Magento to Shopify migration: what should you prepare?
Magento to Shopify migration: what should you prepare? The short answer is that your preparation decides whether the switch becomes a smooth relaunch or an expensive cleanup afterwards. A platform change is not about copying products from one system to another. It is about moving data, history, search engine value and business logic without losing revenue along the way.
At Mercive we see many brands underestimate exactly this preparation. Magento is a technically complex platform, and that complexity does not disappear because you move to Shopify. It has to be handled deliberately before the migration begins. The more thoroughly you map out your current store, the fewer surprises you meet after go-live.
Understand the Magento 2 data model before you move anything
What is Magento 2? It is the newer generation of Magento, an open source e-commerce platform built for larger, customized web shops. Magento 2 uses an advanced EAV data model, where product attributes are spread across many tables instead of sitting together in one place. This gives great flexibility in Magento, but it makes a migration more demanding, because the data has to be translated into Shopify's simpler and more standardized structure.
In practice, this means you have to decide how attributes, product variants, customer groups, price rules and category structure should be mapped into Shopify. Some Magento concepts have no direct equivalent, and here you need to choose a sensible translation rather than a one-to-one copy. Our approach is to do a full data mapping early, so we know exactly what is being moved, what is being consolidated, and what is deliberately left behind.
Protect your SEO and avoid a traffic drop after go-live
The single biggest risk in any migration is the loss of organic traffic. Magento typically generates URL structures that do not match Shopify's standard paths for products, categories and content. Without a well-thought-out redirect plan, you lose rankings that have taken years to build.
Is Shopify a CMS? Yes, Shopify works as a CMS for your store. You manage products, collections, pages and blog content directly in the platform, which means all of your content has to move with you and be given correct URLs. We map every old URL, set up 301 redirects to the new paths, and preserve metadata, titles and structured data. It is detailed work, but this is exactly where the difference lies between a migration that keeps its traffic and one that loses it.
Integrations, payment and authentication in Shopify
A Magento store rarely stands alone. There are usually integrations to ERP, PIM, inventory, shipping, marketing and payment. Before the migration, you need to map each integration and clarify whether there is a matching Shopify app, an API connection, or whether a custom solution needs to be built. This is often where the budget is really decided.
Which authentication app does Shopify use? Shopify offers its own two-factor authentication via the Shopify account, and store owners can enable authentication through apps such as Google Authenticator or similar TOTP-based solutions, as well as security keys. It is worth getting access management and roles in order early, so the right people have access during the migration itself without security becoming looser than it was on Magento.
How Mercive approaches the migration
We work in phases. First, a technical review of the existing Magento store: data model, integrations, URL structure and business-critical functions. Then a mapping and a migration design, where we decide how everything is translated into Shopify. After that we build and test in a staging environment, run trial data migrations, and validate that products, order history and customers land correctly.
The go-live itself is planned with redirects ready, the domain disconnected from the old platform, and a monitoring period afterwards, where we follow traffic, indexing and errors. If you want to understand the economics behind a project like this, we have gathered it in our overview of what a Shopify build costs.
How Mercive can help
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