How Much Does a Shopify Migration Cost?

When you ask three agencies for a quote on a Shopify migration, you might get back £8,000, £40,000, and £150,000. All three could be right. That is not evasion. The honest answer depends entirely on what you are starting with, what you are building towards, and how much of the complexity is properly scoped before anyone starts work.

This article gives you realistic Shopify migration cost ranges, explains the main drivers behind them, and flags the things most quotes quietly leave out.

Why Shopify Migration Costs Vary So Much

The gap between a £10,000 migration and a £100,000 one usually comes down to three things: catalog size and complexity, how much custom functionality needs rebuilding, and how many third-party systems need connecting. A small DTC brand moving from WooCommerce with 300 products and a standard theme is a fundamentally different project to a Magento 2 merchant with 50,000 SKUs, a bespoke pricing engine, ERP integration, and ten years of order history to preserve.

The other factor that inflates variance is how honest the quoting agency is being. A low quote that excludes SEO redirect mapping, post-launch support, or app replacements is not a good deal. It is an incomplete scope.

Realistic Shopify Migration Cost Ranges

These are rough ranges, not fixed prices. They should serve as a sanity check rather than a shopping list.

Small stores (under 1,000 SKUs, minimal custom functionality): £5,000 to £15,000. Typically WooCommerce or simpler Magento stores moving to a standard Shopify theme with a handful of integrations.Mid-market stores (1,000 to 20,000 SKUs, some custom features): £15,000 to £60,000. Involves meaningful custom development, ERP or 3PL connections, data migration scripting, and a bespoke Shopify theme build.Enterprise and Shopify Plus (20,000+ SKUs, complex business logic): £75,000 to £250,000 and above. These projects typically take four to six months and involve significant architecture decisions, extensive QA, and post-launch stabilisation.

A rule of thumb that appears consistently across specialist agencies: multiply the headline project quote by 2 to 2.5 to estimate your realistic Year 1 total cost of migration, once hidden costs are factored in. That reflects how often scope grows when real complexity surfaces, not pessimism about the process.

The Main Cost Drivers Behind Any Shopify Migration

If you want to understand where your quote is coming from, these are the factors that move the number most:

Catalog size and data quality. SKU count matters, but so does the state of your existing data. Years of inconsistent product data require cleaning before it migrates cleanly, and that takes time.Custom functionality. Bespoke pricing rules, quote builders, product configurators, or B2B functionality must be rebuilt in Shopify's ecosystem. There are no imports for logic.Third-party integrations. Each additional system (ERP, OMS, CRM, or PIM) adds substantial scope. Budget £5,000 to £20,000 per integration depending on complexity.Theme design and build. Shopify cannot import designs from other platforms. A custom theme must be built from scratch in Liquid or a headless frontend.Data migration scripting. Large catalogs require custom scripts rather than off-the-shelf tools, particularly when preserving historical orders and customer accounts.SEO redirect mapping. Covered separately below, because it is too often left off quotes entirely.

The Hidden Costs Most Migration Quotes Leave Out

This is where most migration budgets fall short. The headline quote covers the build. These are the things that rarely make it into that quote.

A migration budget that doesn't include redirect mapping is not a budget. It is a starting point.

SEO redirects. Botched or absent 301 redirects can cause 30 to 50 per cent organic traffic loss, with recovery taking up to a year. Shopify's native redirect manager caps at 10,000 URLs, so stores with larger inventories need a third-party solution from day one. Budget £3,000 to £15,000 for proper redirect mapping on a meaningful-sized store. For brands that depend on organic traffic, this is not optional.

App replacement costs. Most WooCommerce plugins and Magento extensions have no direct Shopify equivalent. You will need to audit what you currently use, find replacements, and pay for them monthly. A mature Shopify Plus store typically runs 15 to 20 apps. Budget for higher recurring costs from day one, and factor them into your platform cost comparison.

Post-launch support. Customer contact volumes spike in the two to four weeks after a migration cutover, as customers cannot find accounts, saved addresses disappear, and order history looks unfamiliar. Most project budgets allocate nothing for this period.

Discovery and scoping. Any reputable agency charges for a proper discovery phase before committing to a build price. Expect £5,000 to £15,000 for a thorough scoping engagement on a mid-market project. If an agency quotes a fixed price for a complex migration without one, that is a red flag.

The True Cost of Staying on Your Current Platform

If you are on Magento or an older bespoke platform, there is a real cost to deferring the migration. Brands on legacy platforms typically spend 60 to 70 per cent of their development budget on maintenance, leaving only 30 per cent for growth work. That is a poor ratio for any brand with genuine ambitions.

Magento hosting alone can run £40,000 to £150,000 per year when you account for infrastructure, patches, and security. Shopify Plus starts at around £1,800 per month and bundles hosting, security, and updates. The payback on a £100,000 migration often lands within 12 to 18 months from infrastructure savings alone, before any improvement in conversion rate or development velocity.

Once you are on Shopify, the bigger opportunity for most brands is not the migration itself. It is the conversion work that finally becomes feasible. When most of your dev budget is going to keeping the platform running, conversion rate optimisation and meaningful product work barely get a look in. Shopify changes that ratio.

How to Get a Meaningful Migration Quote

A few things to insist on before accepting any quote:

Ask for an itemised breakdown. A single line price tells you nothing. Get line items for data migration, theme build, integrations, QA, and redirect mapping separately.Ask what is not included. Redirect mapping, post-launch support, app replacements, and training should all appear somewhere, even if scoped separately.Check the agency has specific experience with your current platform. Migrating from Magento 2 is a different skill set to migrating from WooCommerce.Insist on a paid discovery phase before a fixed-price quote on anything above £20,000. An agency quoting complex builds without one is guessing.Ask for references from comparable migrations, not case studies from their website.

Our Shopify migration service starts with a proper scoping phase before any build work begins. We have worked with brands across the UK and internationally on migrations from WooCommerce, Magento, and other platforms, across 12 years and 100+ projects, with a senior team that does the work directly.

For more detail on specific platforms, the WooCommerce to Shopify migration guide and Magento to Shopify migration guide cover the practicalities in depth.

Migration is a significant investment and deserves proper due diligence on both sides. If you want an honest view of what your specific project might involve, get in touch. And if you are already on Shopify but growth has plateaued, our Conversion Growth Retainer may be the more relevant next step.