After the Magento migration: launching your Shopify store

The build is done. Your status page shows Ready for review, and the email with the staging link is in your inbox. What you do between now and flipping DNS determines whether the launch is smooth or stressful. This guide walks through the post-build sequence from staging review to the moment your Shopify store goes live.

1. Review staging before anything else

The staging store is a real, fully functioning Shopify store at <your-name>.myshopify.com. It is not a preview; everything we migrated is live and browsable in Shopify Admin and on the storefront.

You have 30 days to review it. There is no rush — we send one reminder at 14 days if there has been no movement, and that is it.

What to check

Work through this in order:

Products (sample 20–30)

Open products in Shopify Admin → Products. For each:

• Title and description match Magento.
• Variants are correct (sizes, colours, option combinations).
• Prices match, including compare-at prices.
• Images are present and loading.
• SEO title and meta description fields are populated.

Pick a mix: your best-sellers, your most complex configurable products, and a few products you know had quirky attributes in Magento.

Collections

Check the category tree in Admin → Products → Collections. Confirm:

• Top-level categories are present.
• Subcategories are nested correctly.
• Products in each collection match what you would expect.

Customers (sample 10–20)

Go to Admin → Customers. Check:

• Names and email addresses look correct.
• Address book is populated.
• Customers you know were newsletter subscribers have accepts_marketing set to true.

Orders (sample the last 50)

Go to Admin → Orders. Check:

• Order count looks proportional to your Magento order volume.
• Line items, quantities, and totals are correct on a few orders.
• Refunded orders show the refund.
• Fulfillment status is correct (fulfilled vs unfulfilled).

URL redirects

This is the check most people skip and then regret. In Admin → Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects, look at the redirect table. Then open Search Console for your Magento store, go to Performance → Pages, and export your top 50 URLs by clicks.

Paste each path into the staging store (append it to <your-name>.myshopify.com). Each one should 301 to the right product or collection page. Any that 404 are missed redirects — send us those URLs and we will add them before you pay.

For more detail on the redirect verification process, see Preserving SEO when migrating from Magento.

Found something wrong?

Reply to the staging email. Describe what you found. We correct the mapping and re-run — no charge, as many times as needed. Only the final €129 payment transfers the store. You will never be charged for corrections.

Re-runs are safe: anything already loaded is identified by its source identity and skipped. Only the corrected records load again.

2. Paying and transferring

When you are satisfied with staging, click Pay €129 & transfer store on the status page. Stripe handles the payment.

After it clears:

1. We change the Shopify store owner to your email address.
2. Shopify sends you a one-time login link to accept ownership.
3. The status page flips to Transferred, and the card on the right shows Open Shopify admin with a deep-link to your new store.

You now own the store outright. The <your-name>.myshopify.com subdomain is yours. Your Magento store is unaffected — it is still live, still taking orders.

3. Set up Shopify payments

Before you flip DNS, your Shopify store needs a payment provider. You cannot take live orders without one.

In Shopify Admin → Settings → Payments:

• Shopify Payments (recommended if available in your country) — set up with your bank account details. Approval usually takes a few hours.
• Third-party provider — if you use Stripe, Mollie, or another gateway natively, connect it via the payment provider settings.

Test with a real card using a low-value transaction after connecting. Verify the payment appears in your payment provider dashboard. Then refund the test transaction.

4. Install apps before DNS flips

Any Shopify apps you need for the new store should be installed and configured before DNS changes. Common ones:

• Reviews (Yotpo, Judge.me, Okendo) — import your Magento review export if the app supports it.
• Email marketing (Klaviyo, Omnisend, Shopify Email) — connect your list; your migrated customers with accepts_marketing: true appear automatically.
• Analytics (Google Analytics 4, Hotjar) — add tracking codes via the theme or a Shopify pixel app.
• Customer support (Gorgias, Richpanel) — connect to Shopify so agents see order history directly.

Do not install apps you are not sure you need. Each app can affect storefront performance and checkout. Only the essentials on launch day; you can add more once the store is running.

5. Connect a domain

In Shopify Admin → Settings → Domains → Connect existing domain.

If your domain is with a standard registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare):

Add a CNAME record pointing your www subdomain to shops.myshopify.com, and an A record pointing the apex (@) to Shopify's IP addresses (listed in Shopify's domain help). The changes propagate within a few minutes to a few hours.

If your domain is through DK Hostmaster or a Danish registrar:

DK Hostmaster requires nameserver changes rather than individual DNS records. Point the nameservers to Shopify's listed nameservers or to a DNS provider like Cloudflare, then set the CNAME and A records there.

Shopify confirms domain connection automatically once DNS propagates. Until then, the store is accessible only at <your-name>.myshopify.com.

Do not cancel or transfer your domain away from your current registrar. Only the DNS records change. Your domain registration stays where it is.

6. Flip DNS and go live

Once you are ready to go live:

1. In Shopify Admin → Settings → Domains, set your primary domain.
2. Enable the Redirect all traffic to this domain toggle so <your-name>.myshopify.com and any non-www traffic redirects correctly.
3. Update DNS at your registrar (if you have not already).

Your Magento store is still running on the same domain until DNS propagates. Once propagation is complete (usually under an hour for cached lookups to expire), traffic starts hitting Shopify.

Monitor your Shopify admin for the first hour: watch the orders list, verify payment notifications are arriving, and check that the checkout completes correctly on a mobile device.

7. The launch-week Search Console checklist

Search Console is where ranking changes show up first.

1. Add the new Shopify store as a property in Search Console (domain property type, verified via DNS).
2. Submit Shopify's auto-generated sitemap: in Search Console → Sitemaps, submit https://www.<yourdomain>.com/sitemap.xml. Shopify generates this automatically.
3. Request indexing for your top 20 pages: paste each URL into URL Inspection and click Request indexing. This is the highest- leverage action in week one.
4. Watch Coverage → Not Found for the first two weeks. Any 404s that appear are missed redirects. Add them to Shopify's URL Redirects and request re-indexing.

Most Magento-to-Shopify migrations see a brief dip of 10–20% in impressions in the first week as Google re-crawls. Rankings recover to baseline within 14 days and typically see a modest improvement within 30 as Shopify's cleaner URL structure is evaluated. The redirect table is what determines whether the dip is temporary or permanent.

Related reading:

• Preserving SEO when migrating from Magento
• How to migrate from Magento to Shopify with Move to Shopify