BigCommerce to Shopify

Migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify without losing a thing.

Move to the platform with the deeper app ecosystem, the better checkout, and the stronger D2C tooling — with your catalogue, customers, and rankings intact.

Scope my BigCommerce migration See the work

Senior engineers reply within 4 hours

Products & ordersCheckout ExtensibilitySEO preservedApp ecosystem

Typical timeline: 5–9 weeks
SEO: Every old URL mapped to a 301 redirect
Cutover: Staged, with a rollback plan
Engagement: Fixed scope after a short audit

Proof, not promises

Shopify stores we've built and run

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2 storesbuilt & maintained (India + UK)ObeeteeRead the case study →

+180%mobile conversionThe Last ApeRead the case study →

Motorcycle Riding Gear3.1xGoogle Shopping ROASMotodriftRead the case study →

In short

What's involved in a BigCommerce → Shopify migration?

Everything moves: catalogue, customers, order history, content, and — critically — your SEO. We migrate into a staging store first, map every old URL to a 301 redirect, QA with real test orders, then cut over in a low-traffic window with a rollback plan.

Why move

Why brands leave BigCommerce

Reason 01
A thinner app ecosystem
BigCommerce works, but the depth of Shopify apps, agencies, and integrations is in a different league for D2C.
Reason 02
Checkout & conversion
Shopify's checkout — and Checkout Extensibility on Plus — is the most conversion-optimised in commerce.
Reason 03
Talent & support
Finding people who know Shopify is easy. The BigCommerce talent pool is far smaller.

What you get

What we migrate.

Nothing gets left behind — and nothing carries over as technical debt.

Every migration includes6 items

Products, variants, options & collections
Customer accounts & full order history
Metafields, tags & custom attributes
Blog posts, pages & media library
301 redirects for every existing URL
Reviews, subscriptions & app data where an API exists

BigCommerce specifics4 items

Product & category structure remapped cleanly
BigCommerce URL structure fully redirected
Customer groups & price lists rebuilt
Checkout scripts re-implemented via Checkout Extensibility

How it works

How the migration runs.

Step 01
Audit & map
We inventory your catalogue, customers, orders, URLs, and integrations, then map every field to its Shopify equivalent before touching anything.
Step 02
Staging migration
Everything moves into a private staging store first — products, variants, metafields, customers, and order history — with zero risk to your live store.
Step 03
SEO & redirects
Every old URL gets a 301 to its new counterpart, so rankings and backlinks carry over instead of resetting to zero.
Step 04
QA & test orders
Cross-browser QA, checkout and payment test orders, and a full data-integrity check before anything goes live.
Step 05
Cutover & monitor
A coordinated cutover in a low-traffic window — DNS switch, rollback plan, and post-launch monitoring of errors and Core Web Vitals.

Questions

BigCommerce → Shopify — answered.

Is Shopify actually better than BigCommerce for D2C?

For most D2C brands, yes — the app ecosystem, checkout conversion, theme quality, and talent availability are all deeper on Shopify. We'll give you an honest read on whether the migration is worth it for your specific situation before you commit.

Will my BigCommerce URLs and SEO transfer?

Yes. Every BigCommerce product, category, and content URL is mapped to a 301 redirect, and metadata carries over, so your rankings and backlinks move with you.

How do you handle BigCommerce customer groups and price lists?

We rebuild them natively — customer groups become Shopify customer segments/tags, and price lists map to Shopify B2B catalogs or discount logic depending on your model.

Will my store go down during the migration?

No. We build and validate everything on a private staging store while your current store stays fully live. The only brief moment of change is the DNS cutover, which we schedule in a low-traffic window with a rollback plan ready.

Do you set up 301 redirects so I keep my SEO?

Yes — a complete 301 redirect map is standard on every migration. We map each old URL to its Shopify equivalent, validate it against your top-traffic and top-ranking pages, and confirm redirects resolve correctly before and after go-live.

What does a Shopify migration cost?

It depends on catalogue size, custom functionality, and integrations — so we give you a fixed-scope quote after a short audit rather than a vague range. You'll know the price and timeline before any work starts, with no invoice surprises.

Can you migrate our apps, reviews, and subscriptions too?

Wherever an export or API exists, yes. Reviews move into Judge.me, Loox, or Shopify Product Reviews; subscriptions into a Shopify subscriptions app; and third-party apps are mapped to Shopify equivalents or rebuilt as custom apps where needed.

Do you keep our customer accounts and order history?

Yes. Customer records, addresses, tags, and full order history migrate across so nothing is lost — important for retention flows, support, and lifetime-value reporting from day one on Shopify.

Something else on your mind? Ask an engineer directly — we reply within 4 hours.

Guide

BigCommerce to Shopify migration, done properly

Migrating from BigCommerce to Shopify is less about moving data and more about not losing anything that matters while you do it — rankings, order history, customer trust, and revenue continuity. Carryup handles BigCommerce → Shopify migrations end to end: catalogue, customers, orders, content, and a complete 301 redirect map, validated on a staging store before a single visitor is affected.

We work exclusively on Shopify and Shopify Plus, so a BigCommerce migration isn't a side project for us — it's core work we've engineered a repeatable, low-risk process around.

What Actually Drives BigCommerce Migration Cost

BigCommerce migrations tend to be more predictable in cost than WooCommerce or Magento migrations, because BigCommerce is a hosted SaaS platform with a real API rather than a self-hosted, infinitely-extensible codebase — there's simply less hidden custom logic to excavate. The cost drivers that remain: custom checkout scripts (common on BigCommerce, which historically allowed script injection directly into checkout in ways Shopify didn't until Checkout Extensibility existed), custom price list and customer group configurations for wholesale or account-based pricing, and Stencil theme customizations that go beyond BigCommerce's standard template structure. Catalogue size and variant complexity matter more directly on BigCommerce than on WooCommerce, since BigCommerce supports up to 600 variants per product versus Shopify's 100 — stores with very large variant counts sometimes need a product-restructuring decision as part of the migration, which adds scope. Multi-storefront BigCommerce accounts also add real work, since each storefront's catalogue and pricing needs its own mapping into Shopify, usually via Markets.

Typical Timeline for a BigCommerce to Shopify Migration

Most BigCommerce migrations run five to nine weeks, sitting between the faster Wix and Squarespace migrations and the longer Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud enterprise timelines — a reflection of BigCommerce's position as a solid mid-market platform without Magento-level architectural complexity. A single-storefront catalogue with standard products and pricing can move on the faster end. Custom checkout scripts add real time because BigCommerce's older open checkout allowed direct JavaScript injection that has no direct Shopify equivalent pre-Plus and needs to be rebuilt through Checkout Extensibility instead of copied. Multi-storefront BigCommerce accounts, complex price list structures for B2B or wholesale customers, and custom Stencil theme components also extend the timeline, since each needs individual assessment rather than a bulk export. Because BigCommerce's API is genuinely solid, data extraction itself is rarely the bottleneck — the timeline is almost always set by how much custom checkout and pricing logic needs re-engineering rather than by catalogue size.

BigCommerce URL Structure and Redirect Mapping

BigCommerce gives merchants meaningful control over URL structure through its custom URL field on products, categories, and pages, which is good for SEO but means two BigCommerce stores can have completely different URL conventions depending on how deliberately that field was used. Category URLs in particular often reflect a specific taxonomy the merchant designed — nested paths reflecting product hierarchy — that don't always map directly onto Shopify's flatter, tag-and-collection-based model. We pull the full set of custom URLs directly via the BigCommerce API rather than assuming a default pattern, then build the redirect map against your actual top-performing pages in Search Console and analytics, not just the sitemap. BigCommerce's faceted, filtered navigation can also generate indexed URLs with query parameters that need canonicalization decisions during the move, since Shopify's collection filtering behaves differently. Product and category metadata, including custom meta descriptions and title tags set per page, are preserved and mapped across rather than regenerated from templates.

BigCommerce Apps, Stencil Customizations, and What Transfers

BigCommerce's app marketplace is solid but noticeably smaller than Shopify's, both in raw app count and in the depth of specialization within categories like subscriptions, loyalty, and personalization — this is one of the more concrete, verifiable differences between the platforms. Migrating means auditing your installed BigCommerce apps and mapping each to a Shopify equivalent, which in most categories (reviews, email marketing, shipping) is straightforward since the same third-party vendors — Klaviyo, Yotpo, ShipStation — often serve both platforms. The harder part is Stencil theme customizations: custom Handlebars templates, JavaScript, and CSS built directly into a BigCommerce theme don't port to Shopify's Liquid templating language and have to be rebuilt, not converted. This is also the point where most merchants upgrade rather than replicate — a Stencil theme built years ago typically gets rebuilt as a modern, faster Shopify theme rather than recreated feature-for-feature, since the goal is a better storefront, not a like-for-like clone in different code.

Shopify vs BigCommerce for D2C Growth

BigCommerce and Shopify are the two platforms most likely to be cross-shopped by growing D2C brands, since both are hosted SaaS commerce platforms with real APIs and no server management. The differences that matter in practice: Shopify's app ecosystem is deeper and more specialized, which matters once you need a specific tool for retention, personalization, or a niche integration rather than a general-purpose one. Shopify's checkout is the more conversion-optimized of the two and, on Plus, is customizable through Checkout Extensibility without the security tradeoffs of BigCommerce's older script-injection approach. Theme quality and the pool of available development talent both skew heavily toward Shopify — agencies, freelancers, and specialized developers are simply easier to find. BigCommerce's genuine advantages, like a higher default variant limit and no in-platform transaction fees on external payment gateways, are real but narrow, and rarely outweigh the ecosystem and checkout advantages for most brands past their early stage. We give an honest read on whether the switch is worth it before recommending it.

Common Mistakes Migrating Off BigCommerce

The most common risk in a BigCommerce migration is underestimating custom checkout scripts. BigCommerce's checkout historically allowed direct script injection for things like custom shipping logic, third-party tracking, or conditional discounts — flexible, but it means checkout behavior can be running code that lives outside the standard admin settings and is easy to miss during an audit. Teams that only review product and order data can launch on Shopify and discover a checkout behavior, a specific discount rule, or a shipping calculation simply isn't there anymore because nobody accounted for the injected script. Price list and customer group structures are the second common trap — BigCommerce's price list model can get intricate for B2B accounts, and a shallow mapping to Shopify B2B or discount codes can silently produce wrong prices for specific customer segments. The mitigation is auditing checkout scripts and price list logic against real transaction data before cutover, and running parallel test orders across every customer group, not just the default one.

BigCommerce's Price List Structure and Variant Limits

BigCommerce's B2B and wholesale pricing runs through price lists — named sets of SKU-level price overrides that can be assigned to specific customer groups, letting merchants layer wholesale, VIP, or regional pricing on top of a base catalogue. Mapping this to Shopify means a deliberate choice: smaller or simpler pricing tiers usually map cleanly to Shopify's native B2B company and catalog pricing or discount codes, while more intricate multi-tier price list logic sometimes needs a dedicated B2B app or custom Function. The other structural difference worth planning for is BigCommerce's variant ceiling of 600 combinations per product against Shopify's 100 — stores with genuinely large variant matrices, apparel with many sizes and colorways for instance, occasionally need to be restructured into multiple linked Shopify products rather than migrated as a single product, which changes URLs and merchandising slightly and needs to be decided deliberately rather than discovered after the fact during data load.

Running Shopify Day-to-Day After BigCommerce

Because both platforms are hosted SaaS with real admin panels, the operational shift from BigCommerce to Shopify is less dramatic than coming from a self-hosted platform — there's no server or hosting change to manage either way. What does change day-to-day: a noticeably larger and deeper app selection for filling any given need, meaning less settling for a "good enough" tool; a faster, more actively developed theme ecosystem; and, on Plus, direct control over checkout customization through Checkout Extensibility rather than the more limited, script-based approach BigCommerce historically used. Reporting and analytics also shift, since Shopify's native analytics and its most common app integrations are typically better supported and more current than BigCommerce's equivalents, simply due to market share. Most merchants describe the admin learning curve as shallow — the concepts of products, orders, customers, and discounts map closely enough between the two platforms that the team adjustment period is measured in days, not weeks.

Migration or Just a Redesign? What a BigCommerce Move Really Needs

Because BigCommerce and Shopify are both hosted SaaS platforms with real APIs, the migration-versus-rebuild question looks different here than it does for WooCommerce or Magento — there's rarely deep custom backend logic to untangle, since BigCommerce doesn't let you bury business logic in server-side code the way self-hosted platforms do. The real decision is usually about the storefront, not the data: a Stencil theme built years ago is almost never worth porting feature-for-feature, since Shopify's theme ecosystem and Liquid templating make a genuine redesign both faster and more valuable than a like-for-like copy. Where a true technical migration matters is checkout scripts and price list logic — BigCommerce's older script-injected checkout customizations and multi-tier B2B pricing need careful re-engineering through Checkout Extensibility and Shopify B2B, not a redesign. In practice, most BigCommerce moves are a straightforward data migration paired with a storefront rebuild, rather than the deep logic-untangling exercise a WooCommerce or Magento move usually is.

Hidden Costs to Watch in a BigCommerce Migration

BigCommerce's solid API makes data extraction genuinely cheap, which is exactly why the hidden costs on this migration sit elsewhere. The most common one: a low-cost migration tool copies products, categories, and orders cleanly, but skips checkout scripts and price list logic entirely, because those aren't part of a standard product export — the cost then shows up post-launch as wrong pricing for a wholesale customer segment or a missing shipping rule nobody flagged. Ask any partner directly how they audit checkout scripts and price list rules, not just catalogue data; if the answer is vague, that's the gap that becomes an expensive fix later. Multi-storefront BigCommerce accounts are the other quiet cost driver, since each storefront's pricing and catalogue needs individual mapping into Shopify Markets rather than a single bulk export. A properly scoped BigCommerce migration typically runs $10,000–$30,000 and five to nine weeks; quotes meaningfully below that range usually mean checkout and price-list logic aren't included.

Other platforms

Migrating from somewhere else?

Same process, different friction — each platform has its own playbook.

Go deeper before you decide.

Pairs well with

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Get started

Planning a move off BigCommerce?

Tell us your platform, catalogue size, and integrations — we'll scope the migration and get back within 4 hours.

What happens next

01
A senior engineer reads it
Not a sales rep — you hear back within 4 hours on business days.
02
A focused conversation
We talk through your store, what you need and what it would honestly take.
03
A clear scope and price
Fixed scope wherever the work allows, so you know the cost before anything starts.

Or reach us directly

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What do you need?Step 1 of 3

Shopify stores we've built and run

A thinner app ecosystem

Checkout & conversion

Talent & support