Most NZ businesses still running Magento made a sound decision when they chose it. In the early 2010s it was the serious option for large catalogues, layered pricing rules and businesses that wanted control over every part of their ecommerce infrastructure. What has changed since then is the cost of keeping that control, and how little of it now shows up as commercial advantage.
A Magento to Shopify migration is a business decision before it is a technical one. The question an owner or finance director needs answered is whether the money and attention going into the current platform would earn more on a different one, and what exactly has to move to get there. Both halves of that question have clear answers once you look at them properly.
Why businesses leave Magento
Magento needs ongoing developer investment to stay running, secure and current. Security patches arrive on Adobe's schedule rather than yours, and applying them is developer time. Extensions break when the core is upgraded. Hosting, caching and search infrastructure all need someone who understands them. For many NZ businesses that built on Magento and have maintained it since, the total annual cost of that upkeep has exceeded what a Shopify migration would have cost several times over.
Adobe acquired Magento in 2018. The platform has continued to develop, but Adobe Commerce, as the licensed version is now branded, is an enterprise product with enterprise pricing. The open-source version, Magento Open Source, requires self-hosting, security management and a developer for anything beyond simple content changes. Magento 1 reached end of life in June 2020, so any store still on it has been running without official security patches for years. For an NZ ecommerce business without its own technical team, either version is a persistent operational burden.
The developer pool matters too. New Zealand has a limited number of people who can confidently maintain a heavily customised Magento 2 build, and when your store depends on one or two of them, their availability sets the pace of your trading calendar. A promotion that needs a code change waits for a developer. A checkout bug on a Friday afternoon waits until Monday.
The business case, line by line
A useful business case compares the full cost of staying with the full cost of moving, over three years rather than one. Most businesses only count the migration quote, which makes moving look expensive and staying look free.
What staying on Magento costs
- Hosting and infrastructure. Servers, a CDN, search (Elasticsearch or OpenSearch), caching and the monitoring that keeps them alive.
- Patching and upgrades. Each security release and each minor version upgrade is a small project, and the extensions installed on the store have to be tested against it.
- Developer dependency. Product, marketing and promotional changes that need a developer carry an hourly cost and a delay, which together set how quickly the business can respond to a competitor.
- Licensing. On Adobe Commerce, the annual licence is a material line on its own.
- Opportunity cost. Campaigns that never ran because the store couldn't support them cleanly, and staff hours spent working around an admin that was never built for daily merchandising.
What moving to Shopify costs
The one-off cost covers discovery, data migration, design and build, integration management, redirect mapping and launch. The ongoing cost is a Shopify subscription, the apps the store needs and support from a studio for changes your team doesn't make themselves. Shopify handles hosting, security, PCI compliance and platform updates as part of the subscription, which removes the patching and infrastructure lines from the comparison entirely.
Run those numbers against your own invoices from the last two years. When the Magento total includes the developer hours that went into keeping the store upright, the comparison tends to settle itself. Include a realistic app budget on the Shopify side, because apps are where ongoing Shopify costs grow if nobody reviews them.
What moves and where it lands
Magento holds more of your business than most owners realise. Every item below is its own workstream with its own decisions, and treating any of them as a simple export is where migrations come unstuck.
The product catalogue
Product data is the most involved part. Magento's model of configurable products, attribute sets and custom attributes doesn't map one to one onto Shopify's products, variants and metafields. Every attribute has to be assigned a home: a variant option, a metafield, a tag or a product type. Catalogues that have built up inconsistencies over years (attribute values spelt three different ways, images in mixed formats, descriptions pasted from supplier spreadsheets) need cleaning before they're imported, and that cleaning is where the real effort sits.
Customers and order history
Shopify can import customer records and historic orders from Magento, but field structures have to be matched and duplicates resolved. Historic orders are worth bringing across because they drive repeat-purchase marketing, customer service lookups and lifetime value reporting. Customer passwords can't be migrated, because Magento stores them in a hashed form Shopify can't read. Customers with accounts will need to set a new password, so the account activation email and its timing should be planned as part of the launch rather than left to the default.
Pricing, discounts and B2B
Tiered pricing, customer group pricing, wholesale accounts and stacked promotional rules all need to be rebuilt in Shopify's native discount and B2B features, or through a well-chosen app where native features don't cover the requirement. This is often where a migration surfaces rules nobody remembers creating. Our article on setting up Shopify for B2B and wholesale covers the wholesale side.
Integrations
ERP, accounting, 3PL, freight, email and reviews platforms all connect to Magento today and will need to connect to Shopify. In most cases you already know which systems you're keeping. The migration work is mapping exactly how each one will exchange data with Shopify: which system owns stock levels, which owns pricing, what triggers an order to flow to the warehouse. We scope and manage those integrations, with the technical connection built by the relevant integration partner or platform vendor. Complex Shopify integrations goes into how ERP and accounting connections are structured.
URLs and search rankings
Every indexed Magento URL needs a 301 redirect to its Shopify equivalent, because Shopify's URL structure differs from Magento's on almost every page type. The mechanics of that redirect map are covered in our guide to migrating products to Shopify without losing SEO rankings.
Custom functionality
Years of custom modules sit in most Magento installs. Some of them exist because Magento needed help doing something Shopify does natively. Others support a genuine commercial process that has to be rebuilt. Discovery sorts each one into a group. Some are retired outright, some are replaced with a native Shopify feature or an app, and the remainder are rebuilt because nothing off the shelf does the job.
Design and content
The Shopify store needs to be designed and built to a standard that reflects the business. Design and build happen together inside Shopify's theme architecture, so the design is shaped by how the platform works rather than translated into it afterwards. Content pages, blog posts and any landing pages with search traffic come across as well, and the migration is a sensible point to retire the ones that no longer earn their place.
What businesses gain
Lower ongoing costs. A Shopify store run day to day by a non-technical team, with a studio supporting changes, costs considerably less to operate than a Magento site that needs a developer for most functional changes.
A better staff experience. Shopify's admin is built for people who manage products and orders every day. Updating products, managing orders, running promotions and pulling reports are all straightforward without technical knowledge, which moves control of the trading calendar back to the people running the business.
Platform risk handed to Shopify. Uptime during peak trading, security and checkout performance become Shopify's responsibility. Shopify's checkout is maintained and improved continuously across millions of stores, which a self-hosted Magento checkout can't match without significant investment.
A faster route to new channels. Selling into Australia, opening a wholesale channel or adding point of sale in a showroom are configuration and build decisions on Shopify, where on Magento each one would be a development project.
A worked example: Advintage
Advintage is one of New Zealand's largest online wine retailers, shipping since 1999. Its Magento store carried more than 5,000 SKUs, complex discount and stock management rules, wholesale pricing and an ERP integration that the business depended on daily. We moved the whole operation to Shopify, mapping each of those systems to its new home and managing the ERP integration through to launch. Customers experienced zero downtime during the cutover, and the business now runs its store without the developer dependency Magento required.
The detail that made Advintage work was treating the project as a new Shopify build with data migration attached, starting from what the business needed the store to do commercially. The timeline, phases and risks involved in a project at that scale are set out in our piece on replatforming from Magento.
When staying on Magento still makes sense
A small number of businesses are well served by Adobe Commerce: those with in-house development teams, custom back-office processes that run inside the platform, or multi-brand operations already invested in Adobe's wider stack. If you have a capable internal team and the platform is earning its keep, a migration may not pay back. For most established NZ retailers without that team, the cost of staying keeps rising while the capability gap closes.
If you're weighing the decision, our website migration service starts with a discovery phase that answers the business case question with your own numbers before any build is scoped.
Common questions
Will I lose my search rankings when migrating from Magento to Shopify?
Not if the migration is handled correctly. A complete redirect map covering every indexed product, category and content URL is the most important technical step, along with carrying across page titles, meta descriptions and product content. Some movement in rankings in the first few weeks is normal. A migration done with full redirect coverage sees rankings recover, and often improve, within a few months of the new store going live.
How do I migrate my product data from Magento to Shopify?
Start by exporting and auditing the catalogue, then map every Magento attribute to a Shopify variant option, metafield, tag or product type. Dedicated migration tools handle the transfer itself, but the mapping and cleaning decide the result. The right approach depends on catalogue size, the condition of the existing data and how many custom attributes are in use.
Can I keep my existing design when moving to Shopify?
You can carry forward the visual language and layout approach of the existing site, but the design has to be rebuilt within Shopify's theme architecture. Most businesses use the migration to fix the design and UX problems they've tolerated on Magento, because the build cost is incurred either way and the new store can be shaped around how customers actually buy.
Is Magento 2 better than Shopify for large catalogues?
Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce handle some enterprise-scale requirements that need a development team behind them. For most NZ ecommerce businesses, catalogues of several thousand SKUs run comfortably on Shopify, and the operational complexity and ongoing cost of Magento don't produce a better commercial outcome. Advintage moved more than 5,000 SKUs with complex pricing rules across to Shopify.
Can customers keep their passwords when we move from Magento to Shopify?
Magento stores passwords in a hashed format that Shopify can't import, so customer accounts arrive without them. Customers set a new password the first time they log in, prompted by an account activation email. Plan the wording and timing of that email as part of launch, and make sure the login page explains the change clearly to returning customers.
Does Shopify replace my ERP or accounting system?
Shopify becomes the sales channel and your ERP or accounting system continues to do its job, with an integration passing orders, stock and pricing between them. The migration defines which system owns each piece of data. The connection itself is built by an integration partner or the vendor, with the studio scoping and managing it alongside the store build.
