Moving From BigCommerce to Shopify A Migration Guide

Moving your online store from BigCommerce to Shopify isn't just a technical task; it's a strategic leap. You're shifting your products, customers, and hard-earned SEO data to a new home. It’s a calculated decision many brands make to tap into better scalability, a massive app ecosystem, and a friendlier interface built for long-term growth.

Why Top Brands Are Moving From BigCommerce to Shopify

If you're weighing this decision, you're in good company. The impulse to switch platforms rarely comes down to a single missing feature. More often than not, it’s about hitting a growth ceiling. Ambitious brands often realize that the very things that made BigCommerce a great starting point are now creating friction as they try to scale.

This isn't just a hunch; the numbers tell a clear story. As of 2025, Shopify is the dominant force in e-commerce, with around 2.54 million live stores. BigCommerce, while a solid platform, serves a much smaller niche of about 41,221.

The real tell is the direction of traffic. In a recent 90-day window, BigCommerce lost stores to competitors at a rate of 1.8 to 1, with Shopify being the top destination. This trend underscores a clear demand for the flexibility and robust features modern brands need to compete. You can dive deeper into these numbers in Redstag Fulfillment's market analysis.

Before diving into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." The core differences between the platforms often clarify why a migration becomes a necessity for a growing business.

BigCommerce vs Shopify Key Differences for Migrating Stores

This table highlights a fundamental trade-off: BigCommerce gives you a lot out of the box, while Shopify gives you a powerful foundation to build anything you want. As businesses mature, the need for that flexibility often outweighs the convenience of built-in tools.

The Limits of a One-Size-Fits-All Platform

BigCommerce is a powerhouse all-in-one solution. This is brilliant when you're starting out. But as your business evolves and your needs get more specific, that all-inclusive structure can feel rigid.

Imagine a fashion brand wanting to add a slick "Shop the Look" feature. On BigCommerce, this might mean hiring a developer for a custom-coded solution. On Shopify, you'd head to the App Store and find a dozen polished, plug-and-play apps that get the job done in minutes—no technical overhead required.

The core reason for migrating often boils down to this: BigCommerce provides a defined set of tools, while Shopify provides a flexible foundation and a vast toolbox. As a brand's needs outgrow the defined set, the move becomes inevitable.

Overcoming Developer Dependency and Update Fatigue

A common headache for growing BigCommerce merchants is the heavy reliance on developers. Simple layout tweaks or adding new functionality can quickly become expensive, time-consuming projects. This slows down your marketing team and makes it tough to react to market trends.

Shopify flips this script. It’s built for the merchant. With its intuitive drag-and-drop editors and one-click app installs, marketing teams are empowered to make changes on the fly. This shift from "developer-dependent" to "merchant-empowered" is a huge driver for migration.

Then there's "update fatigue." Platform updates are crucial, but on BigCommerce, they can sometimes break custom code or cause compatibility issues. That means unexpected maintenance bills and, worse, downtime. Shopify's cloud-based architecture handles all updates seamlessly in the background. You can focus on growing your business, not just maintaining it.

Unlocking Growth with a Superior Ecosystem

Ultimately, migrating is a strategic move to future-proof your business. It’s about plugging into an ecosystem that actively supports growth, rather than just passively accommodating it.

Here are the key advantages that pull scaling brands into Shopify's orbit:

• Unmatched App Marketplace: With over 8,000 apps, the Shopify App Store has a ready-made solution for almost any challenge, from complex subscription models to AI-powered personalization.
• User-Centric Design: Shopify’s admin is famously simple. This cuts down on training time for new team members and makes day-to-day operations faster and more efficient.
• Scalability for High-Volume Sales: Shopify Plus is engineered to handle massive traffic spikes—think Black Friday or a viral TikTok campaign—without breaking a sweat. It's the reason brands like Allbirds and Gymshark trust it.
• Innovation and Community: Shopify is constantly rolling out new features like Shop Pay, integrated marketing tools, and cross-border commerce solutions, ensuring its merchants are always ahead of the curve.

The decision to move from BigCommerce to Shopify isn’t about escaping a bad platform. It's about graduating to one that better aligns with your brand’s ambitions. It’s an investment in flexibility, speed, and sustainable, long-term growth.

Building a Realistic Migration Timeline

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when moving from BigCommerce to Shopify is wildly underestimating how long it will take. This isn't a weekend project. A proper migration is a carefully orchestrated process, and rushing it is a surefire way to end up with broken links, lost data, and a terrible launch-day experience for your customers.

The honest truth? There's no one-size-fits-all timeline. Your schedule is dictated entirely by your store's complexity. A small boutique with 200 products is on a completely different planet than an enterprise brand juggling tens of thousands of SKUs, complex B2B rules, and a dozen critical app integrations.

To build a schedule that makes sense, you have to get real about the scale of your operation. It’s time to forget generic estimates and dig into the factors that actually define your project's scope.

Key Factors Shaping Your Timeline

Your migration timeline is a direct reflection of your store's complexity. Don't just count your products; you need to consider every piece of data, every third-party connection, and every custom feature that makes your store what it is. These are the real drivers of your project schedule.

• Data Volume and Complexity: This is so much more than a simple product count. We're talking about product variants, customer accounts, and years of historical order data. A store with 100,000 orders will take exponentially longer to migrate and verify than one with 1,000.
• App and Integration Audit: Do you rely on specific apps for subscriptions, loyalty programs, or advanced search? Each one needs a full audit. You have to budget time to find a Shopify equivalent, then install, configure, and rigorously test it.
• Design and Theme Customization: Are you picking a standard Shopify theme and just changing the colors, or are you building a totally custom storefront from scratch? Custom development is almost always the most time-consuming part of a migration, filled with design mockups, coding, and endless revisions.
• SEO and Redirect Mapping: Protecting your hard-earned search rankings is non-negotiable. The work of mapping every single old URL to its new Shopify home is meticulous and slow, especially if your site has thousands of indexed pages.

Timelines for Different Store Sizes

Understanding which bucket your store falls into helps set realistic expectations for everyone involved. Drawing from data across hundreds of enterprise migrations gives us a pretty solid framework for what to expect.

A standard store, usually with fewer than 10,000 SKUs, can generally expect a migration timeline of around 16–20 weeks. This covers data transfer, theme setup, and basic app configuration.

For more advanced stores—think those managing up to 50,000 SKUs and needing light B2B functionalities—you should budget for 20–30 weeks to handle that extra layer of complexity.

And for the big players? Enterprise-level businesses with over 50,000 SKUs, custom applications, and deeply integrated workflows are looking at an average timeline of 39 weeks. While that sounds like a lot, many of these brands see a measurable ROI within a year. They're escaping common BigCommerce pain points like technical debt and developer constraints for Shopify's superior capabilities. You can explore more about these enterprise migration insights to see how Shopify Plus powers multi-billion-dollar brands.

Setting a realistic timeline is less about hitting a deadline and more about ensuring a high-quality outcome. Investing adequate time upfront in planning, data cleaning, and testing is the single best way to prevent post-launch emergencies.

Common Delays to Anticipate

Even the best-laid plans hit snags. It's smart to build some buffer time into your schedule for the unexpected hurdles that inevitably pop up. Here are a few common culprits I see derail otherwise smooth timelines:

• "Dirty" Data: Realizing your product data is a mess of inconsistencies and missing info halfway through is a major setback. Clean it before you start.
• Scope Creep: Deciding to add new features or change the design mid-project will always, always extend your timeline.
• Third-Party Dependencies: You might get held up waiting on a developer or an app's support team, introducing delays that are completely out of your hands.

At the end of the day, a well-paced migration is a successful one. By understanding the true scope of your project and planning for every stage—from the initial data audit to post-launch testing—you turn a stressful ordeal into a strategic, controlled upgrade for your business.

Navigating Your Product and Customer Data Migration

With your timeline in place, it’s time to tackle the heart of the migration: moving your product catalog, customer lists, and order history from BigCommerce to Shopify. Let's be honest, this is where things can get messy. Getting this part right is absolutely critical—any slip-ups can mean lost sales, confused customers, and a chaotic launch day.

The very first decision you need to make is how you're going to get all that data from point A to point B. There’s no single right answer here. The best approach really boils down to your store's complexity, your budget, and how comfortable you are getting your hands dirty with the technical details.

Choosing Your Data Migration Method

Think of this decision like planning a cross-country move. You could rent a U-Haul and do it all yourself (manual CSV), hire a standard moving company (a third-party app), or bring in a full-service white-glove team to handle everything (an expert agency). Each has its time and place.

Choosing the right method for moving your data is critical. This table breaks down the pros and cons of the most common approaches to help you decide which path is best for your business.

Data Migration Method Comparison

Ultimately, the goal is to get your data moved safely and accurately. For most stores, a third-party app hits the sweet spot, but for bigger operations, the peace of mind an agency provides is often worth the investment.

For a closer look at what a professional migration involves, our full guide on how to migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify breaks down the agency-led process in much more detail.

Pro Tip: I can't stress this enough: always run a small test migration first, no matter which method you pick. Move a handful of products, a few customer accounts, and some recent orders to a Shopify trial store. This simple check will uncover 90% of potential headaches before you've committed to moving your entire business.

This image shows the basic flow of getting your product data from its old home on BigCommerce to its new one on Shopify.

It’s a good visual reminder of how the raw data is exported, transformed, and then slotted neatly into Shopify's framework.

Handling Common Data Migration Hurdles

Migrating data is rarely a clean copy-and-paste job. Every platform organizes information a little differently, which creates some predictable friction points. Knowing what to look for ahead of time is the key to a smoother process.

Messy Product Variant Data

One of the most common headaches we see is tangled product variant data. BigCommerce and Shopify just don't handle options like size, color, and material in the same way. If your BigCommerce data is a mess—for instance, using "L," "Large," and "large" for the exact same size—you’re going to end up with duplicate or broken variants in Shopify.

The Fix: Your best defense is a good offense. Before you even think about exporting, dedicate time to cleaning up your data inside BigCommerce. Standardize all your product options and apply the changes consistently. A few hours of pre-migration cleanup will save you days of manual corrections on the other side.

Customer Password Transfers

This is a big one: for security reasons, you cannot migrate customer passwords. This isn't a Shopify thing; it's a universal rule across e-commerce to protect sensitive user info. When your customers are moved to Shopify, their accounts will exist, but their passwords won't.

The Fix: Communication is everything here. Plan to send a post-launch email campaign letting your customers know about the new storefront. Explain that for their own security, they'll need to create a new password. Frame it as a security upgrade and give them a direct link to the password reset page to make it as painless as possible.

Mapping Product Categories to Collections

BigCommerce uses "categories" to group products. Shopify, on the other hand, uses a much more flexible system called "collections." They don't map one-to-one, which often trips people up. Shopify collections can be either manual (you pick the products) or automatic (products are added based on rules you set, like tags or price).

The Fix: See this as an opportunity to rethink and improve your site navigation. Before the migration, map out your ideal collection structure. You might just replicate your old categories, or you might create new, more intuitive groupings. A great trick is to use product tags during the migration to power automated collections later. For example, tagging all red shirts with "color_red" lets you instantly build a "Red Shirts" collection with a simple rule once you’re on Shopify.

Recreating Your Store Design and Functionality

With your data safely in its new home, it's time to focus on the soul of your store: its look, feel, and functionality. This isn't just about making an exact copy of your old BigCommerce site. Honestly, that's the last thing you should do. Treat this as a golden opportunity to upgrade your user experience and streamline how you run things behind the scenes.

Your store's design is so much more than just a pretty face. It's the entire foundation of your customer's journey. I've seen countless merchants get this wrong, picking a theme that looks good but ultimately tanks their conversion rates with slow load times and a clunky mobile experience. On Shopify, your theme is the engine.

Choosing the Right Shopify Theme

Don't rush this part. It’s a classic mistake to just pick the first theme that looks "nice" and run with it, only to run into headaches down the line. When you're moving from BigCommerce to Shopify, your theme choice has to be a strategic one, based on hard metrics and your specific business needs.

Here’s what I tell my clients to prioritize when they're browsing the Shopify Theme Store:

• Mobile-First Design: This is non-negotiable. With over 70% of e-commerce sales happening on mobile, a theme that isn't built for small screens is already obsolete. Don't just trust the desktop preview; pull up the demo on your phone and really click around.
• Performance and Speed: Fast-loading pages are everything for user experience and SEO. Shopify has made this easier by including performance scores right on their themes. Look for themes that are lightweight and snappy out of the box.
• Brand Alignment: Does the theme’s general layout and style actually feel like your brand? If you're a vibrant, maximalist brand, a sterile, minimalist theme is going to feel jarring, and vice versa.
• Built-in Features: Pay close attention to what's included. Some themes come with built-in mega menus, color swatches, or quick-view functionality. Choosing a theme that has these baked in can save you a ton of money and hassle with third-party apps.

Think of it like this: your theme is the house, and your apps are the furniture. It’s a lot easier to start with a house that has the right floor plan than to start knocking down walls after you've already moved in.

Auditing and Replacing Your BigCommerce Apps

Functionality is the other half of the puzzle. Your BigCommerce store was probably held together by a collection of apps for everything from email marketing to product reviews. Now is the time for a ruthless audit.

Not every app needs to make the trip over to Shopify. Some are likely redundant, some you barely use, and others have far better alternatives in the Shopify ecosystem. I recommend creating a simple spreadsheet to list your current apps and rank their importance.

Replicating your app stack is a chance to declutter. For each app, ask yourself: Is this absolutely essential for how we operate, or is it just a "nice-to-have"? A leaner app stack almost always means a faster site and lower monthly bills.

Once you have your "must-have" list, the hunt begins. The good news? With over 8,000 apps in the Shopify App Store, there's almost certainly a solution for whatever you need.

Finding Powerful Shopify App Equivalents

For every common function you had on BigCommerce, there's a top-tier Shopify app ready and waiting. This isn't just about finding a direct replacement; it's about finding a better, more deeply integrated solution that plays nicely within the Shopify environment.

Here are a few common app migrations I see all the time:

• Loyalty & Rewards: If you were using something like Smile.io on BigCommerce, you’re in luck—they have a fantastic Shopify app. Other heavy hitters include LoyaltyLion and Yotpo.
• Subscriptions: Moving a subscription business is a big deal and requires careful planning. If you used a native BigCommerce feature or an app like Rebillia, you'll want to look at industry-standard Shopify apps like Recharge or Skio.
• Product Reviews: Were you on Yotpo or Stamped.io? Both have seamless Shopify integrations. For a simpler, free solution, Shopify’s own Product Reviews app is surprisingly effective.
• Advanced Search: For stores with big catalogs, an app like Searchanise or Algolia can be a game-changer for product discovery, easily replacing any custom search you had on BigCommerce.

Take your time here. Read the reviews, compare the pricing models, and make use of free trials. Installing and configuring these new apps is a massive part of the migration. You need to ensure they work with your new theme and your imported data before you even think about launching. This careful reconstruction is what turns a simple platform switch into a true business upgrade.

How to Protect Your SEO During the Switch

What's the point of moving from BigCommerce to Shopify if your customers can't find you anymore? SEO is the lifeblood of your organic traffic, and dropping the ball on it during a platform switch is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. I’ve seen it happen.

The goal here isn't just to tread water and avoid a traffic drop. It's to make sure every last bit of authority and trust you've built with Google gets carefully transferred over to your new Shopify store. A single missed step can unleash a torrent of broken links, tanked rankings, and a terrible experience for both your customers and the search engines.

But don't worry. With a solid strategy, you can protect that hard-earned traffic and set yourself up for even better growth on Shopify.

Create a Comprehensive URL Map

First things first: before you touch a single thing, you need a complete blueprint of your current website's structure. This means creating a master list of every single URL on your BigCommerce store. And I mean every URL—not just your top product pages. We're talking every product, category, blog post, and dusty old content page that might be getting even a trickle of traffic.

The easiest way to do this is with a web crawler like Screaming Frog. Run a crawl, export the results, and you'll have a spreadsheet that will become your new best friend. This sheet is your single source of truth for the entire SEO migration. It should have two columns: "Old BigCommerce URL" and "New Shopify URL."

Yes, this step is tedious. But it's absolutely non-negotiable. Without a complete map, you're flying blind and you’re guaranteed to miss pages that matter.

Mastering the Art of 301 Redirects

Once your URL map is ready, it's time to implement 301 redirects. Think of a 301 redirect as a permanent change of address notice for search engines and browsers. It tells them, "Hey, this page has moved forever. Go to this new address instead." This is precisely how you pass your link equity and ranking power from an old URL to its new home.

The thing is, BigCommerce and Shopify have different default URL structures. It might look something like this:

• BigCommerce Product URL: yourstore.com/products/cool-gadget.html
• Shopify Product URL: yourstore.com/products/cool-gadget

See that subtle difference? Even a tiny change like removing .html from the end requires a redirect. You'll need to go through your URL map line by line, creating a 301 redirect for every old URL, pointing it directly to its new Shopify equivalent.

Implementing 301 redirects isn't just a "best practice"; it's the absolute core of a successful SEO migration. Skipping this is like moving to a new house and forgetting to tell the post office. You'll simply lose everything that was supposed to find you.

Migrating Your On-Page SEO Elements

Your URLs are just one piece of the puzzle. All that on-page SEO work you’ve put in—your meta titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags—has to come along for the ride. This data is what tells search engines what your pages are about and helps you stand out in the search results.

As you migrate your products and content, you have to ensure this metadata is transferred accurately. Most good migration apps can handle this, but you absolutely must spot-check your most important pages to confirm everything came over correctly. An effective migration process should preserve:

• Meta Titles: The clickable headline in search results.
• Meta Descriptions: The short summary that appears under the title.
• Image Alt Tags: Descriptive text that helps search engines understand your images.

Losing this metadata is like ripping the chapter titles and table of contents out of a book. It makes it much harder for search engines to understand and categorize your content, which is the last thing you want.

Your Post-Launch SEO Checklist

The work doesn't stop when you flip the switch. In fact, the first few days and weeks after launching your Shopify store are critical for monitoring your SEO health and catching any issues before they do lasting damage.

Here are your immediate post-launch actions:

1. Submit Your New Sitemap: As soon as you go live, grab your new sitemap.xml file in Shopify and submit it to Google Search Console. This is like sending Google a direct invitation to come and crawl your new site structure right away.
2. Hunt for 404 Errors: Use Google Search Console to keep a close eye on "Page Not Found" (404) errors. These are dead ends for users and search engines alike, and they need to be fixed immediately with proper redirects.
3. Monitor Your Rankings: Watch your keyword rankings and organic traffic in your analytics tools like a hawk. It's normal to see some slight fluctuations in the first week or two, but a major, sustained drop is a red flag that something is wrong with your redirects or overall setup.

Protecting your SEO while moving from BigCommerce to Shopify requires a proactive, detail-oriented approach. By mapping your URLs, implementing thorough redirects, and closely monitoring your site post-launch, you can ensure that your beautiful new store gets the visibility it truly deserves.

Your Post-Launch Checklist for a Smooth Transition

You did it. You pushed the button, and your new Shopify store is live. Pop the champagne—you've earned it!

But don't get too comfortable just yet. While the heaviest lifting is behind you, the first few days post-migration are absolutely crucial. This is your chance to catch and squash any tiny bugs before they turn into major headaches for you or your customers.

Think of this as the "soft opening" for your new digital home. A little proactive diligence now will save you from scrambling to fix broken checkouts, lost sales, and frustrated shoppers down the road.

Confirm Core Functionality

Before you shout about your new site from the rooftops, you need to become your own first customer. Seriously, this is the single best way to feel out the user experience and spot anything that feels… off.

• Place Test Orders: Walk through the entire checkout process yourself. Use a couple of different payment methods—a real credit card is a must to make sure the money actually flows where it's supposed to. Just remember to refund yourself immediately afterward.
• Verify App Integrations: Are your loyalty, reviews, and subscription apps playing nicely with the new theme? Head to a product page and an account page to ensure all the user-facing widgets and data are showing up correctly.
• Check Automated Emails: Make sure your order confirmations, shipping notifications, and new account emails are actually being sent. It's also a good idea to double-check that they look great and reflect your brand, not just a generic template.

Monitor Technical Health and SEO

Once you're confident the store works, it's time to peek under the hood at its technical and SEO health. All those 301 redirects you set up are now doing the heavy lifting to preserve your hard-won search rankings, but you need to make sure they're pulling their weight.

Jump into Google Search Console and keep an eye out for any spikes in 404 "not found" errors. Catching these early lets you plug any gaps with new redirects, protecting your organic traffic from taking a hit. For a much deeper dive, our complete Shopify migration checklist lays out all the post-launch SEO tasks you should be watching.

Your analytics are your early warning system. Keep a close eye on key metrics like conversion rate, bounce rate, and page load speed. A sudden negative change is a clear signal that something needs immediate investigation.

A huge part of a successful switch is making your existing customers feel at home on the new site. Brushing up on customer onboarding best practices can make a world of difference in keeping them engaged and preventing churn.

Get Inspired by Success Stories

If the post-launch to-do list feels a bit daunting, just remember why you made this move in the first place. You're in good company.

Brands like Allbirds, Gymshark, and Kylie Cosmetics all migrated to Shopify Plus to handle massive traffic spikes, get access to a better app ecosystem, and streamline their global operations. This wasn't just a platform change; it was a strategic move that unlocked significant growth and improved performance, future-proofing their businesses for years to come.

By methodically working through this checklist, you can close the loop on your migration and set your brand up for a new chapter of growth on a more powerful, flexible platform.

Got Questions About Migrating? We've Got Answers

Making the jump from BigCommerce to Shopify always brings up a few key questions. It's a big move, and you want to get it right. Let's walk through the most common concerns we hear from merchants just like you.

How Long Does a Migration Take?

Honestly, the timeline is all over the map because it completely depends on your store's size and complexity. For a smaller shop with a few hundred products and a fairly standard setup, you could be looking at a turnaround of two to four weeks.

But if you're running an enterprise-level operation with tens of thousands of SKUs, a ton of custom code, and a web of complex app integrations, it's wise to budget for four to six months. The biggest things that stretch the timeline are the sheer volume of data, how much custom design work is needed, and replicating all your third-party app functionality.

Will I Lose My SEO Rankings?

This is the big one, isn't it? And the answer is: not if you do it right. While a tiny, temporary dip in traffic can sometimes happen as the search engines catch up, a major, lasting drop in rankings is 100% preventable.

The absolute key is a rock-solid 301 redirect strategy. This means meticulously mapping every single old BigCommerce URL to its new equivalent on Shopify. No exceptions. We also migrate all your metadata—titles, descriptions, the works—and get a new sitemap submitted to Google the moment you go live. These steps are crucial for protecting the organic traffic you've worked so hard to build.

I can't stress this enough: a successful SEO migration isn’t magic, it's just a very precise, detail-oriented process. Skipping or rushing the URL redirects is the number one reason stores lose traffic, so consider this step completely non-negotiable.

Can I Keep My Domain Name?

Yes, absolutely! Not only can you keep your domain, but you must. It’s the core of your brand identity and holds all your SEO value.

The process itself is pretty simple. Once your new Shopify store is built, tested, and ready to go live, you'll just update your domain's DNS records. It’s like changing the address on a forwarding service—it tells the internet to send all your traffic to Shopify's servers instead of BigCommerce's. Your customers won't notice a thing, except for your fantastic new site.

Is Moving From BigCommerce to Shopify Expensive?

The cost really depends on how you tackle the project. There are a few different paths you can take, and they come with very different price tags.

• DIY Migration Apps: This is your most budget-friendly route. It’s perfect for smaller stores with straightforward data. It'll cost you more in time and effort, but it keeps the cash outlay low.
• Hiring a Freelance Developer: A great middle-of-the-road option. You get expert help for specific parts of the project without the overhead of a full agency. This is ideal for stores that have some custom requirements but aren't overwhelmingly complex.
• Full-Service Migration Agency: This is the most comprehensive solution and, naturally, the most expensive. An agency handles every last detail for you, which is often the best choice for large, complex stores where there's simply no room for error.

Don't forget to also budget for your new Shopify theme and any must-have premium apps you'll need to subscribe to.

Ready to make your move a success? The team of experts at ECORN specializes in seamless Shopify migrations, ensuring your data, design, and SEO are handled with precision. Start your migration journey with us today.