Do You Need a Shopify Migration Agency, or Can You Do the Move Yourself?
DIY migration tooling costs $0-$1,000 and an agency runs $1,500 to $250,000+, so the honest answer isn't a price comparison — it's whether your catalog, your organic traffic, and your in-house time can absorb the risk of getting redirects wrong. Here's the break-even math nobody selling migration services actually shows you.
You need a Shopify migration agency once the value of what you could lose — search rankings, order history, working integrations — exceeds what your own team's time is worth spending on the move instead of running the store. Below that line, DIY tooling migrates you for $0 to $1,000. Above it, agencies charge $1,500 to $250,000+ depending on catalog size and source platform, and the fee buys risk reduction, not magic. The rest of this is the math for figuring out which side of that line your store is actually on, because nobody selling the service is going to show it to you.
What DIY migration actually costs
Shopify's own Store Importer moves a Wix, Squarespace, or BigCommerce catalog for free, and it will get products, customers, and orders across in an afternoon for a simple store. Third-party migration apps — LitExtension and Cart2Cart are the two most-used — run roughly $50 to $1,500 depending on entity count (products, orders, reviews) and how many of them you're moving. That's the number every "how much does Shopify migration cost" article leads with, and it's accurate as far as it goes.
What it leaves out is the labor the tooling doesn't do for you. A CSV or app import gets your data into Shopify; it does not rebuild your theme, does not map your old URLs to new ones, does not reconnect the review app, loyalty program, or subscription tool that was keyed to your old platform's product IDs, and does not test checkout before you point your domain at it. We wrote up exactly where the WooCommerce Store Importer path silently drops data — past three variant options, and on re-import it can reissue variant IDs and break anything keyed to the old ones — and that gap is the same shape regardless of which platform you're leaving. If your team is doing this work, count the hours honestly: theme rebuild, redirect mapping, app reconnection, and a full checkout test pass is rarely under 40-60 hours for a catalog with more than a few hundred SKUs, even before anything goes wrong.
What an agency actually charges, and why the range is so wide
Published agency and freelancer pricing clusters into three tiers: a freelancer or small shop runs $1,500 to $8,000, a full-service agency runs $8,000 to $50,000, and a Shopify Plus partner handling an enterprise replatform runs $25,000 to $250,000+. The spread inside each tier — and between them — comes down to four things, in order of how much they actually move the number:
- Data debt. Cleaning up inconsistent categories, duplicate SKUs, and years of manual product-page edits routinely takes six weeks and consumes around 30% of a project's total cost — and it's the part almost no merchant estimates correctly going in, because it's invisible until someone opens the export file.
- Source platform. A WooCommerce or BigCommerce migration is more mechanical than a Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud one, which usually needs a structural rebuild rather than a data transfer.
- Design scope. Launching on a customized starter theme runs $200-$350 in theme cost plus setup time; a fully custom design is a $20,000-$50,000+ line item on its own, separate from the migration itself.
- Integrations. Every ERP, CRM, or PIM connection the old store had is a piece of custom work on the new one — Shopify doesn't ship a generic adapter for whatever your warehouse system happens to be.
The takeaway that pricing pages tend to skip: a $2M/year store doesn't need a $250,000 Plus partner engagement, and a business running SAP integrations and a five-figure SKU count won't get a safe migration from a $1,500 freelancer project either. The tier that fits is a function of complexity, not revenue alone.
The number that actually decides it: what a bad migration costs in traffic
This is the part the DIY-vs-agency comparison usually skips entirely, and it's the real reason agencies exist. Shopify's own migration checklist is explicit that you need to create URL redirects so existing customers and search engines can find your new store — but it doesn't tell you what happens if you get that step wrong, because that risk lives outside Shopify's control.
A properly executed migration — every old URL 301-redirected to its Shopify equivalent, titles and metadata preserved, changes made in one batch rather than staggered — typically produces a temporary organic traffic dip of 10% or less, recovering within one to six months depending on catalog size. One reasonable way to price your own exposure: multiply the share of your revenue that comes from organic search, by the share of that traffic that's non-branded (i.e., not people already searching your store name), by 15-30% for a worst-case redirect failure rate. A store doing $500,000/year with 20% of revenue from organic search and 70% of that non-branded is looking at roughly $10,500-$21,000 in worst-case exposure if redirects are botched — concentrated in the highest-traffic product and collection pages, which are also the ones with the most existing backlinks to lose. That's the number an agency's fee is actually priced against, not the mechanical work of moving a CSV file.
A break-even framework, not a feeling
Run these four questions against your own store before deciding:
- Catalog size and complexity. Under a few hundred SKUs with simple variants (2-3 options), DIY tooling handles it cleanly. Past a few thousand SKUs, or once you're near Shopify's 2,048-variant combination ceiling on complex products, manual cleanup time starts to exceed what a freelancer would charge to do it once, correctly.
- Organic traffic value. Run the exposure math above. If the worst-case number is small relative to what a migration specialist costs, DIY is the rational choice even if it's imperfect — you can afford to be wrong. If it's large, you're paying an agency to reduce the odds of the expensive outcome, not to save your team's time.
- In-house engineering bandwidth. Redirect mapping, theme rebuilding, and integration reconnection are real engineering work with a real opportunity cost. If your developer's next-best use of those 40-60+ hours is shipping something that makes money, the "free" DIY migration isn't actually free.
- Timeline pressure. A lease ending, a platform shutting down, or a seasonal deadline compresses your margin for error. Rushed redirect work is where the "avoidable errors" that cause traffic loss actually happen — missed redirects, reset titles, too many changes made in one batch under time pressure.
What the DIY route quietly assumes you'll do yourself
If you're leaning DIY after the framework above, go in knowing the full task list the app or CSV import won't touch:
- Export every indexed URL from Google Search Console before you touch anything, and build a full old-URL-to-new-URL redirect map — not just for products, but collections, blog posts, and any custom landing pages with backlinks.
- Rebuild the theme rather than assuming the imported data will look right in a stock template; product data rarely maps cleanly to a new theme's structure without at least some manual review.
- Reconnect every app that was keyed to your old platform's IDs — reviews, subscriptions, loyalty points — before launch, and test each one against a real order.
- Stage the new store on a temporary domain and run full checkout, refund, and fulfillment tests before you repoint DNS, following the current migration checklist for what's changed on Shopify's side this year.
- Plan for a monitoring window after launch — watch Search Console for crawl errors and 404s in the first two weeks, when a missed redirect is still cheap to fix and becomes expensive to fix later.
Who should DIY, and who shouldn't
DIY the move if your catalog is simple, your organic traffic is a small fraction of revenue, and you or someone on your team has a free week to do the unglamorous redirect and testing work properly — not squeezed in around other priorities. Hire an agency or freelancer if any of these are true: your organic search traffic is a meaningful revenue line, your catalog has years of data debt you haven't had time to clean, you're migrating from a platform that needs a structural rebuild rather than a data transfer, or you genuinely don't have anyone in-house who can own the redirect map and pre-launch testing without it becoming a part-time job for a month.
Whichever route you take, the highest-value check happens after launch, not before it: migrated catalogs are exactly where we most often find duplicate product descriptions and missing alt text carried over unnoticed from the old platform, because nothing about a successful import flags content quality. Our free store scanner checks a live Shopify URL for this in about two minutes. If you'd rather have someone scope the actual migration — whether that's a full build or just a second pair of eyes on your redirect map before you cut over — that's what we do, and you can reach out here for an honest read on which tier your store actually needs.