What a Shopify migration actually costs

"How much to move our store to Shopify" has no single answer, but it has a small number of drivers, and once you know them you can estimate your own project within a sensible range. Here they are, roughly in order of how much they move the number.

1. Catalogue complexity

Not product count — complexity. Two thousand simple products migrate more easily than two hundred configurable ones.

What actually costs money:

• Variant explosion. Shopify has hard limits on variants per product. Ranges that exceed them need restructuring, which is a data modelling exercise, not a copy-paste.
• Configurable products. If customers build a specification rather than pick a size, you need a configurator. That is bespoke work.
• Pricing rules. Customer-specific pricing, tiered volume breaks and contract rates are all straightforward in B2B platforms and all custom work in Shopify.

A clean catalogue of simple products is often the cheapest part of the project. A complex one can be the most expensive.

2. The app stack you are already renting

Open your current store's app list and add up the monthly cost. Most stores we migrate are paying for six to twelve apps, several of which overlap, and at least two of which exist only to patch a theme limitation.

This cuts both ways. Some of those apps should carry across — a well-built subscription or reviews app is not worth rebuilding. Others should be replaced by a few hundred lines in the theme, paying for themselves within months.

The audit is worth doing before you scope anything, because it changes both the build cost and the run cost.

3. Data migration and its awkward corners

Products, customers and orders all transfer. The awkward parts:

• Order history. Needed for customer service and returns, and the most fiddly to bring across faithfully.
• Customer passwords. They do not migrate — hashes are not portable. Plan a password reset campaign and write the email properly, because this is the moment you are most likely to lose customers.
• URL redirects. Every indexed product and category URL needs a 301 to its new home. Skip this and you lose the rankings you have spent years building. It is the single most commonly skipped step and the most expensive to discover late.

4. Theme: template, customised, or bespoke

• Marketplace theme, lightly configured. Cheapest and fastest. Fine if your brand is not the differentiator and your merchandising is conventional.
• Marketplace theme, customised. The common middle ground, and often a trap — heavy customisation of someone else's theme costs nearly as much as bespoke and breaks on theme updates.
• Bespoke theme. Most expensive up front, cheapest to live with. Nothing to fight, nothing that breaks when the vendor ships an update.

Our honest advice: pick either end, not the middle.

5. Integrations

Every system your store talks to is a line item. ERP or accounting sync, warehouse or 3PL, EPOS for physical stores, email and CRM, local payment methods, tax calculation.

Two of these is routine. Six changes the shape of the project — at that point you are building an integration layer that happens to have a storefront attached, and it should be scoped that way.

Realistic ranges

Assuming a competent agency rather than the cheapest possible quote:

• Simple migration. Modest catalogue, marketplace theme, one or two integrations: a few weeks of work.
• Typical mid-market migration. A few thousand SKUs, bespoke theme, three or four integrations, full redirect mapping: six to ten weeks.
• Complex B2B or configurable-product migration. Custom pricing, configurator, ERP sync: three months or more, and worth treating as a software project rather than a store build.

The line item people forget

Redirects, again. It is worth repeating because it is the one that shows up in revenue rather than in the invoice. A migration that loses your organic rankings has cost you far more than it saved, and you will not see it in the first fortnight — you will see it in month three, when the traffic that used to arrive for free has stopped arriving.

Ask any agency you are quoting how they handle redirect mapping. If the answer is vague, keep looking.