On paper, moving from BigCommerce to Shopify sounds easy. Both are hosted SaaS platforms. Both use similar concepts: products, variants, collections (BigCommerce calls them categories), orders, customers. How hard can it be?
Harder than the marketing pages suggest. After running 200+ Shopify builds as a Shopify Partner and Shopify Plus Partner agency, I can tell you a bigcommerce to shopify migration has its own specific failure points that nobody warns you about. Store owners assume the two platforms are siblings. They're more like cousins who look alike at family reunions but argue about everything at the dinner table.
In this post I'll walk you through exactly what breaks (product data, URLs, checkout logic, app equivalents) and the fixes we use on every project. Some of this will save you weeks of headaches. Some of it might change your mind about migrating at all, and that's fine too.
Why Merchants Leave BigCommerce for Shopify
We hear the same three reasons, repeatedly:
- App ecosystem. Shopify's app store has roughly ten times the apps of BigCommerce's marketplace. If you want a loyalty program, a subscription engine, or a reviews platform on BigCommerce, you have maybe two credible options. On Shopify you have ten, and they integrate with everything else you run.
- Theme and design flexibility. BigCommerce's Stencil framework is fine for developers, but merchants find Shopify's Online Store editor far easier to self-serve. Small design tweaks stop requiring a developer ticket.
- Checkout ownership. Shopify owns the checkout on every plan, which means it's fast, stable, and constantly improved. BigCommerce lets you customize the checkout file directly, which sounds like freedom until a platform update breaks your checkout at midnight on Black Friday. We've fielded that call more than once from merchants switching to us.
BigCommerce is genuinely good at a few things: complex catalog structures, out-of-the-box faceted filtering, and multi-storefront from one backend. If those are core to your business, weigh the switch carefully. Migration is a one-way door for most stores.
What Actually Breaks: The Six Failure Points
1. Product Options and Variant Limits
This is the number one blocker. BigCommerce allows a generous number of product options and variants, more than Shopify's standard limit of 100 variants and three options per product. Stores selling configurable furniture, custom apparel, or made-to-order goods routinely blow past this on Shopify's standard plans.
Your options: restructure products into multiple linked listings (our usual approach), move configuration into line-item properties, or use a product-options app. None are free. Audit your variant counts in BigCommerce (Products → Export) before you commit, because a store with 40 configurable products can turn into 400 Shopify listings and mess up your whole catalog hierarchy.
2. URL Structure Differences
BigCommerce URLs look like /product-url/ and /category-url/. Shopify uses /products/, /collections/, and /pages/. Every single URL on your store changes, without exception. This makes the redirect map the single most important deliverable in the project.
Export your full URL list, pull click data from Google Search Console for at least 16 months, and map every URL with meaningful traffic individually. The rest can be handled by pattern rules, but the top 100–500 pages deserve a human eye. We hand-check them in a spreadsheet: boring, unglamorous, and absolutely non-negotiable. Skip this and you're donating your rankings to your competitors.
3. Customer Accounts and Passwords
Same problem as every migration: password hashes don't transfer between platforms. BigCommerce and Shopify use different encryption, so every customer resets their password. Send the email announcement before launch, put a "reset your password" banner on the new storefront for the first month, and don't be surprised when a vocal minority of customers act personally offended. They always do.
Order history imports cleanly, but note that Shopify's native import tools handle newer order formats better. We typically migrate 24 months of orders and keep older history in a reporting export.
4. Store Credit and Gift Certificates
BigCommerce's store credit system doesn't map to anything natively on Shopify. The fix is issuing Shopify gift cards to affected customers in bulk, via Shopify's API or a CSV import. It's tedious but straightforward. What you can't do is migrate outstanding gift certificates as "credit"; they become gift card balances. Tell your finance team this early; it affects how they reconcile liabilities.
5. App Functionality Gaps
BigCommerce stores lean on built-in features that Shopify merchants get through apps. Faceted search and layered filtering, native on BigCommerce, becomes the Shopify Search & Discovery app (free, decent, not identical). Built-in product reviews need a reviews app. Some BigCommerce-specific apps have no Shopify equivalent at all, and you'll need to rebuild that workflow with Shopify Flow, a different app, or a custom solution.
Make a spreadsheet of every active app and integration on your BigCommerce store, then find its Shopify counterpart before you start. "We'll figure it out after launch" is how stores end up missing their subscription billing engine for three weeks.
6. Checkout Customizations
If your BigCommerce checkout has custom scripts (B2B validation, PO number fields, delivery-date pickers), those don't copy over. Shopify Plus gives you checkout extensibility for this; lower plans are more constrained, and honestly that's a feature, not a bug. Most checkout "customizations" we audit are conversion leaks anyway. Rebuild only what your order data proves customers actually use.
BigCommerce to Shopify Migration: The Process We Follow
Step one: audit and export. Crawl the BigCommerce store, export products, customers, orders, and content, and pull Search Console data. Freeze the catalog during migration week; nothing's worse than reconciling products that changed mid-export.
Step two: map and transform. Convert BigCommerce product fields to Shopify's structure: options to variants, categories to collections, custom fields to metafields. Handle the variant-limit overflow here, not at launch.
Step three: build in parallel. We build the Shopify theme on a development store while data migrates, so content, navigation, and SEO elements are ready before the data lands. Test checkout end-to-end with Shopify's test mode and every real payment gateway.
Step four: redirect, launch, verify. Upload redirects, flip DNS, and immediately crawl the live store. Check Google Search Console for coverage errors daily in week one. Then resist the urge to "improve" titles and content for at least a month. Changing URLs and on-page elements at the same time makes debugging rankings impossible.
SEO: What to Watch in the First 90 Days
Expect a two-to-four-week dip while Google processes the redirects. That's normal. What isn't normal: rankings that don't recover by week six. That's almost always a redirect problem, such as homepage redirects, redirect chains, or high-value pages mapped to the wrong target.
Beyond redirects, replicate your structured data before launch using Google's Rich Results Test on templates, not just individual pages. BigCommerce themes often carry review schema and breadcrumb markup that Shopify themes won't reproduce identically out of the box.
Once the dust settles, this is where Shopify starts paying you back. Our SEO clients see a 9x average organic traffic increase post-migration when the technical work is done right and the content program follows. The platform change is the enabler, not the result.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a BigCommerce to Shopify migration take?
Most stores take 6–10 weeks from kickoff to launch, including data migration, theme build, redirect mapping, and testing. Simple catalogs under 500 products can go faster; stores with heavy variant structures, B2B logic, or custom integrations run longer. The redirect map is usually the bottleneck, not the data.
Will my SEO rankings survive the migration?
Yes, if redirects are mapped URL-to-URL and content parity holds. Every URL changes in this migration, so there are no shortcuts. Expect temporary fluctuation, then recovery. If rankings haven't recovered in six weeks, audit the redirect map first. That's where 90% of permanent losses come from.
Can I migrate customer passwords from BigCommerce to Shopify?
No. Passwords are encrypted differently and can't be transferred. Customers will reset their passwords on first login. Email them ahead of launch and keep a reset-password banner up for the first month to cut support tickets dramatically.
What happens to my BigCommerce apps and integrations?
Most functionality is replaced by Shopify equivalents or native features. Some gaps need real solutions: advanced faceted filtering, certain B2B pricing rules, and niche integrations may require apps, Shopify Flow, or custom builds. Inventory every app before you start, and budget for replacements.
Is it worth migrating, or should I stay on BigCommerce?
If your store is stable, profitable, and depends on BigCommerce's native multi-storefront or complex catalog features, staying may be smarter. If you're fighting the platform (app gaps, design constraints, checkout issues), Shopify's ecosystem usually wins. We walk through the full decision framework in our Shopify migration guide.
Get Help With This
We've migrated enough stores to know exactly where the bodies are buried in a bigcommerce to shopify migration, and we'd rather you benefit from that than rediscover it the hard way. If you want the redirect map, data transfer, and relaunch handled by a team that does this every month, take a look at our Shopify migration service and let's talk about your store.
