Shopify to Magento Migration 2026 Playbook

If you searched "shopify to magento migration," you are probably past the comparison-shopping stage. You already know why Magento might fit better than Shopify for where your business is heading, whether that is B2B complexity, catalog depth, or wanting to own your stack outright. Now you want to know what actually happens between deciding and going live.

Here is the honest answer: this is not a weekend project, and it is not a plugin. A Shopify to Magento migration is a real engineering project with a real budget, a real timeline, and real ways to get it wrong. Data migration tools move your products and orders in days. They do not move your checkout, your app functionality, your SEO equity, or your customer trust. Those have to be rebuilt, deliberately, by people who have done it before.

This is the playbook we would walk a client through before they sign anything, not the marketing version: six honest phases, what breaks when a phase gets skipped, and two risks that show up in almost no migration guide but that we have seen bite real merchants.

Two timelines, not one

Every migration estimate you will find online blends two very different projects together, and that is where budgets go wrong. Separate them from the start.

Data migration alone, moving products, customers, and order history from Shopify's data model into Magento's, runs roughly 1 to 8 weeks depending on catalog size and how clean your data already is. A tidy 1,000-SKU catalog is a matter of days once the destination is built. A messy 40,000-SKU catalog with years of inconsistent tagging is a matter of weeks, and cleanup, not transfer, is what eats the time.

A full replatform, meaning a new Hyvä frontend, a rebuilt checkout, and every integration reconnected and tested, is a different order of magnitude: 3 to 5 months for a mid-market store, and 6 to 9 months for B2B logic, ERP integration, or multiple sales channels. If a quote lands meaningfully under that, ask what is being skipped. For the cost side, our piece on Shopify Plus total cost in 2026 breaks down where the money actually goes.

The six phases, honestly named

Phase 1: Discovery and data audit. Before anything moves, someone needs to actually look at your catalog, customer base, order history, and integration list, and find the mess. This is the phase every rushed migration skips, and it is the single biggest predictor of how the rest of the project goes. Attribute inconsistencies, duplicate SKUs, orphaned metafields, all of it surfaces here or surfaces expensively later, usually the week before launch.

Phase 2: Magento environment, attribute sets, and categories built first. This is the step most non-technical migration guides skip entirely, and it is not optional. Magento's product model (EAV, entity-attribute-value) needs its attribute sets, categories, and customer groups defined before a single product record is imported, not after. Import into an empty structure and it will silently mis-map: attributes land in the wrong place, categories don't nest correctly, and nobody notices until a customer complains that a filter is broken. Building the destination shape first is slower up front and saves weeks of cleanup later.

Phase 3: Data migration. With the structure in place, products, customers, and order history move across. Products and structured data map reasonably cleanly. Two things do not: customer passwords and full order state.

Shopify's password hashes cannot be carried over one-to-one into Magento. Magento's authentication uses its own multi-part hash format, and there is no supported path to copy a foreign hash string and have it validate. The honest default is a forced password reset on first login, communicated clearly and ideally sweetened with an incentive, not sprung on customers as a surprise. A custom legacy-authentication bridge is technically possible but is bespoke development with its own failure history, not a packaged feature any migration tool ships.

Order history "migrates" in the sense that field values transfer, but Shopify's flatter order structure does not map one-to-one onto Magento's more granular order-to-invoice-to-shipment-to-credit-memo chain. Expect a recreated order record with the final state, not a faithfully replayed history.

Pulling data yourself rather than through a migration tool means planning around two hard ceilings: Shopify caps CSV exports at roughly 9,000 rows per file, and a GraphQL bulk export query has a 10-day execution window before Shopify marks it failed. Neither is a dealbreaker, but a naive full-catalog pull can fail outright on a large store without query design that respects them.

Phase 4: Frontend build on Hyvä. This is where the store becomes a store again, not just a database. Hyvä has been fully free and open source since November 10, 2025, which meaningfully changes this phase's economics: the roughly 1,000 EUR per-store license that used to be part of every Hyvä quote is gone. Checkout, Commerce, and Enterprise B2B tiers from Hyvä remain paid add-ons, so this phase is cheaper than a year ago, not free. Our deeper look at what that change means for a Magento build is in Hyvä going open source in 2026.

One thing this phase cannot avoid: checkout.liquid, the customization layer behind most bespoke Shopify Plus checkouts, was retired by Shopify across two deadlines in 2024 and 2025. There is no code to port from it. Whatever your custom checkout did has to be re-specified as business logic and rebuilt from scratch on Magento, regardless of which migration tool moved your data.

Phase 5: Integration and QA. Payment gateways, shipping carriers, tax logic, email, analytics, loyalty, subscriptions, anything running as a Shopify app has to be re-evaluated individually. Some have direct Magento equivalents; some do not exist as packaged Magento extensions and need bespoke development. This is also where you test the password-reset flow, the redirect map, and every checkout path end to end, repeatedly, since this is the phase most often compressed under launch-date pressure.

Phase 6: Phased cutover with dual-run fallback. Don't flip a switch on a Friday and hope. The safer pattern: launch the new store for a low-risk segment first, keep the old Shopify store live as a fallback, and sync orders and inventory bidirectionally while you confirm stability, before expanding and eventually decommissioning Shopify. A lower-budget version is keeping Shopify live and read-only for two to four weeks post-launch, syncing only the newest activity back once confident. Either way, build in the ability to reroute traffic back if something breaks.

What breaks when this is done badly

Six things recur across every migration post-mortem we have read or lived through, and all six are avoidable with the phases above done in order.

Password migration handled as an afterthought rather than a planned, communicated reset flow generates support tickets and lost trust in week one. A 301 redirect map treated as a nice-to-have rather than an exhaustive export-and-pair exercise across every product, collection, page, and blog URL costs rankings built over years; expect some fluctuation during Google's re-crawl even when done well, but an incomplete map turns fluctuation into a real drop. Shopify app functionality assumed to "just work" on Magento leaves gaps that surface only when a customer hits them. Product images and attribute data go missing when field mapping is rushed instead of validated against the structure built in Phase 2. checkout.liquid nostalgia, expecting old checkout logic to carry over, wastes time better spent rebuilding it properly the first time. And GA4 ecommerce tracking does not transfer at all; it has to be rebuilt and validated from scratch, ideally in parallel with the old tracking for a month or two before you trust the new numbers.

Two under-discussed risks

Two risks show up in almost no migration guide, and both can bite a merchant who assumes the switch is purely technical.

First, Shopify's own GDPR compliance webhooks put a clock on your data that you do not fully control. Once apps are uninstalled or a shop closes, automatic redaction timers start: shop data purges begin 48 hours after app uninstall, and customer data redaction is honored 10 days after a request for inactive customers, or deferred up to 6 months for recently active ones. If historical order or customer data has not been fully exported and verified in Magento before you start winding down Shopify, it can collide with a redaction clock that fires on Shopify's schedule, not yours.

Second, email sender reputation does not travel with the platform switch. ISPs trust sending infrastructure, not brands, so keeping the same visible sending domain across the migration matters more than most guides mention. And once you are on Magento, security operations become entirely your responsibility, not a platform-managed concern. SessionReaper (CVSS 9.1) hit roughly 81 percent of Magento stores with attack traffic within six weeks of disclosure in late 2025, affecting Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source at similar rates, so this is not solved by a more expensive license. It is solved by ongoing patching discipline, covered in the lessons from SessionReaper, worth reading before you commit to self-hosting.

Cost bands, honestly

Nobody publishes a trustworthy single number for "what does this cost," and anyone who quotes one before auditing your catalog is guessing. Think in team-weeks and GMV bands, not a euro figure that pretends every migration is the same shape.

A pure data migration for a clean, small-to-mid catalog is a matter of a few team-weeks. A full replatform onto a Hyvä frontend scales primarily with integration count, not catalog size: a simple store under 10 third-party extensions is a smaller project than a mid-market store with 25 or more, or one carrying B2B logic. GMV matters too, mostly through hosting and support-tier decisions. We run this as Magento Open Source plus Hyvä plus a dedicated support retainer, deliberately not Adobe Commerce's licensed tier, a materially different cost structure worth understanding before you compare quotes. That distinction is covered in our Shopify Plus total cost breakdown, and any development work we scope is billed hourly under a contractual SLA, rate confirmed in writing after discovery.

Where to go from here

If you are weeks from deciding, the most useful next step is not picking a migration tool. It is getting your catalog, integrations, and checkout requirements audited by someone who will tell you honestly whether this is a 6-week project or a 6-month one, before you commit to either. For merchants coming from Shopify, our Liquid Framework New Build path exists for exactly this kind of migration; details are at liquidlab.ro/en/liquid-framework. For the wider case on why Magento fits some businesses better than Shopify, and where it does not, start with our Magento vs Shopify 2026 honest guide.

Book a free strategy call with LIQUIDLAB and we will walk through your catalog, integrations, and timeline before you spend a euro on tooling.