BigCommerce to Shopify Migration: Costs, SEO & Redirects

Why Leave BigCommerce — and When to Stay

Both BigCommerce and Shopify are hosted platforms — you own your store on either, so this isn't a rescue mission; it's a fit decision. Coming from a different platform? Our platform-by-platform migration guide covers WooCommerce, Wix, Magento and more.

For most established BigCommerce merchants the trigger is the one Shopify names in its own migration guidance — growth the current setup can't absorb without custom work, and a narrower app-and-theme ecosystem than the business now needs. It's the point where the platform stops keeping up with the store, which is exactly what pushed the team at Crossrope to replatform mid-growth:

The Auto-Upgrade Squeeze

BigCommerce moves you up a plan automatically as your sales grow. Once your trailing-twelve-month sales pass a threshold, the platform notifies you and upgrades the plan — $30K in sales moves you from Core to Growth, and $100K moves you from Growth to Scale. That predictability cuts both ways: the fee steps up on schedule whether or not the extra features matter to you.

BigCommerce plan prices and thresholds observed July 2026 — competitor pricing changes; confirm on bigcommerce.com/pricing.

The Honest Trade-Offs

A migration guide that only sells the destination isn't worth your time, so here are the two places Shopify is genuinely worse for a BigCommerce merchant. First, payment fees. Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee — 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus — whenever you take payments through a gateway other than Shopify Payments. BigCommerce famously charges no transaction fees on any gateway, so if you're committed to an outside processor, model that surcharge before you switch. Our guide to Shopify payment gateways and the third-party fee shows exactly how it adds up.

Second, Shopify's catalog and URL model is more rigid. You get three product options where BigCommerce gives you unlimited modifiers, and fixed URL paths where BigCommerce lets you shape the structure. For the full, unvarnished list of where Shopify constrains you, read our honest take on the disadvantages of Shopify — then weigh it against what pushed you to look in the first place.

What Actually Changes: The Model Shift

The instinct when scoping a migration is to check features one-to-one. The more useful frame is to look at where the two platforms model the same thing differently, because that's where data doesn't map cleanly and where you'll spend rebuild time.

Catalog: Variants, Options & Modifiers

This is the biggest structural difference. Shopify lets a product carry up to 2,048 variants but only three options, and it has no direct equivalent to BigCommerce modifiers (the add-ons and custom inputs that don't create a distinct SKU). Products that lean on many modifiers or a fourth option type need a third-party app or theme code using line item properties.

Shopify limits: Shopify Help Center. BigCommerce limits: BigCommerce developer docs. Verified July 2026.

Categories change shape too. BigCommerce's category tree becomes Shopify collections — either manual (you pick the products) or smart (rule-based). Anything driven by BigCommerce's faceted logic is rebuilt on Shopify's own Search & Discovery app, which is free and lets shoppers filter by multiple attributes. Products also gain a single canonical URL regardless of how many collections they sit in, which quietly removes the duplicate-category-URL problem you may have managed on BigCommerce.

B2B Price Lists

If you run wholesale, note where B2B lives. Shopify B2B is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, but the heavy-duty pieces — unlimited catalogs and assigning price lists directly to companies — are Plus-only. If wholesale is a core part of your BigCommerce store, map those features carefully; our deep dive on B2B on Shopify Plus covers what native B2B does and doesn't replace.

What Your Data Carries Over

BigCommerce exports your core data as CSV or XML, and migration tools carry most of it into Shopify. The matrix below is the honest picture of what lands cleanly, what needs a workaround, and what doesn't move at all.

Compiled from Shopify Help Center (migrating to Shopify, importing customers) and the Shopify enterprise migration guide, July 2026.

Customer Passwords Never Transfer

This one surprises people, so plan for it. Passwords are encrypted outside Shopify and can't be migrated by CSV — and Shopify confirms the same specifically for BigCommerce. Your fix is built in: after the customer import, trigger Shopify's account-invite email on launch day so shoppers set a new password on first login. Order history stays attached to each record, so once they're back in, nothing feels lost. Expect a small login dip in week one and prepare a short support note explaining the reset.

Reviews & Review Schema

Shopify retired its own product-reviews app, so reviews now live in third-party apps — and so does the star-rating schema that shows up in Google. Both Judge.me and Yotpo import your existing reviews from an export file at migration time. One honest caveat: whether star ratings reappear as rich snippets isn't automatic — the rich-snippet markup is configured inside the review app, so turn it on and re-check your product pages after the import rather than assuming it carried over.

Protecting Your SEO: URLs & Redirects

BigCommerce lets you shape product URLs several ways; Shopify uses fixed paths — /products/<handle> for products and /collections/<handle> for collections. That means almost none of your old URLs survive unchanged, and each one needs a redirect. Here's how the common patterns map.

Shopify uses fixed /products/<handle> and /collections/<handle> paths. Patterns shown are generic examples of both platforms' structures.

Building the 301 Redirect Map

Shopify lets you create up to 100,000 URL redirects on standard plans (20 million on Plus), and you can import them in bulk by CSV. A few paths are reserved and can't be redirect targets, so keep them out of your map.

One trap most guides miss: your product images. On BigCommerce, images are served from a BigCommerce-owned CDN domain — and once you migrate, you can't redirect those old image URLs because you don't own that domain.

The practical fallback is to re-host every image on Shopify's CDN during the migration (the tools do this) and to make sure your new product pages reference the new image URLs, so search engines index the Shopify-hosted versions. On the rankings themselves, be realistic: expect short-term fluctuation while Google re-crawls the new URLs, and trust the complete redirect map — not luck — to hold your equity through that window.

Migration Methods: Manual, Tool or Partner

Shopify's own guidance frames the choice cleanly: you can move manually, use a migration tool such as Matrixify, or bring in a specialist partner. Here's what each path is actually for.

For the tool route, three names come up repeatedly. Prices below are observed and drift — always confirm on each tool's own page — but they give you the shape of the decision.

Prices observed July 2026 from each vendor; the Cart2Cart figure is a third-party estimate, not an official rate. Confirm current pricing and entity coverage before you buy.

Whichever tool you pick, run its free demo or test migration first and inspect the results on sample products before committing to the full run. The video below walks through an automated BigCommerce-to-Shopify migration end to end, so you can see the flow before you start.

What It Costs and How Long

There's no single price for a BigCommerce-to-Shopify move because most of the cost is labor. The three methods above map straight onto three cost paths: doing it manually or with a tool is the DIY route, while a specialist partner means either a freelancer or an agency depending on your catalog's size. Here's what each path realistically costs and how long it runs, using published Shopify-developer and Shopify-agency rate benchmarks.

Freelancer rates: Upwork Shopify-developer benchmarks. Agency rates and project minimums: Clutch Shopify directory. Migration-tool fees from vendor pages. All observed 2026.

If you're weighing the full build rather than just the data move — theme, apps, custom work and year-one running costs — our breakdown of Shopify store development cost maps every component with worked scenarios. That's the place to size a real budget, since this guide deliberately keeps its numbers migration-specific.

And if the answer is “hire it out,” the harder skill is scoping the job and vetting whoever takes it. Our guide to hiring a Shopify developer covers the brief, the red flags and how to compare quotes so you don't overpay for a straightforward migration.

DIY or Hire? Find Your Route

You've seen the data matrix, the methods and the costs. Still weighing how to run it? Answer five quick questions about your catalog, budget and timeline. This quiz doesn't judge you — it routes you to the execution path that fits your store, whether that's doing it yourself or handing it over.

Your Migration Playbook

These steps apply to everyone: if you're going DIY you'll run them yourself, and if you've hired help you'll supervise and sign off on each one. Tick them off as you go — the checklist saves your progress on this device.

The Bottom Line

BigCommerce and Shopify are both capable hosted platforms; this is a fit decision, not a rescue. Merchants who move for a real reason — outgrowing the plan ladder, needing a wider app-and-theme ecosystem, or wanting Shopify's checkout and conversion tooling — and who respect the two revenue-critical steps (the 301 redirect map and the customer-password reset) come out ahead. Merchants who move on a whim usually don't.

Frequently Asked Questions