Almost every store-migration project we are asked to rescue went wrong in the same predictable place, and it is never the products. Products export to a CSV and import cleanly; that part is genuinely easy and it lulls teams into thinking the whole migration will be. The damage shows up after launch, when organic traffic falls off a cliff because the URLs changed and nobody mapped the redirects, or when a customer logs in and their order history is gone because the import ran in the wrong order, or when a feature the old store depended on simply does not exist on the new one because everyone assumed it would come across.
Migrating to Shopify from WooCommerce or Magento typically runs four to twelve weeks depending on catalogue size and how customised the old store was, and the timeline is dominated by exactly the parts that are not the products. WooCommerce migrations tend to be lighter because the platform is simpler; Magento migrations run longer because Magento stores are usually more heavily customised and the gap to Shopify's model is wider. In both cases, the work that determines success or failure is SEO preservation, data relationships, and rebuilding custom logic, so that is where the planning has to go.
The redirects are the most valuable thing you can get right
Here is the part that quietly decides whether a migration is a success or a disaster: every platform structures its URLs differently, and Shopify's product, collection, and page URLs do not match WooCommerce's or Magento's. That means every existing URL that search engines have indexed and ranked points, after the migration, at nothing, unless you have mapped a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
The reason this matters more than almost anything else is that an established store's search rankings are often its single most valuable asset, built up over years, and they are attached to the old URLs. Lose the redirect mapping and you lose the rankings, and the new store starts from a standing start in search even though the business did not. So the redirect map is not a launch-day cleanup task; it is a deliverable you build before launch, covering every product, every collection, every CMS or content page, mapped old-to-new and tested. We make the same point about treating SEO as a first-class concern in our Shopify SEO audit checklist: the rankings you already have are far cheaper to keep than to rebuild, and a migration is the moment you are most likely to throw them away by accident.
Import in the right order, or the relationships do not form
The second place migrations break is data relationships, and it comes down to a sequence that is easy to get wrong. Products, customers, and orders are not independent; an order references the products in it and the customer who placed it. If you import orders before the products and customers they reference exist in Shopify, the orders have nothing to attach to, and you end up with order history that is disconnected from the catalogue and the customer accounts.
The correct order is products first, then customers, then historical orders, so that by the time the orders import, the things they point at already exist and the relationships form correctly. This sounds obvious stated plainly, and it is exactly the kind of obvious thing that gets done out of order under deadline pressure, leaving a store where customers cannot see their past purchases and the merchant cannot run history-based segments. Get the sequence right and the data knits together; get it wrong and you are reimporting under pressure after launch. Migration tools and the Store Migration app help with the mechanics, but they do not save you from importing in the wrong sequence, so the sequence is yours to own.
Custom logic does not port, it gets rebuilt
The third area, and the one that most often blows up Magento timelines specifically, is custom functionality. A mature Magento or WooCommerce store has accumulated extensions and bespoke logic over years, and none of it ports to Shopify automatically, because Shopify's architecture is different by design. The mistake is assuming a feature will come across simply because the business relies on it; it will not, and discovering that late is how a migration overruns.
The reframing that keeps this manageable is that custom functionality has to be re-implemented in Shopify's model, not transplanted. The good news is that Shopify's app ecosystem has matured to the point where most common extensions have a Shopify counterpart, so a lot of what felt custom on the old platform is now an app install. For genuinely bespoke logic, Shopify's own building blocks, metafields and metaobjects for custom data and Functions for backend rules, cover a great deal of what used to require custom platform code, and the way to model that custom data is the same metafield-versus-metaobject decision you would make on any Shopify build. The work is to audit the old store's custom functionality early, decide for each piece whether it is an app, a Shopify-native rebuild, or something to drop, and plan the rebuild as real work rather than a free side effect of the migration.
A migration that keeps its traffic and its data
A migration that lands well has a recognisable shape. The redirect map is built and tested before launch, covering every old URL, so the rankings survive the move. The data is imported in the right order, products then customers then orders, so history connects and accounts are whole. The old store's custom functionality has been audited and each piece deliberately rebuilt as an app, a Shopify-native feature, or consciously dropped, rather than assumed to carry over. And the catalogue import, the easy part, is treated as the easy part rather than as evidence the whole thing will be smooth.
The lesson from every rescued migration is the same: the products lull you, and the URLs, the data order, and the custom logic are where the project is actually won or lost. Plan the migration around those three, not around the catalogue, and the move to Shopify keeps the two things the old store was most valuable for, its traffic and its history, instead of quietly losing them at launch.
