Migrating Off Magento - The Checklist Nobody Gives You Before You Start

By Amitav Roy · Practice Manager | Commerce & Applications · Comet CX

Most Magento-to-Shopify migration guides cover the obvious: move your products, move your orders, pick a theme. The projects that go sideways are the ones that stopped there. Here's the checklist that actually matters.

Before you touch a single product

• Audit your extensions, not just your features. Every Magento extension you rely on needs a Shopify equivalent, a native feature, or a custom app. Some won't have a clean equivalent; know that before you commit to a timeline.
• Map your customisations. Custom Magento modules built years ago by a developer who's long gone are the single biggest source of migration surprises. Find them now, not during UAT.
• Decide what data actually needs to move. Full order history? Customer accounts and their saved payment methods? Product reviews? Each of these has a different migration complexity, and "just move everything" is rarely the right call.

The part everyone forgets: SEO

• URL structure changes between platforms. Without a full redirect map from old URLs to new, you lose search rankings you spent years building.
• Meta data and structured data don't migrate automatically; someone needs to own re-mapping this, not assume the migration tool handles it.

Integrations that were invisible until they broke

• ERP, PIM, or accounting system connections built for Magento's data model rarely map one-to-one onto Shopify's.
• Email marketing platform integrations (customer sync, abandoned cart triggers) need to be rebuilt and tested, not just reconnected.
• If you run B2B or wholesale pricing in Magento, this is one of the areas most likely to need custom development on Shopify Plus rather than a native feature.

Before cutover

• Freeze period plan. Decide how you'll handle orders placed during the data migration window; this is the detail that causes the most last-minute panic if it's not planned.
• Staff training, not just for the storefront but for whoever's running fulfillment and customer service in a new admin they've never seen.
• A rollback plan. Hope you don't need it. Have it anyway.

The takeaway

A Magento migration isn't hard because Shopify is complicated; it's hard because Magento stores accumulate years of customisation that nobody fully documented. The checklist above is really one piece of advice: find the invisible stuff before it finds you.