There is a version of the Shopify Plus migration that takes about ten minutes. You sign the contract, Shopify upgrades your plan and your store is technically on Plus. Your theme is the same, your checkout is the same and your integrations are the same, and the only visible change is a larger invoice.
The ten-minute version is seldom the right one. Businesses move to Plus because the current store has stopped doing what they need, and if you upgrade the licence and leave the build untouched, those problems stay exactly where they were. The upgrade buys capability. Putting it to work is a build project with its own phases, timeline and budget, and it looks different depending on where you are starting from.
Two projects that share one name
"Moving to Shopify Plus" describes two different projects. The first is an upgrade: a store already on Basic, Grow or Advanced moves to a Plus contract and puts the new capabilities to use. The second is a replatform: a business on Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or a custom system moves onto Shopify and starts on Plus from day one. The two share a destination and very little else. An upgrade keeps your products, customers, orders and URLs where they are. A replatform has to move all of them without losing search rankings, customer accounts or a single order along the way.
Upgrading from standard Shopify: what changes on day one
The contract changes first. Plus is sold on a one-year term at US$2,500 a month or a three-year term at US$2,300 a month, billed in US dollars and quoted here ex GST, with larger businesses moving to a variable fee set by revenue. Processing rates drop slightly, and the extra fee Shopify charges on third-party payment providers falls to 0.2%.
The admin gains new options. Checkout extensions can now be added to the information, shipping and payment steps. Custom apps running Shopify Functions become available for discount, delivery and payment rules. The full B2B toolset opens up, along with expansion stores, the organisation admin, 200 inventory locations and unlimited staff accounts.
Everything customers see stays as it was. The theme, the checkout layout, the apps and the integrations all carry over unchanged, which is why the upgrade on its own produces no commercial return. Every capability on that list needs scoping and building before it affects a single order.
One detail catches out stores that were on Plus before, or that bought a business already on Plus. Shopify has retired checkout.liquid, the old way of customising checkout, so any checkout customisation built that way has to be rebuilt as checkout extensions and Functions. Some older apps relied on it as well, and they need checking before the project is scoped.
Replatforming onto Plus from another platform
A replatform carries all the upgrade work plus the migration itself. Products, variants, images, metafields, customers, order history, gift card balances, reviews and content all have to move, and each one maps differently from the old platform's structure into Shopify's. Every old URL needs a redirect to its new equivalent so search rankings and inbound links carry across. Customer passwords can't be migrated between platforms, so customers set new ones, and the invitation to do so needs designing as carefully as any other customer communication.
Advintage is the clearest example from our own work: a complete Magento to Shopify migration covering 5,000+ SKUs, complex discount and stock management, wholesale pricing and an ERP integration, completed with zero customer downtime. That outcome came from rehearsing the data migration several times before launch and agreeing exactly how stock, pricing and orders would flow between Shopify and the ERP before any connection was built. Our overview of Magento to Shopify migration for NZ businesses covers the platform-specific detail, and migrating products to Shopify without losing SEO rankings covers the redirect work.
We handled the Robomate migration as a full platform move with a rebuild. The timeline was set by the complexity of what needed to work, and the launch date followed from it.
The phases and a realistic timeline
Both kinds of project move through the same phases. The time each phase takes depends on what you are starting from and how much the store needs to change.
Strategy
Strategy maps the customer journey for each segment you sell to, the integration strategy and the app strategy. You will already know your ERP, accounting system and freight partner. This phase maps exactly how each one will function within the new store, which apps stay, which get replaced by native Plus features and which checkout rules the build needs to enforce. The scope and the budget come out of this phase.
Design and build
Shopify theme design and build run concurrently, with the design built directly in Shopify's theme architecture alongside the store's functionality. Checkout extensions and custom Functions are built in the same period, each one specified as a written rule and tested against real product and customer data.
Integrations
Integration connections are built by the platform vendor, integration partner or existing app. We scope them and specify the data flows and error handling, then manage that work so the connections are tested against the store before launch. Existing integrations built for standard Shopify may need reconfiguring for Plus, and some stores use the move to replace fragile connections with sounder ones.
Data migration and testing
On an upgrade, this phase is mostly restructuring: moving product data into metafields, cleaning collections and setting up B2B catalogues. On a replatform it is the full migration, rehearsed at least twice on a development store before the real run. Testing covers the full purchase journey across devices, payment methods, trade and retail accounts and the edge cases your checkout rules exist to handle.
Cutover and launch
A replatform launch involves a content and order freeze on the old platform, a final import of orders and customers placed since the last rehearsal, DNS changes, redirect testing and close monitoring of the first orders. An upgrade launch is simpler because the store never goes offline: new checkout rules and features are switched on in a planned sequence.
A targeted upgrade focused on checkout customisation, Functions and integration changes, without a theme rebuild, takes six to ten weeks. A full rebuild or replatform, covering new design, new development and a full integration overhaul, takes twelve to twenty weeks. Timelines compress by reducing scope. Faster execution alone doesn't shorten them, because rehearsals and testing are where the risk gets removed.
What drives the cost
The licence is the cost you take on with Shopify directly, from US$2,300 a month. The project cost is set by scope, and five things move it most.
- Whether the theme is rebuilt or extended.
- How many checkout rules and custom Functions the store needs.
- How many integrations are involved and how complex their data flows are.
- How much data has to migrate and from which platform.
- Whether expansion stores or a B2B storefront are part of the launch.
Integration partners and new apps carry their own fees, passed through at cost.
A modest upgrade focused on checkout and automation sits in a very different range from a full replatform with several integrations and a trade store. Our guide to what a Shopify website costs in NZ shows how the ranges move with complexity, and the right starting point for a Plus project is a scoped strategy phase, which produces a figure you can plan around.
What changes for your team
The day-to-day work changes more than most businesses expect. Customer service stops editing orders to apply rules the checkout now enforces. Trade customers order online instead of by email, which moves work from order entry to account management. Merchandisers work with structured product data and reusable theme sections. Someone needs to own Flow automations, B2B catalogues and the expansion stores, and that ownership should be decided before launch.
Training is part of the project. Your team is trained to run the store themselves before handover, covering the checkout rules, B2B settings, automations and the theme components they will use to build pages, so the capabilities you paid for get used from the first week.
The mistake that costs the most
The most expensive mistake is treating the Plus contract as the deliverable. The licence is approved, the account is upgraded and the team moves on. A year later the store is on the same theme, the Flow automations are half configured and the checkout is unchanged, so the business is paying Plus pricing for standard functionality and has nothing to measure against the fee.
Treat the upgrade as the enabling step and the build as the project. Our website migration service and Shopify Plus work both start with a proper scoping conversation. If you are weighing up what moving to Plus involves for your store, talk to us about what it would take.
Common questions
How long does it take to migrate to Shopify Plus?
The licence upgrade itself is immediate once the contract is signed. The project that makes it worthwhile takes six to ten weeks for a targeted upgrade covering checkout customisation, Functions and integration changes. A full rebuild or a replatform from Magento, WooCommerce or another system takes twelve to twenty weeks, including strategy, concurrent design and build, integration work, migration rehearsals, testing and launch.
How much does a Shopify Plus migration cost in NZ?
The licence starts at US$2,300 a month on a three-year term or US$2,500 on a one-year term, ex GST. The build cost depends on scope: whether the theme is rebuilt, how many checkout rules and integrations are involved, how much data moves and whether B2B or expansion stores are included. A scoped strategy phase produces a fixed figure for your specific project.
Will my store go offline when moving to Shopify Plus?
An upgrade from standard Shopify doesn't take the store offline, because the store stays on the same platform and features are switched on in sequence. A replatform from another system involves a planned cutover with a short content and order freeze on the old site. With rehearsed migrations and a planned launch, customers can keep shopping throughout, as they did during the Advintage migration.
Do I keep my theme and apps when I upgrade to Shopify Plus?
Yes, everything carries over at the moment of upgrade. Whether it should stay is a separate question for the strategy phase. Some apps become unnecessary once native Plus features or custom Functions can do their job, and a theme built for a smaller store may hold the new capabilities back. Checkout customisations built with the retired checkout.liquid need rebuilding as checkout extensions.
Will I lose SEO rankings moving to Shopify Plus?
An upgrade within Shopify doesn't change your URLs, so rankings are unaffected unless the rebuild changes site structure. A replatform changes URL formats, so every old URL needs mapping to its new equivalent with a 301 redirect before launch. Rankings carry across when every redirect is mapped, page content and metadata are preserved and the redirects are tested after cutover.
