signed off on crawl stats can still leave an assistant quoting a dead page for weeks — while the new theme rebuilds your structured data from scratch, because markup is theme-level on most platforms.
Before you freeze the old store
Take a citation baseline while the old site is still live. Which assistants name you, for which questions, and which URLs do they cite? After the cutover that record is unrecoverable — the pages those citations point at will not exist, and you will have no way to tell whether you lost ground or never held it.
During the URL map
Redirect maps are usually built for Googlebot and signed off on crawl stats. Assistants resolve citations on their own schedule and do not re-crawl on your launch date, so a 301 that satisfies Search Console can still leave an assistant quoting a page that now bounces. Map the specific URLs you were cited on first, not just the URLs with sessions.
When the new theme ships
Structured data is theme-level on most platforms, so a replatform silently rebuilds it. Product, Offer, availability and price markup that an agent could read on the old store may be absent, partial, or rendered client-side on the new one. Diff the emitted JSON-LD before and after — not the theme's feature list.
After cutover
Re-run the same prompt set you baselined. Recovery is not instant and is not uniform across assistants: each re-reads on its own cadence, so a surface that looks unchanged in week one can move in week six. Hold the measurement open for a quarter before calling it.
Only the baseline has a deadline — it is the one step that becomes impossible once the old store is dark. The free Citation Rank scan records it, and Visibility Score is where the measurement lives afterwards. House of Zelena is what that loop looked like end to end.
Who should do this work.
Not us — we do not migrate stores, and we are not a migration tool, vendor or agency. What we do sits underneath the migration: whether an agent can read your catalog, whether assistants recommend you, and whether an agent-driven purchase completes. A replatform is simply the cheapest moment to get that right, because your catalog structure and templates are already open.
For the migration itself, brief specialist firms and full agencies against the same written scope — including your extension list. The agency buyer’s guide covers the questions worth asking and the answers that should end a conversation. If you run migrations for clients, the agent layer is available to deliver on our platform via the partner programme.
How we connect to these platforms
Questions
It is a question about operating cost, not features. Magento gives you control and charges for it in engineering time, hosting and upgrade cycles; Shopify takes the control back and removes most of that overhead. Brands whose competitive advantage lives in a genuinely custom commerce workflow usually regret the move. Brands running a conventional catalog on a Magento build maintained by one contractor usually do not.
They do not transfer. Every extension is replaced by a Shopify app, rebuilt as custom work, or abandoned — and that decision list, not the catalog size, is what determines the real cost of this project. Price it during scoping. A migration quote that has not seen your extension list is not a quote.
The risk is concentrated in the URL map, because Magento's category-path URLs have no direct Shopify equivalent and this migration therefore changes more addresses than most. The common mistake is building the redirect map from an analytics export sorted by sessions, which systematically drops long-tail pages that carry links and citations but little direct traffic. Build it from a full crawl of indexed URLs instead.
Not exactly. Shopify enforces fixed prefixes for products and collections, so paths cannot be reproduced one-to-one. You can preserve the handle portion and redirect everything else, which is the usual approach — but plan for the change rather than discovering it during the build.