"What happens to all of our data?" is one of the first questions technical stakeholders ask when considering an ecommerce platform migration. Typically, customers, subscriptions, saved payment methods, order history, and reviews all have to be migrated to the new platform. In our experience migration over 150 brands to Shopify, the honest answer is that data migration is frequently presented as straightforward, and it rarely is, though the degree of difficulty varies a great deal by source platform of the migration.

The Difference Between Commerce Stacks

If your brand is on WooCommerce or BigCommerce, your catalog structure is usually close enough to Shopify's data model that tools such as Matrixify handle the bulk of the work cleanly.

If your brand is coming from a homegrown stack or an enterprise platform like Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), the task is different in kind, not just scale. The data model itself was often built around assumptions that may not carry over to Shopify at all.

On one enterprise catalog migration we worked on, the product data carried more than 600 custom attributes accumulated over a decade. Fewer than 100 remained functionally relevant for the new site. On a homegrown stack, the equivalent problem often shows up as undocumented custom fields with no clear owner.

Either way, the assessment of what still matters cannot be automated. Artificial intelligence can meaningfully compress the timeline once the target structure is known, in some cases reducing weeks of scripting to a matter of days, but determining whether a given field still carries business value requires someone who understands why the data was structured that way in the first place.

Beyond the Product Catalog

A few areas deserve the same scrutiny as your catalog:

• Customer payment tokens generally migrate to Shopify, though the path depends on the processor. Stripe and Braintree migrations tend to be clean. Proprietary vaulting, more common on custom-built platforms, is more complex and should be assessed early.
• Subscription migrations through Recharge or Skio follow established playbooks regardless of brand size. Most customers experience no disruption, though a small subset may need to re-enter payment details.
• Content held in a custom content management system (CMS) or a non-standard format can be harder to move than standard blog posts, and the volume matters less than the structure.

If You're Running a PIM and ERP Stack

Brands running a full product information management (PIM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system should treat the two as a single data flow: a product record typically originates in the ERP, flows into the PIM as that product's system of record, and is enriched downstream into Shopify.

Some brands don't run a dedicated PIM at all, and instead manage product data through a combination of spreadsheets, the ERP, and manual updates to the storefront. That's not a deficiency, but the mapping exercise still needs to happen, just with fewer systems in the chain. Skipping it during discovery is the most common source of mid-build delays we see.

The Real First Question

The first question in any migration is not what the new site will look like. It is what condition the underlying data is actually in, assessed layer by layer: product catalog structure, customer and order history, subscription data with active billing cycles that cannot be interrupted mid-migration, and content in whatever system currently holds it.

Get the Full Framework

Our Shopify Migration Playbook for CPG brands walks through the complete data audit process, layer by layer, so nothing surfaces as a surprise mid-build.

Download the free Shopify Migration Playbook here.

If you're not sure what condition your data is actually in, that uncertainty is worth resolving before you scope a migration. Reach out for a technical data audit.