BigCommerce to Shopify Migration, Step by Step
A BigCommerce to Shopify migration means rebuilding your storefront on Shopify, transferring products, customers, orders and content, and then redirecting every old BigCommerce URL to its new Shopify address. That last step is where this particular move gets interesting: BigCommerce lets your products sit at the root of your domain, and Shopify does not. Every product, category and page URL changes — not some of them, all of them. Get the redirect map right and nobody notices. Get it wrong and you hand back years of rankings on launch day.
Here is what actually happens when you move from BigCommerce to Shopify, in the order it needs to happen.
Why brands leave BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a genuinely capable platform. It has native faceted search, solid B2B tooling, and it charges no transaction fee on top of your payment gateway. Brands rarely leave because it stopped working. They leave for three reasons that show up as the business grows:
- Plan thresholds tied to sales. BigCommerce plans carry annual online sales limits. Crossing one moves you up a tier whether or not you needed the extra features — so your platform bill steps up as a consequence of a good year, not a decision.
- The talent pool. BigCommerce themes run on Stencil with Handlebars templating. Shopify themes run on Liquid. There are simply more developers, agencies and off-the-shelf apps in the Liquid ecosystem, which shows up as faster turnaround and more options every time you want to change something.
- Ecosystem gravity. When a new tool ships an integration, it usually ships Shopify first. Over a few years that gap compounds into real operational friction.
None of those are emergencies. That is exactly why a BigCommerce move tends to be planned rather than panicked — which is the best possible condition for a migration. If you are still deciding, our Shopify vs BigCommerce comparison lays the two platforms side by side, and the broader case for switching is covered in the signs it’s time to replatform.
What a BigCommerce to Shopify migration actually moves
A migration is not an export and an import. Some things copy across cleanly, some need translating, and some have to be rebuilt from scratch. Knowing which is which before you start is most of the battle.
| Asset | What happens to it |
|---|---|
| Products, variants, images | Transfers, with option data remapped to Shopify’s variant model |
| Categories | Rebuilt as Shopify collections — manual or automated by rules |
| Customers | Records transfer; passwords cannot. Shopify sends account invites instead |
| Orders | Import as historical records for reporting and support, not as live fulfillable orders |
| Pages and blog posts | Transfer, but land under Shopify’s fixed URL prefixes |
| Theme and design | Rebuilt. Stencil templates have no Shopify equivalent |
| Apps and integrations | Re-selected and reconnected — the BigCommerce versions do not carry over |
| URLs and rankings | Preserved only if you build a complete redirect map |
The bottom two rows are where budgets get blown and traffic gets lost. Everything above them is largely mechanical.
The URL problem nobody warns you about
This is the part that makes a BigCommerce migration structurally different from most other platform moves.
By default, BigCommerce publishes products at the root of your domain — /blue-ceramic-mug/. Categories sit at the root too. It is a clean, flat structure, and if you have been on BigCommerce for years, that is the shape of every link Google has indexed, every link a blogger has ever sent you, and every URL in your paid campaigns.
Shopify does not offer that structure. Products are always served under /products/, collections under /collections/, static pages under /pages/, and blog articles under /blogs/<blog>/<article>. Those prefixes are part of how Shopify routes requests and you cannot remove them. Which means:
In a BigCommerce to Shopify migration, one hundred percent of your URLs change. There is no subset you can leave alone.
That is not a disaster — it is just a requirement. Every old URL needs a 301 redirect to its new equivalent, generated from a real crawl of the live BigCommerce store rather than from a guess about what the URL pattern was. Products whose handles get cleaned up during the move need their own mapping. So do the category pages, the blog, and every legacy URL that still earns a click.
We go deeper on building and testing that map in our guide to 301 redirects during a migration. If you do nothing else on this list, do this.
Where the two data models disagree
The second source of migration surprises is structural. BigCommerce and Shopify model a product differently, and the gaps only surface when someone tries to place an order.
- Modifiers versus variants. BigCommerce separates variants (which create SKUs) from modifiers (add-on choices, custom text fields, engraving, gift notes — which do not). Shopify only has variants. Anything you built as a modifier has to be rebuilt as either a variant, a line-item property, or an app-driven customisation. Personalised and made-to-order catalogues feel this hardest.
- Option dimensions. Shopify’s variant model is stricter about how many option dimensions a single product can carry. Deep option matrices that were fine on BigCommerce sometimes need restructuring — splitting into related products, or moving a dimension into a property.
- Customer groups and price lists. BigCommerce handles tiered and wholesale pricing natively. On Shopify, that is either B2B on Plus or a dedicated app. This is a commercial decision disguised as a technical one, and it belongs in the plan, not in launch week.
- Multi-storefront. BigCommerce’s channels map roughly to Shopify Markets or to separate stores. “Roughly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence — it needs a real design decision before anything moves.
How to migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify, step by step
1. Crawl and inventory before you touch anything
Crawl the live BigCommerce store and export the full URL list. Pull your top landing pages from Search Console. Inventory the catalogue, including which products use modifiers. List every app and integration and mark whether it is load-bearing or habit. This inventory is the source of truth for the entire project — and it is the one thing that becomes impossible to reconstruct once the old store is gone.
2. Rebuild the storefront natively
Your Stencil theme is not coming with you, and trying to clone it pixel-for-pixel is a waste of the opportunity. Rebuild on Shopify properly — a migration is the cheapest chance you will ever get to fix the navigation, the product page and the mobile experience at the same time. Navigation, product page, mobile experience — all of it is on the table exactly once.
3. Move the data in staged, verified passes
Products first, then customers, then orders — each pass reconciled against the source counts before the next begins. Remap modifiers deliberately rather than letting a tool guess. Reconnect ERP, email, reviews, subscriptions and shipping, and confirm each one writes and reads correctly on the new store before it carries real orders.
4. Build and test the redirect map
Generate redirects from the crawl in step one, not from a pattern. Then test them: every mapped URL should return a single 301 to a live 200 page, with no chains and no loops. Redirect chains leak both crawl budget and speed.
5. Launch, then watch closely
Point the domain, resubmit the sitemap, and monitor coverage and rankings daily for the first few weeks. Some fluctuation while Google reprocesses a fully changed URL set is normal. A sustained drop is not — and it almost always traces to a gap in the redirect map, which is fixable if you catch it early.
Working through it yourself? Our free Shopify migration checklist covers the same sequence as a tickable list.
How long it takes and what it costs
Scope drives the timeline, not the fact that it is a migration. A modest catalogue with standard products and a clean URL structure is a matter of weeks. What stretches a project is almost always one of the same three things: a catalogue built heavily on modifiers, a wholesale or customer-group pricing structure that needs an equivalent designing, or a large legacy URL set with years of accumulated redirects already in place.
Cost tracks the same variables. A migration is priced like a build, because structurally it is one — you are shipping a new storefront that happens to inherit a catalogue. For a ballpark against your actual scope, our project cost estimator gives you a range in about a minute, and if you want a read on your current store before committing, we run a free Shopify store audit.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my Google rankings moving from BigCommerce to Shopify?
Only if the redirect map is incomplete. Because every URL changes in this migration, the map is doing all the work — there is no partial safety net. Built from a full crawl and tested before launch, rankings transfer with the URLs. Expect some short-term movement while Google reprocesses the new structure.
Can I keep my BigCommerce URL structure on Shopify?
No. Shopify’s /products/, /collections/ and /pages/ prefixes are fixed and cannot be removed. You can keep the final handle in each URL — the slug that follows the prefix — which makes the redirect map cleaner and more predictable, but the prefixes themselves are not negotiable.
Do my customers have to create new accounts?
Customer records transfer, but passwords are stored as one-way hashes and cannot move between platforms. Shopify sends account activation invites so existing customers reclaim their account with their existing email and order history intact. Plan the wording and timing of that email — it is the one migration artefact your customers actually see.
What happens to my BigCommerce order history?
Historical orders import as records, which is what you need them for: reporting, returns, and customer service context. They do not import as live orders you can fulfil. Anything still open at cutover is worth closing out on BigCommerce before the switch rather than migrating mid-flight.
Plan the URLs first, everything else follows
The BigCommerce to Shopify migrations that go badly are the ones treated as a data transfer with a redirect step bolted on at the end. The ones that go well start from the URL map and work backwards — because on this particular route, the URLs are the only thing that genuinely cannot be rebuilt after launch.
If you want the move handled end to end, that is exactly what our BigCommerce to Shopify migration service does: crawl, rebuild, migrate, redirect, and watch the numbers afterwards. Bring us the crawl and we will tell you honestly whether the move is worth making.
Current store performance