What a Shopify migration costs, and what drives it

The short answer

A Shopify migration done properly costs more than moving your products across, because moving the products is the smallest part of it. With KA Consultancy, migration is part of the build: a custom theme design and build including migration starts from $9,997, and bespoke design and development from $19,997 for large or complex catalogues, custom integrations and multi-market stores.

Where your store lands in that range comes down to a handful of factors: how big and how messy the catalogue is, what systems it connects to, how much organic traffic you have to protect, and the platform you’re leaving. The rest of this guide takes them one at a time.

What you’re actually paying for

A migration quote should cover six jobs. When quotes differ wildly, it’s usually because some of these are missing.

1. Data audit and restructuring. Working out what you have, cleaning it, and rebuilding it as structured data Shopify can use for filters and product pages.
2. Catalogue, customer and order migration. Products, variants, images, customers, addresses and order history moved and checked.
3. URL mapping and redirects. Every old address matched to its new one, so rankings and links carry over.
4. The new store. A theme designed around the new data, not the old design copied across.
5. Integrations and tracking. Point-of-sale, stock, accounting and finance connected; analytics and conversions rebuilt and verified.
6. Launch and monitoring. A controlled switch-over, then rankings, traffic and revenue watched against a baseline, with fixes included.

A quote that covers only the second item is a data transfer. It will look cheap, and the other five will still need doing.

What drives the price

Catalogue size and variants

More products means more data to move and check, but size on its own is rarely the problem. A thousand clean, consistent products can move faster than two hundred messy ones. What matters more is how many variants each product has, and whether they fit Shopify’s variant structure without restructuring.

Data quality

This is the factor most quotes underestimate. If specifications live in free-text descriptions, manufacturer PDFs or inconsistent fields, they need cleaning and structuring before they can power filters, comparison and product pages. For a specialist retailer, this is often the largest single block of work.

Integrations

Every system that touches the store adds scope: point-of-sale, stock, accounting, finance, shipping, reviews and email. Some have reliable off-the-shelf connectors to Shopify; others need custom work. For a showroom retailer, the point-of-sale connection is often the biggest variable in the whole quote.

Organic traffic to protect

A store with little search traffic has little to lose. A store that ranks for thousands of model numbers needs every one of those URLs mapped and redirected, structured data carried across and rankings monitored closely after launch. The more traffic you have, the more care the migration needs.

Customer and order history

Importing years of customers and orders is straightforward with the right tools, but it needs checking. Passwords can’t be moved, so the customer communication around account activation needs planning too.

Content and blogs

Buying guides and blog posts often carry valuable rankings of their own. Moving them, fixing their formatting and redirecting their URLs is part of the job.

Markets and currencies

Selling in the US and Canada, or further, adds multi-currency and multi-market setup, and moves a project towards the bespoke route.

Low cost vs high cost migrations

Most specialist retailers sit in the right-hand column on two or three rows. That’s normal, and it’s exactly what the audit before a quote is for.

The platform you’re leaving

Where you’re coming from shapes the work, though less than people expect.

• WooCommerce. Features often live in plugins, and their data doesn’t always export cleanly. Expect some features to be rebuilt natively in the new theme.
• Magento. Catalogues are often large and heavily attributed, but usually well organised. The work is restructuring, not rescuing.
• BigCommerce. Exports are generally clean; the main effort goes into URL mapping and rebuilding custom templates.
• Lightspeed and retail POS platforms. The decision about keeping or replacing the in-store system shapes the whole project. See our Lightspeed to Shopify guide.
• Niche and legacy platforms. Specialist sectors often run on industry-specific systems with no clean export. Extracting the data intact can be the longest part of the job.

DIY vs agency: what each really costs

The DIY route looks cheapest because its biggest costs don’t appear on an invoice: staff time, rankings lost to missing redirects, ad spend wasted on broken tracking, and weeks of fixing things after launch. For a small store with little to protect, those risks are manageable. For an established retailer, they usually outweigh the fee. If you’re comparing agencies, our guide to choosing a Shopify migration agency has the questions to ask.

The cost of getting it wrong

The most expensive migrations aren’t the ones with the highest quotes. They’re the ones that have to be fixed afterwards.

Each of these can cost more than the difference between a cheap quote and a proper one, which is why the cheapest migration so often turns out to be the most expensive.

Three typical migration scenarios

Every store is scoped individually, but most migrations fall into one of three shapes.

A focused specialist store

A few hundred products, reasonably clean data, standard apps and a single market. The work centres on restructuring specifications, mapping URLs and designing a custom theme around the range. This sits in the custom theme route, from $9,997, and typically takes 2–6 weeks.

An established showroom retailer

Thousands of products from dozens of brands, specifications spread across old fields and PDFs, a point-of-sale system in store and years of organic rankings. The data work is heavier, the POS connection needs scoping, and the redirect map runs to thousands of lines. Depending on the integration, this sits at the top of the custom theme route or moves into bespoke.

A multi-market or integration-heavy business

Selling in more than one country, with ERP, finance or wholesale requirements, or a platform with no clean export. This is bespoke design and development, from $19,997, typically 4–8 weeks, invoiced in three stages.

The audit tells you which shape your store is, and the quote is fixed before work starts.

Questions to ask about any migration quote

• Is a data audit included, or is the price based on a product count alone?
• Will the catalogue be restructured, or moved as it is?
• Is the full URL map and redirect set included and completed before launch?
• Which integrations are named in the scope, and what happens if another is discovered?
• Is tracking rebuilt and verified against real orders before launch?
• Is there a fixed launch date, and what happens if it slips?
• How long is post-launch monitoring, and are fixes included in the fee?

A quote that answers each of these in writing is far easier to compare, and far less likely to grow once the project starts.

How we price a migration

We don’t price migrations per product or per hour. Every project starts with a free audit and scoping call covering your current store, catalogue, rankings and integrations. You then get a fixed scope, a fixed fee and a launch date in writing before anything is committed.

Migration is part of the build rather than a separate line. A custom theme design and build starts from $9,997 and typically takes 2–6 weeks. Bespoke design and development starts from $19,997, typically takes 4–8 weeks, and is invoiced in three stages: signature, design sign-off and launch.

Included in both: data migration and restructuring, URL mapping and redirects, speed and technical SEO, structured data, tracking verified against live orders, a staged launch, and 30 days of monitoring and fixes against the pre-launch baseline.

Budgeting a migration

A realistic year-one budget for a migrating AV retailer has three parts.

Our Shopify website cost guide for AV retailers goes into plans, processing and running costs in more detail.

Ways to reduce the cost

• Clean your data before you start. Consistent product names, structured specifications and tidy images shorten the most expensive part of the job.
• Prune the catalogue. Discontinued lines and dead products don’t need migrating; they need redirecting.
• Decide on integrations early. Knowing whether you’ll keep your point-of-sale system avoids rework mid-project.
• Audit your apps. Every app you drop is one fewer integration to rebuild, and a custom theme can replace several.
• Migrate and redesign together. Doing both at once means restructuring, designing and testing once.
• Avoid your peak season. Launching outside November and December gives the new store time to settle before your busiest weeks.
• Make decisions quickly. Slow sign-offs extend timelines more than any technical problem.

A migration in practice

Lipton’s Audio & Video, a premium hi-fi and AV retailer in Ontario, moved to Shopify with a custom theme. More than 2,800 products were rebuilt as a single structured dataset, serving organic search, on-site filtering and Google Shopping at once.

With the same team running SEO and Google and Meta marketing afterwards, revenue grew +191%, then +114% the following year, at an 11.9x blended return on ad spend. The full account is in the Lipton’s Audio & Video Shopify case study, and our approach for the sector is on Shopify website design for hi-fi and AV retailers.

When a migration isn’t worth it

• Your current platform is working. If it’s fast, developable and converting, a redesign may deliver more for less.
• The real problem is traffic or range. A new platform won’t fix a range customers don’t want or a store nobody visits.
• You’re weeks from peak season. Wait until after it, and use the time to clean your data.
• You’re already on Shopify. You need a redesign or a custom theme, not a migration. Our guide to custom Shopify theme vs template covers that choice.

The audit will tell you if any of these apply, before anyone quotes you for a migration you don’t need. Sometimes the most valuable outcome of that conversation is being told to stay where you are and fix something smaller first. If that’s the right answer for your store, that’s the answer you’ll get.

Shopify migration cost: FAQ

Sources

KA Consultancy prices, timelines, inclusions and invoicing are as published on our Shopify website design page. Shopify plan prices: Shopify’s published US pricing, as summarised in our Shopify website cost guide; check shopify.com/pricing for current figures. Migration results are from the Lipton’s Audio & Video case study.