What a Shopify migration actually costs, and what moves the number

What you are actually paying for

Every agency page ranking for this query does the same thing. It quotes a range from ten thousand dollars to a quarter of a million, explains that every project is different, and points you at a contact form. The range is true and useless.

The number behind that range is built like this. A quote for Shopify migration services is five workstreams stacked together, and the total is set almost entirely by which of the five your particular store makes hard.

1. Data migration. Products, variants, collections, customers, order history, blog content, and every attribute that has no Shopify equivalent.
2. Theme. Either an adaptation of an existing Shopify theme or a build from a design file. The gap between those two is the largest single swing in most quotes.
3. Apps. Finding replacements for what the old platform did natively, configuring them, and carrying their subscriptions forever.
4. Integrations. ERP, POS, 3PL, accounting, PIM, marketing automation, and anything else that talks to the store over an API.
5. Launch. URL mapping and redirects, QA across devices and payment methods, and the fortnight after go-live when things surface that no test caught.

Ask any agency to price those five separately. The ones that can are the ones that have done it before. A quote that arrives as a single number with no workstream breakdown is a guess wearing a suit.

For a floor to anchor against: EVDEV publishes fixed-price Shopify migrations from $2,000 CAD. That buys a small catalogue on a near-stock source platform moved onto an adapted theme, with the redirect map done properly. Every driver below moves the number up from there, and two of them can move it by a factor of three on their own.

The cost drivers, ranked by how much they move a quote

Every item below is something a competent agency asks about before quoting. If nobody has asked you about the bottom half of this table, you are being quoted on the top half only.

Two of these deserve an argument before anything else, because they are where merchants overspend without noticing: the theme, and the customisations you are carrying over from the old platform out of habit rather than need.

Catalogue size matters less than catalogue shape

Merchants assume a 30,000-SKU catalogue costs thirty times what a 1,000-SKU catalogue costs. It does not. Importing 30,000 clean rows takes barely longer than importing 1,000, because the work sits in the mapping, not the volume.

Shape is what costs money. A Magento configurable product with custom options, tier pricing and a dozen attributes has no single Shopify equivalent, so a person decides where each piece lands: variant, metafield, line item property, metaobject, or app. Multiply that decision by every product type you sell and you have the real scope of the data workstream.

One historic driver has quietly disappeared. Shopify used to cap products at 100 variants, and catalogues that broke the ceiling needed splitting into parent and child products with custom logic holding them together. On 15 October 2025 Shopify raised the limit to 2,048 variants for every merchant on every plan. If a 2026 quote still budgets for variant-splitting workarounds, ask why.

Data quality is the quiet one. If descriptions live in the old platform, specifications live in a PIM and images live in a shared drive with inconsistent naming, then the migration contains a reconciliation project nobody scoped. That work is real and someone pays for it, either you in agency hours or your team in evenings.

Customer records import. Passwords do not. Shopify will not accept password hashes generated by another system, so migrated accounts arrive deactivated and every customer has to be sent an account activation invite before they can log in. Budget for the email sequence, warn your support team before launch rather than after, and expect a spike in tickets in week one.

Theme build versus theme adaptation

This is the largest swing in most quotes and the one merchants understand least.

Adaptation means starting from a paid Shopify theme, restyling it to your brand and building the two or three sections it lacks. A build means starting from a design file and writing every section from nothing. The second can cost several times the first for a store that looks broadly similar to the person shopping on it.

For most migrating merchants, adaptation is the right answer, and an agency that talks you out of it may be selling hours. A replatform is already a large change to how the business runs. Bolt a redesign onto it and, when conversion moves after launch, you will not be able to say which one caused it. Migrate on a close copy of your current design, measure for a quarter, then redesign as its own project with its own budget.

There is one honest exception. If the existing design is the reason you are replatforming, and you have evidence rather than a feeling, combine them. Our audit of 5,410 live Shopify stores at /blog/shopify-conversion-study-5410-stores is a reasonable picture of what that evidence looks like when it is real.

Make anyone quoting you price both routes side by side: hours to adapt an existing Shopify theme, hours to build one from your design file. That gap is the part of the quote you have the most control over, and the part you are most likely to give away in the first meeting.

Apps are two costs, and the second one never stops

Every migration quote counts app setup. Far fewer count app subscriptions, which is the cost you actually live with.

The pattern repeats on every project. Something the old platform did natively becomes an app on Shopify: faceted search, tier pricing, bundles, subscriptions, sophisticated tax handling. Each replacement is a monthly bill, and mainstream apps in these categories are commonly priced in tiers that step up with your order volume. Your app bill grows as you grow, which is exactly when you notice it.

Price the whole stack before you sign anything. Take the apps the agency proposes, look each one up on the Shopify App Store at the tier your volume actually needs, and add the total to your monthly Shopify bill. Merchants regularly find the recurring app stack costs more than the plan underneath it.

Migration tooling itself is cheap by comparison. Matrixify, the bulk import and export app most agencies reach for during a data move, was priced at 20 US dollars per 30 days for up to 5,000 products, 50 dollars for up to 50,000 products, and 200 dollars for unlimited volume, checked on 12 August 2026. A rounding error against the hours spent preparing the files that go into it.

Ask any agency you are talking to for two numbers: how many paid apps your store will have installed on launch day, and what that stack bills each month at your order volume. If either answer is a shrug, the recurring cost has not been priced.

Integrations, B2B and multiple markets

Integrations are where quotes go wrong, because the merchant describes one in a sentence and the sentence hides a project. We sync with NetSuite is not a requirement. It is a category.

The questions that set the price are narrower than that. Which direction does data flow. How often. Which system owns inventory. What happens when the two disagree. Does anything have to be real time, or is real time just a preference nobody has costed. A nightly one-way product feed is a small piece of work. Bidirectional inventory across an ERP, three warehouses and a POS, with an agreed rule for who wins a conflict, is not.

Check whether a connector app already exists before anyone quotes a build. Often one does, and the integration becomes configuration plus a subscription instead of development plus maintenance. That check is the difference between two line items an order of magnitude apart. If the gap turns out to be one specific skill rather than a whole project, bringing in a Shopify developer for a defined block of work through /shopify-experts costs less than commissioning the integration outright.

B2B got cheaper this year

Company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing, vaulted credit cards, ACH payments in the US, and up to three active B2B catalogs became available on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans on 2 April 2026, at no extra cost. Before that, native B2B on Shopify meant Plus. If a quote written against 2025 assumptions is pushing you onto Plus purely to sell wholesale, push back. Plus still holds unlimited catalogs, direct catalog assignment to companies and locations, and partial payments and deposits, so the answer is not always no. It stopped being automatic.

Selling in local currencies has a similar shape. It runs through Shopify Markets and requires Shopify Payments, and Shopify charges a currency conversion fee of 1.5% or 2% depending on where your store is based, which is 2% for a Canadian store. That is a margin cost rather than a build cost, and it belongs in the same spreadsheet as the build so the two get compared honestly.

URLs, redirects and the content nobody counted

Redirect work scales with URL count, and URL count is almost always larger than merchants think. Crawl the old site before you accept a quote, and include everything that has ever ranked or earned a link, not only what appears in the current navigation.

Shopify URL structure is fixed. Products sit under /products/, collections under /collections/, static pages under /pages/, articles under /blogs/. You cannot flatten those prefixes. If you are coming off Magento or WordPress, where the path was yours to design, every single URL changes and every one of them needs a 301. Pricing a migration as though a handful of URLs move is the most common way a cheap quote gets to be cheap.

Shopify allows a maximum of 100,000 URL redirects, or 20,000,000 on Plus. Most stores never approach the standard limit. The ones that do are usually the stores whose faceted navigation was indexed on the old platform, generating tens of thousands of parameter URLs that all need to be mapped or deliberately dropped. Deciding which to drop is analysis work, and it is far cheaper than mapping all of them badly. The structural side of that decision is covered at /seo-services/site-structure.

Content migration falls out of quotes more often than anything else on this page. A decade of blog posts, a help centre, landing pages built in a page builder that has no Shopify counterpart. Someone rebuilds each one by hand. Ask explicitly whether content is in scope and how many pages the number assumes, because the honest answer is often zero and nobody said so.

Fixed scope, time and materials, and the cheapest quote

There are two ways to buy a migration. Fixed scope means an agreed deliverable for an agreed price, with a change order process for anything outside it. Time and materials means an hourly or daily rate against an estimate that both sides understand is an estimate.

Fixed scope moves risk onto the agency, and the agency prices that risk. Expect a contingency baked into the number, and expect the agency to hold the scope line firmly, because that contingency is the only thing protecting them from a requirement you remember in week six. Nobody is behaving badly there. That is what a fixed price buys.

Time and materials is cheaper when the requirements are genuinely clear and more expensive when they are not, which is the opposite of what most people assume when they choose it. It works if you have someone internally who can decide things in hours rather than weeks.

The practical answer for most migrations is a paid discovery phase at a fixed price, producing the specification, the data mapping, the app list and the redirect plan, followed by a fixed-scope build quoted against that document. You pay for discovery either way. The only question is whether you pay for it up front and receive a specification, or pay for it later in change orders and receive an argument. That sequence is how we scope the work described at /shopify-migration-services.

Now the cheapest quote. Of three bids, the lowest is rarely the most efficient team. It is usually the team that read the brief least carefully. Test that directly: ask each agency what they think the riskiest part of your migration is. The one that names something you had not thought of has read the requirements. The one that says it all looks straightforward has not, and the difference arrives later as a change order. Then ask for two references on your source platform, and judge the work at /portfolio and /case-studies rather than the deck.

One more question worth asking outright: what share of their fixed-scope migrations needed a change order, and how big the typical one was. Any agency that cannot answer that about its own projects is guessing about yours.

How to actually pay less

Not every lever is worth pulling. These are the real ones, roughly in order of how much they save per unit of pain.

• Adapt a theme instead of building one. The largest saving available and the one merchants resist hardest.
• Cut dead SKUs before the migration rather than after. Every discontinued product is a row to map, a URL to redirect and a page to QA.
• Decide what you are not moving. Ten-year-old order history rarely earns its migration cost. Archive it, keep the old system read-only for a quarter, and move the last two years.
• Do the content entry yourself. Agencies charge agency rates for copy and paste. If you have a coordinator with a spare week, take that line out of the quote entirely.
• Accept a standard app in place of one bespoke feature, at least for launch. You can build the custom version later, with real Shopify data telling you whether it was ever worth it.
• Keep the redesign out of the migration unless you have a specific, evidenced reason to combine them.

One thing not to cut: QA and the first two weeks after launch. Migrations hold their revenue through that window or lose it there, and the cost to migrate to Shopify properly includes somebody reading the analytics, the coverage report and the error logs every morning while the redirects settle. It is the cheapest insurance in the quote and the first thing merchants try to negotiate away.

Common questions

How much does it cost to migrate to Shopify?

EVDEV publishes fixed-price Shopify migrations from $2,000 CAD, and that figure is the floor: a small catalogue on a near-stock platform, moved onto an adapted theme. Price rises with five things, in this order: source-platform customisations, whether the theme is built or adapted, integrations such as ERP or POS, catalogue complexity, and the size of the redirect map. Thousands of configurable products with an ERP integration and a custom design sit at the top of any published range. Shopify plan fees are minor next to the build.

What makes a Shopify migration quote go up the most?

Three things dominate. A custom theme built from a design file instead of an adapted Shopify theme. Integrations that write data in both directions, such as ERP or POS inventory sync. And customisations carried over from the old platform, where each one has to be rebuilt as an app, a Shopify Function or a metafield structure. Catalogue size alone moves the number far less than merchants expect.

Do I need Shopify Plus to migrate, and how much more does it cost?

Usually not. Checked on 12 August 2026, Plus starts at CA$3,400 a month on a three-year term against CA$517 a month for Advanced. Since 2 April 2026, company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing and up to three B2B catalogs run on Basic, Grow and Advanced too. Plus still adds unlimited catalogs, direct catalog assignment, partial payments and a 20,000,000 URL redirect ceiling.

Should I redesign my store during the Shopify migration?

Usually no. Migrating on a close copy of your current design lets you measure what the platform change did on its own. If you redesign at the same time and conversion drops, you cannot tell which change caused it, and you have no clean baseline to fix it from. Redesign as a separate project a quarter later, with its own budget and a hypothesis worth testing.

Will I lose search rankings when I migrate to Shopify?

Some short-term movement is normal. Permanent loss usually comes from incomplete redirect mapping. Shopify enforces fixed URL prefixes, so products move to /products/ and collections to /collections/, which means every URL changes when you come off Magento or WordPress. Crawl the old site first, map every URL that ranks or has links to its closest new page, and use 301 redirects rather than the homepage.