Matthew Collins, the 16th of April 2026
Teams on BigCommerce don't usually come to us because something is broken. They come because the business has changed. They want a different app ecosystem, Shopify Plus capabilities, or a simpler way for the team to merchandise every day.
The move itself is well trodden. Products, customers, orders and content all move from BigCommerce to Shopify. What changes is the shape of some of that data. Options, categories, customer groups and channel setup need rethinking, not copying. Plan those early and the migration is predictable. Leave them to import day and it isn't.
What moves across cleanly?
Most of the core data has a direct home on Shopify.
- Products, with titles, descriptions, images and SKUs.
- Variants, where they're true stock-keeping options such as size or colour.
- Customers and their addresses.
- Order history, so returning buyers and your team can still see past orders.
- Content pages and blog posts that earn traffic.
- The URLs that already rank, mapped to their new Shopify equivalents.
That's the base of every migration we run. The data moves into staging first, where we check it against the live store before anyone sees it.
What needs rethinking on the way in?
This is where most of the planning sits. None of it is a problem. It just needs a decision.
Options and modifiers. BigCommerce separates options that create variants from modifiers that don't, such as engraving text or a gift message. On Shopify, some become variants. Others become metafields, line item properties or an app. We decide case by case, based on stock, pricing and how customers choose.
Categories and collections. A deep category tree becomes Shopify collections plus a navigation menu. It's a good moment to ask which categories customers actually use, and which exist because someone added them once.
Custom fields. Product specifications, care details and technical data usually become metafields. That gives your team structured fields to edit, and your theme clean data to display.
Customer groups and pricing. If groups drive trade pricing, they map to Shopify B2B companies and catalogues. Since the 2nd of April 2026, B2B without Plus is an option for simpler wholesale setups. Heavier trade pricing still points to Plus.
If your catalogue has outgrown its structure, our guide to variants or separate listings on Shopify is worth reading before the data mapping starts.
Channels, apps and checkout
Multi-channel setups need a clear structure on Shopify. For each channel, marketplace or feed, we decide what stays native and what an integration should own.
Apps get the same treatment. List every app and script on the current store, and write down the job it does. Some jobs become native Shopify features. Some have a strong equivalent in the Shopify App Store. A few need a small custom build. The point is to arrive with a shorter list, not a longer one.
Checkout gets scoped early. Payment methods, shipping rules, discount logic and any trade checkout behaviour must be ready on day one. If you're weighing up Plus for checkout control, our note on whether Shopify Plus is worth it sets out the questions we ask first.
How to protect rankings and regular customers
A migration protects assets you've already paid for. Search rankings, customer accounts and order history are the three we guard most closely.
For search, category and product paths change between platforms. So we crawl the current store, inventory the URLs that earn traffic, and set one-to-one 301 redirects before launch. Blanket redirects to the homepage aren't the plan. After cutover, we watch Search Console and fix gaps quickly. Our guide to keeping your Google rankings when you move to Shopify goes deeper.
For customers, the priority is continuity. Regular buyers should be able to log in, see past orders and reorder on day one. We rehearse those journeys on staging, including the activation email returning customers receive.
The stages we follow
Every BigCommerce move runs through the same five stages.
- Audit. The catalogue, channels, apps, integrations and traffic URLs.
- Map. Data fields, redirects and cutover risks, written down before anything moves.
- Migrate. Catalogue and customers into staging, cleaned as they land.
- Rehearse. Redirects, accounts, checkout and top landing pages, tested.
- Launch and watch. Go live in an agreed trading window, then monitor the first days closely.
The length of each stage depends on the data, the channels and whether the storefront is being redesigned at the same time. Many teams take the move as the moment to rebuild the theme too, so clean data doesn't land in a weak design.
Where parallel helps
We plan and run BigCommerce to Shopify migrations as data and SEO projects that happen to launch a Shopify store. The people who scope the move do the mapping, the redirects and the cutover. See how we approach Shopify migrations across every platform.
Tell us what your BigCommerce store runs today and when you'd like to be live. Book a call and we'll give you a realistic window.