How long does a Magento to Shopify migration take?

Short answer: from the moment you submit the wizard, most stores see staging ready inside a working day, and most merchants accept and transfer within the week that follows. This guide breaks the timeline down into the phases the status page actually shows, so you know where the time goes.

Phase 1 — Queued (within one business hour)

The status page lands on Received the moment you submit. Behind the scenes:

1. We probe your Magento credentials immediately to fail fast on typos. The wizard will not save the request if the probe fails.
2. The request is queued for a member of the build team to pick up. We aim to start the build within one business hour during working hours (Monday to Friday, EU office hours). Outside those hours the queue holds until the next morning.
3. Once a runner picks up the request, the status flips to Building.

If you submitted on a Friday evening, expect a Monday-morning start. We will email you when it kicks off.

Phase 2 — Building (a few hours, usually)

The pipeline runs three sub-phases, all visible on the status page:

• Reading. A read-only session against your Magento admin. Pulls the catalogue, customers, orders, categories, and the url_rewrite table. For a mid-sized store (~5k products, ~50k orders) this typically takes 30–60 minutes.
• Mapping. Reshapes Magento's data into Shopify's product / variant / metafield model. Almost always under 10 minutes.
• Building. Creates a fresh Shopify development store at <your-name>.myshopify.com and pushes every record. This is the longest phase — Shopify's API rate limits dominate it. For a mid-sized store, expect 2–6 hours of wall-clock time.

The status page polls every 10 seconds and shows running counts: records loaded, records failed, current phase. You can leave the tab open or come back later. Nothing breaks if you close it.

The pipeline retries any record that fails for transient reasons (Shopify rate-limit, network blip). Anything that fails for a real reason (validation error on a record we cannot map cleanly) is flagged. The "records failed" counter is mostly there to surface that — the build does not stop when a single record fails.

What can stretch the build phase

• Catalogue size. A 50k-SKU store with hundreds of options per product will take longer than 5k SKUs. We have not hit a hard ceiling.
• Order history depth. Hundreds of thousands of orders take more API calls. Shopify rate-limits dominate; the build phase scales close to linearly with order count.
• Custom modules. If you mentioned bespoke product types or unusual EAV attributes in the Notes for the migration field on Step 3, a human reviews the mapping before the build. That review can take a few hours during business hours, longer out-of-hours.
• Probe failures partway through. If your Magento store becomes unreachable mid-extract (planned downtime, IP allow-list change), the build pauses and we email you. Status flips back to Received with a note. Once you fix the reachability, we resume from where we left off.

Phase 3 — Ready for review (your call)

When the build finishes, you get an email with a private staging link, and the status page flips to Ready to ship. From here the clock is yours.

Most merchants spend two to five days on staging:

• Day 1. Skim the staging store, spot-check the top 20 products and the most recent orders. Confirm counts match.
• Day 2. Get someone else on the team to look. Browse customer accounts, sample the redirect table.
• Day 3+. Sit on it overnight, walk away from it for 24 hours, come back with fresh eyes.

There is no time pressure. We send exactly one follow-up email at 14 days if there has been no movement. Never sooner. The staging store is parked for 30 days from build completion; if you have not transferred by day 30, it auto-deletes.

If you find something wrong, reply to the staging email. We re-run the migration with corrections at no charge. Re-runs are safe by design: anything already loaded is skipped on the next pass, so there are no duplicates. Each re-run typically completes the same day.

Phase 4 — Pay & transfer (minutes)

When you click Pay €129 & transfer store on the status page, Stripe handles the payment. As soon as it clears:

1. Status flips to Paid. Our team picks up the transfer.
2. We change the Shopify store owner email to yours. Shopify emails you a one-time login link.
3. Status flips to Transferred. The card on the right becomes Open Shopify admin.

Transfer typically completes within an hour during business hours. At that point, the store is in your name. Set a custom domain in Shopify Admin → Settings → Domains, flip DNS, and you are live. Existing 301 redirects from your Magento URL keys do their job from the moment DNS resolves.

End-to-end timeline, typical store

A merchant who submits Tuesday morning, runs a tight review, and hits Pay Thursday afternoon is very normal.

Outliers we have seen

• Sub-six-hour end-to-end. Tiny catalogues (under 500 SKUs, single storefront) submitted at 09:00 and transferred by 15:00 the same day. Less common, but it happens.
• Two-week reviews. Merchants who want their entire team to walk through staging, including content, marketing, and customer service, before committing. Fine. Staging is parked for thirty days.
• Multi-store splits. If your Magento install runs three storefronts and you want them split into three Shopify stores, that is three migrations done sequentially. Add a few days. Mention this in the wizard notes and we will plan it.

What we do not control

• Your DNS flip. Once the store is transferred, you flip DNS on your end. That can take minutes (Cloudflare) or up to 48 hours (some registrars).
• Your customers' password reset. Shopify rotates the customer authentication token between stores; existing customers need a one-time reset. Shopify auto-emails them when the store goes live, but the actual reset happens on the customer's schedule.
• Theme & app setup. We do not do design work or install apps. If you want help with that after transfer, we will introduce you to a partner agency.

Ready to start? Begin the wizard, or read the step-by-step migration walkthrough first.