A BigCommerce to Shopify migration isn’t a data export and import. It touches your product catalog, your custom templates, your app stack, and every search ranking you’ve built up over the years. Brands that treat it as a simple platform swap usually rebuild half the store anyway, just after launch instead of before it.
This guide covers what actually happens when you move from BigCommerce to Shopify: what transfers cleanly, what has to be rebuilt from scratch, how to protect your rankings through the move, how long the whole thing takes, and how to decide whether a DIY tool or an agency-led migration is the right call for your store.
BigCommerce isn’t a bad platform. Plenty of stores run on it well. But growing brands keep hitting the same two friction points, and pricing is usually the first.
BigCommerce assigns your plan by trailing twelve-month GMV, and when you cross a threshold the upgrade happens automatically. That model tightened significantly on 1 June 2026. The plans were renamed, with Standard becoming Core, Plus becoming Growth, Pro becoming Scale, and Enterprise becoming Performance. More importantly, the thresholds that trigger an upgrade were cut: the old $50K ceiling on Standard is now $30K on Core, and the $180K ceiling on Plus is now $100K on Growth.¹ The same revenue that kept a store on a mid-tier plan last year now places it a tier higher.
How the number gets calculated matters as much as the number itself. GMV counts as gross order value minus 10%, and taxes and delivery charges count toward it, as do orders from marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.¹ A store selling $28K in product can cross the $30K Core threshold on shipping and tax alone.
The second change closed BigCommerce’s longest-running argument against Shopify. The platform never charged its own transaction fee, which was the headline comparison for years. Since June it charges an Open Payment Provider Fee on GMV from orders that don’t settle through an Embedded provider: 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale, and 0% on Performance.¹ For a brand that specifically chose BigCommerce to avoid Shopify’s gateway penalty, the math the decision rested on no longer holds.
The other driver is the ecosystem. Shopify’s app marketplace and theme ecosystem are larger, which means more ready-made answers for subscriptions, loyalty, and advanced merchandising. For a brand that wants to move fast without commissioning custom development for every feature, that gap is real. Hiring is easier too, because there are simply more developers, agencies, and freelancers who specialise in Shopify.
None of this makes BigCommerce the wrong platform for every brand. But if either driver sounds familiar, that’s usually the point where a migration starts to earn its cost.
¹ BigCommerce, 2026 plan and pricing updates. Verify current figures before relying on them, since the structure changed twice in eighteen months.
Some parts of a BigCommerce store move over with almost no friction. Others have to be rebuilt. Knowing which is which before you start removes most of the mid-project surprises.
Core commerce data is the part that travels well. Product titles, descriptions, images, pricing, variants, and inventory levels all have clean equivalents on Shopify. Collections map across in a similar way, although the logic behind smart collections often needs rebuilding in Shopify’s own rule structure rather than copying directly.
Customer records, order history, and basic account data transfer too. How much order history you bring over deserves a deliberate decision rather than a default of everything. Metafields and custom product attributes are where automation runs out. If your BigCommerce store uses custom fields for ingredient lists, sizing charts, or care instructions, each one has to be mapped individually to Shopify’s metafield structure. This is the step teams underestimate most often.
Your BigCommerce theme does not move to Shopify. Stencil templates and Shopify’s Liquid templating language are built on different principles, and no automated conversion exists between them. Custom templates, custom checkout scripts, and any bespoke frontend logic have to be rebuilt for Shopify from the ground up.
This is usually where the real scope of the project shows itself. A store on a largely default theme has a short path. A store carrying years of layered custom scripting is closer to a full rebuild than a migration, and pricing it as a migration is how projects go over budget.
BigCommerce apps don’t carry over either. Every integration the store depends on, whether reviews, email, loyalty, subscriptions, or shipping, needs re-evaluating against what exists on Shopify. Most have a comparable option, sometimes from the same vendor. Niche and industry-specific integrations are where exact matches run out, and those either need a replacement or custom functionality built.
The practical move is to audit the app stack before migration starts rather than after. Knowing what needs a direct replacement, what needs custom development, and what can be dropped entirely changes how the whole project gets scoped and priced.
This is the part of a BigCommerce to Shopify migration that does the most damage when it’s handled badly, and the part that gets the least attention while the project is still exciting.
URL structures differ between the two platforms. BigCommerce URLs tend to follow a flatter, more customisable pattern, while Shopify defaults to /products/, /collections/, and /pages/. Migrate content without addressing that difference and every old URL search engines have indexed starts returning a 404.
A proper redirect strategy means mapping every important URL on the old store to its new equivalent, not the homepage and a handful of top categories. That covers product pages, collection pages, blog posts, and any custom landing page that has earned backlinks or organic traffic. Every one of those needs a 301 in place before the new store goes live, rather than assembled in a hurry after rankings start sliding. We walked through the same problem from the WooCommerce side in our guide to migrating without losing SEO, and the principle is identical regardless of which platform you’re leaving.
Beyond redirects, review the sitemap structure on the new store, check canonical tags across templates, and resubmit the sitemap through Google Search Console once the migration completes. Watch crawl errors daily for the first two weeks, because a redirect that points at the wrong collection is invisible until someone looks.
Rankings fluctuate around any platform migration. The goal isn’t avoiding that entirely. It’s making sure the dip is temporary, and that search engines get a clear path to your new URLs instead of a wall of broken links.
Third-party migration apps exist specifically to move product, customer, and order data from BigCommerce to Shopify with minimal manual work. For a store with a simple catalog, a default or lightly customised theme, and a small app stack, one of these can genuinely be enough. It won’t remove the manual cleanup afterwards, but it handles the bulk transfer without a development team.
DIY tools fall short exactly where the earlier sections of this guide pointed: custom templates, custom checkout logic, complex metafield structures, and integrations with no clean one-to-one match. Migration tools move data. They don’t rebuild a custom theme, they don’t restructure your SEO, and they don’t make judgement calls about which app to replace with what.
That’s the point where an agency-led migration starts to make more sense than a self-serve tool. An agency brings the pieces a data-transfer app can’t: custom theme development, a deliberate redirect and SEO strategy, app stack decisions based on how the business actually operates, and QA across the full store before launch rather than a spot check on whether products imported.
If you’re already on Shopify Plus, or planning a BigCommerce to Shopify Plus migration as part of moving up a tier, the stakes rise further. Plus-level capabilities like Checkout Extensibility, Shopify Functions, and native B2B tools aren’t things a generic migration tool touches at all. Those moves tend to need agency involvement by default, purely because of what gets configured on top of the data transfer.
Migrations run longer than most founders expect, mostly because the data transfer is the short part. In practice the project moves through four phases.
| Phase | What Happens | Typical Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Audit and mapping | Cataloguing what exists: URL inventory, metafields, app stack, custom template logic, and what actually earns traffic | 2–3 weeks |
| Scoping | Deciding what gets rebuilt, what carries over, which apps get replaced, and whether a redesign runs alongside | 2–3 weeks |
| Build and data migration | Theme development in Liquid, data transfer and cleanup, metafield mapping, app reconfiguration | 6–12 weeks |
| QA, redirects and launch | Full-store testing, the 301 map going live with the store, then crawl and ranking monitoring | 2–4 weeks |
Phases overlap, so a typical migration runs 12 to 20 weeks end to end rather than the sum of those ranges. A small catalog on a default theme handled with a DIY tool can finish in under six. Large catalogs, heavy custom scripting, and a redesign bundled in push past 20.
Before you migrate, ask whether your current design deserves to be rebuilt exactly as it is on a new platform.
Most brands that reach the point of migrating have also outgrown parts of their original design. Product pages that don’t reflect how the catalog has grown. A checkout that was never optimised for mobile. A homepage built for a smaller brand than the one it represents today. Migrating that design across pixel for pixel just moves the same limitations onto new infrastructure.
Combining the migration with a redesign avoids paying for frontend work twice. Instead of rebuilding your current theme in Liquid and then redesigning it a year later, the migration becomes the moment to build the store you actually want, informed by everything that wasn’t working on BigCommerce. It also means the redirect work accounts for one set of URL changes instead of two separate rounds of disruption. Whether that means a light rebuild or full custom Shopify development depends on how far the current design has drifted from where the brand is now.
This doesn’t mean every migration needs a custom build. But if a redesign was already somewhere on the roadmap, migration is the cheaper moment to do it, not after the new store is live and stable.
We’ll walk through your current BigCommerce setup, flag what migrates cleanly and what won’t, and give you an honest scope for the move, including whether a redesign should happen alongside it.
Most run 12 to 20 weeks end to end, across four phases: audit and mapping, scoping, build and data migration, then QA and launch. A small catalog on a default theme can finish in under six weeks with a DIY tool. Heavy custom scripting, a large catalog, or a redesign bundled in push the project past 20.
Not if the redirect mapping is completed before launch. Some ranking fluctuation is normal around any platform migration, but a full 301 strategy covering products, collections, blog posts, and landing pages, together with an updated sitemap, keeps the disruption temporary rather than permanent.
Yes, for stores with a standard catalog, a default or lightly customised theme, and a manageable app stack. Once custom templates, complex metafields, or non-standard integrations are involved, a DIY tool can’t cover the full scope on its own.
As of 1 June 2026 the plans were renamed to Core, Growth, Scale, and Performance, the GMV thresholds that force an automatic upgrade were cut, and a new Open Payment Provider Fee applies to orders that don’t settle through an Embedded provider. The practical effect is that the same revenue now sits a tier higher, and the platform’s long-standing no-transaction-fee position no longer applies to every order.
Beyond the standard data migration, a Plus move involves configuring capabilities that don’t exist on standard Shopify: Checkout Extensibility, Shopify Functions, and native B2B tools. These get planned and built deliberately rather than switched on, which is why Plus migrations rarely fit a self-serve tool.
A full-service migration covers data migration and cleanup, custom theme development in Liquid, app stack evaluation and replacement, redirect and SEO strategy, and QA testing across the store before launch. Exact scope depends on how heavily customised the original BigCommerce store is.
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