You've built something real on BigCommerce. Now Shopify keeps coming up in every conversation, and you're quietly wondering if a bigcommerce to shopify migration is going to torch three years of Google rankings in a weekend.
It doesn't have to. Most of your data survives the move just fine. The damage almost always comes from one unglamorous detail that merchants skip in a hurry.
🎯 Quick Summary
- Products, orders, and customer records migrate cleanly in most cases.
- URL structure changes by default, so 301 redirects are non-negotiable if you care about rankings.
- Reviews, custom checkout scripts, and app logic all need manual attention.
- Across the industry, migration cost ranges from around $500 for a small store to $25,000+ for a complex one.
- Done right, you can move platforms without losing a single meaningful ranking.
📦 What Transfers Cleanly (and What Quietly Breaks)
Here's the honest split when you migrate BigCommerce to Shopify.
The stuff that moves without drama:
- Products (titles, descriptions, prices, SKUs, variants, images)
- Customer records (names, emails, addresses)
- Order history
- Basic blog content (with caveats below)
The stuff that needs real attention:
301 redirects. BigCommerce and Shopify use different URL patterns. Category pages, blog posts, and brand pages almost always land at a different path on Shopify. Without redirect rules in place, every backlink pointing at your store and every page Google has indexed sends visitors to a 404. That is where rankings quietly bleed out.
This is the single most common migration mistake. It is also entirely preventable.
SEO metadata. Title tags and meta descriptions rarely carry over cleanly. Every important page needs a manual check after the move.
Product reviews. Reviews live in third-party apps on both platforms. Your BigCommerce reviews app will not talk to Shopify. Plan for a migration-compatible reviews app and a manual import step.
Custom checkout logic. BigCommerce lets you edit checkout templates directly. Shopify restricts that to Shopify Plus. If you have custom checkout logic, budget time to rebuild it.
Your app stack. Every BigCommerce app needs a Shopify equivalent. Most have one. Some are better on Shopify. A few do not exist yet. Audit your integrations before you commit.
Your theme. It does not migrate. You are starting fresh on design. That is actually good news. Shopify's theme ecosystem is excellent and significantly faster by default.
The SEO risk is real but fully manageable. Crawl your BigCommerce store before you touch anything, export every URL, and map each one to its future Shopify path. Do this before launch day, not after. The pre-migration checklist walks through exactly what to lock down before you flip the switch, including a section specifically on redirect mapping.
💰 BigCommerce to Shopify Migration Cost (and How to Keep Your Rankings)
This has a frustrating but honest answer: it depends on how messy your store is.
A small store with clean data and few custom integrations is a very different job from a 10,000-SKU catalog with custom checkout, multiple storefronts, and five years of blog content sitting on URLs that all need redirecting.
Here's what you will typically see across the industry:
| Store size | Typical scope | Industry range |
|---|---|---|
| Small (under 500 products) | Data migration, basic redirects, theme setup | $500 to $2,500 |
| Mid-size (500 to 5,000 products) | Data plus SEO audit, reviews migration, app stack rebuild | $2,500 to $8,000 |
| Large or complex (5,000+ products) | Full audit, custom logic, QA, post-launch monitoring | $8,000 to $25,000+ |
These are general market ranges gathered from across the industry, not a CartWorks price list. Every store is different, so we quote each project individually after a quick look.
How to migrate without losing rankings:
- Crawl your BigCommerce store first (Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URLs)
- Export every URL and map old paths to new Shopify paths
- Upload all redirect rules before your domain switches over
- Submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console on launch day
- Monitor for 404 errors in Search Console for the first four weeks
💡 Pro tip: Set your 301 redirects live at least 24 hours before you flip the DNS. That window gives you time to catch any misses before Google sees them.
How a Clean BigCommerce to Shopify Migration Flows
Audit
Crawl your store, export all URLs, and review your app stack and custom logic
Migrate
Move products, customers, orders, blog content, and SEO metadata to Shopify
Redirect
Map every old URL to its new path and upload rules before launch day
Launch
Flip DNS, submit your sitemap, monitor Search Console for 404s in the first month
🚀 Moving from BigCommerce? We've done this before.
CartWorks handles the full migration including data, redirects, SEO checks, and your app stack. Built to land you on Shopify with your rankings intact.
🤝 Where Getting Help Pays for Itself
DIY migration is fine for a small, clean store. The tooling is solid and the risk is low.
But mid-size and larger stores have a different calculus. A missed redirect map, a broken reviews import, or an app with no Shopify equivalent can quietly cost more in lost revenue than the migration would have cost to do right in the first place.
CartWorks handles Shopify migrations end to end, including data, redirects, SEO, and your full app stack. We give a fixed-scope quote after a quick look at your store. No guessing, no open-ended hourly billing.
If you're also planning what comes next after the move, our guide on why Shopify stores get no traffic is worth reading before you hit publish.
