How to Migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify

BigCommerce and Shopify are the two heavyweights of hosted ecommerce, and a growing number of merchants are moving from the former to the latter. It's rarely a decision made lightly. When you migrate a store you're moving products, customers, order history, content, design, and years of accumulated SEO equity from one platform's data model to another that structures things differently. Done carelessly, you break URLs, tank rankings, and lose the checkout that pays your bills. Done well, you land on a faster, more extensible platform without your customers or Google noticing a thing.

This guide walks through exactly what changes when you move from BigCommerce to Shopify, what tends to break, and the step-by-step process for a clean cutover. It's written for store owners and marketers who want to understand the work, whether you do it in-house or hand it to a partner like our website migration team.

Why Businesses Move From BigCommerce to Shopify

Both platforms are capable, so the motivation usually comes down to ecosystem, cost structure, and workflow rather than raw features. The most common reasons merchants make this move include:

• App ecosystem depth. Shopify's App Store is significantly larger, so finding a well-supported app for subscriptions, reviews, loyalty, or advanced shipping is usually easier than on BigCommerce.
• Checkout and conversion. Shop Pay, accelerated one-tap checkout, and Shopify's tightly optimized conversion funnel are a genuine draw for merchants focused on cart-completion rates.
• Theme and design flexibility. Shopify's Online Store 2.0 architecture with JSON templates and sections-everywhere gives marketers drag-and-drop control over nearly every page without touching code.
• No transaction fees on Shopify Payments. BigCommerce doesn't charge transaction fees either, but its plans force an upgrade once you cross annual revenue thresholds; some merchants find Shopify's pricing more predictable as they scale.
• Talent availability. Because Shopify is so widely adopted, it's easier to hire developers, agencies, and freelancers who know Liquid than to find BigCommerce specialists.

None of these are universal truths. If you rely on BigCommerce's superior native B2B, faceted search, or its more generous product-option limits, migrating can actually cost you functionality. Audit honestly before committing.

What Changes and What Breaks

The two platforms model a store differently, and those differences are where migrations go wrong. Know them before you start.

• URL structures differ. BigCommerce products often live at flat URLs like /product-name/, while Shopify forces the /products/, /collections/, /pages/, and /blogs/ prefixes. This means virtually every URL on your site will change, which is the single biggest SEO risk in the move.
• Categories become collections. BigCommerce categories map to Shopify collections, but nested category trees don't translate one-to-one. You'll often rebuild taxonomy using automated and manual collections plus tags.
• Apps and integrations don't carry over. Every BigCommerce app has to be replaced with a Shopify equivalent and reconfigured. Custom BigCommerce Stencil/Blueprint theme code has no path forward and must be rebuilt in Liquid.
• Product options and variants. BigCommerce supports more variant options and rule-based modifiers than Shopify's historical 3-option/100-variant model (now expanded to 2,000 variants, but still structured differently). Complex configurable products may need an app or a rethink.
• Content and design. Your theme is not portable. Homepage, banners, blog posts, and static pages are recreated, not copied. Metafields and custom fields need remapping.
• Customer passwords cannot be exported. For security, hashed passwords don't transfer; customers will need to reset on first login, so plan a communication around it.

Step-by-Step: Export Your BigCommerce Data

Start by getting a clean, complete backup out of BigCommerce. In your control panel, use the built-in export tools and API to pull:

• Products via the CSV export (Products → Export), including SKUs, prices, inventory, images, categories, and custom fields.
• Customers and their order history through the customer export and Orders export.
• Content pages and blog posts, which BigCommerce doesn't export as cleanly, so you may need the API or manual copy for these.
• A full URL inventory. Crawl your live site with a tool like Screaming Frog and export every indexed URL. This crawl becomes the backbone of your redirect map, so don't skip it.

Verify the exports before moving on. Open the CSVs, spot-check special characters, HTML in descriptions, and multi-image products. BigCommerce exports can mangle rich text and image ordering, and it's far cheaper to catch that now than after import.

Step-by-Step: Set Up Shopify and Import

With your data in hand, build the destination. Spin up your Shopify store on a development or trial plan so you can work privately behind a password before launch.

• Choose and build your theme first. Pick an Online Store 2.0 theme or commission a custom one. Recreating your BigCommerce look-and-feel here is a design job, not a data job. If you want the rebuild to genuinely improve on the old store rather than just replicate it, this is where a focused Shopify design and development effort pays off.
• Import products. Use Shopify's native CSV importer for straightforward catalogs, or a migration app (Matrixify/Excelify is the workhorse for large or complex stores) to bring in products, customers, orders, and metafields with far more control.
• Rebuild collections. Recreate your category structure as Shopify collections, using automated conditions where logical and manual collections for curated groupings.
• Recreate content and blogs. Move pages into /pages/ and posts into a Shopify blog, preserving titles and body content so you keep topical relevance.
• Reconfigure apps, taxes, shipping, and payments. Install Shopify equivalents of your old apps, set up Shopify Payments or your gateway, and replicate tax and shipping zones exactly.

After importing, audit thoroughly: check inventory counts, price accuracy, image alt text, variant integrity, and that no products imported as drafts by accident. If you have custom operational needs, such as syncing with an ERP or CRM, plan that integration work now rather than after launch.

Preserve SEO With a Complete 301 Redirect Map

This is the step that protects the revenue and rankings you've spent years building, and it's where most botched migrations fail. Because Shopify changes your URL structure, every old BigCommerce URL that had traffic or links must 301-redirect to its new Shopify equivalent. A 301 (permanent redirect) passes the large majority of link equity to the new URL and tells Google the page has moved for good.

Build the map from the crawl you exported earlier: one column of old URLs, one column of matching new URLs. Redirect products to products, categories to their new collections, and content to content, mapping to the closest relevant page, never dumping everything on the homepage. Shopify has a built-in URL redirect tool (Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects) and supports bulk redirect uploads by CSV, which is essential for large catalogs. Our guide to building a 301 redirect map covers the mechanics in detail, and the broader website migration SEO checklist walks through the full pre- and post-launch sequence.

Beyond redirects, preserve as much on-page SEO as you can: carry over title tags and meta descriptions, keep H1s and body copy intact, retain image alt text, and rebuild your structured data. Recreate your XML sitemap (Shopify generates one automatically at /sitemap.xml) and keep your robots.txt sane. Match canonical tags to the new URLs.

DNS, Launch, and Post-Launch Testing

Launch is a sequence, not a switch. Work through it deliberately:

• Remove the storefront password only when the store is genuinely ready.
• Point your domain to Shopify by updating the A record and CNAME (or adding the domain in Shopify admin and following its DNS instructions). DNS propagation can take up to 48 hours, so time the cutover for a low-traffic window.
• Activate all redirects the moment the domain flips, and immediately crawl the live site to confirm old URLs return 301s and land on the right pages, not 404s or redirect chains.
• Place a full test order end-to-end to confirm payments, taxes, shipping rates, and order confirmation emails all fire correctly.
• Reconnect analytics and Search Console. Verify the property, resubmit your new sitemap, and use the Change of Address tool if the domain changed. Reinstall GA4 and any pixels.

For the first few weeks, monitor Search Console coverage reports, crawl errors, and rankings closely. A temporary dip is normal as Google recrawls and reindexes; a sustained drop means a redirect or indexing problem you need to hunt down fast. If you'd rather not manage this alone, our broader web development team handles migrations end to end.

Realistic Timeline and Cost

A BigCommerce-to-Shopify migration is a project, not an afternoon. For a small catalog with a template theme and clean data, expect roughly two to four weeks. A mid-size store with a custom design, thousands of SKUs, complex variants, and multiple app integrations more realistically runs six to twelve weeks, with enterprise moves longer still.

Costs vary just as widely. A DIY migration on a small store might cost only your Shopify subscription plus a migration app fee. A professionally handled migration with custom theme development, data cleanup, a full redirect map, and SEO preservation generally runs from a few thousand dollars into five figures depending on complexity. At $80/hour, most of the budget goes to design rebuild, data reconciliation, and redirect mapping, not the raw import itself. The cheapest possible migration is almost always the one that quietly loses rankings, so weigh the cost of doing it right against the cost of lost organic revenue.