Migrating Magento customers and orders to Shopify

The two data types that make merchants most nervous about a Magento migration are customers and orders. Customers because of the password question. Orders because of the history — years of transactions that affect reporting, loyalty, and customer service. This guide covers exactly what Move to Shopify does with both, so you know what to expect before you click Start your migration.

Customers

What moves

Every customer account on your Magento store migrates to Shopify. For each account, we carry across:

• Name and email address — the Shopify account is registered on the same email the customer used in Magento.
• Billing and shipping addresses — the full address book, including multiple saved addresses per customer.
• Account creation date — preserved in Shopify's customer record, so your account-age segmentation stays intact.
• Customer group — mapped to a Shopify customer tag matching the Magento group name. Standard Shopify does not have a native customer group model, so a tag is the closest equivalent. If you use tags to drive automatic collections or discount eligibility, this mapping works cleanly.
• Newsletter consent (marketing opt-in) — read from Magento's newsletter subscriber table. Customers who subscribed have accepts_marketing set to true on the Shopify account.

What does not move: passwords

This is the part most merchants ask about. Customer passwords do not transfer.

Magento hashes passwords using its own format (MD5 with a salt, or SHA-256 in later versions). Shopify cannot validate those hashes and has no import mechanism for them. This is true of every migration tool, not just Move to Shopify — it is a Shopify platform constraint.

What happens in practice: when a migrated customer tries to log in on the new Shopify store for the first time, they are prompted to set a new password. Shopify sends them an account activation email automatically.

What you should do before launch:

Send a pre-launch email to your customer list announcing the new store and asking them to click the "set your new password" link when it arrives. Frame it as an upgrade moment — new store, faster checkout — not as a technical problem. Customers who see this email have a seamless first login. Customers who miss it get the activation prompt when they try to log in, which Shopify handles gracefully.

Expect a modest customer-service spike in the two weeks after launch: customers who cannot find the activation email, or who did not understand the prompt. It is manageable and predictable.

Customer notes

Magento customer notes (stored in the customer entity record) migrate to the Shopify customer note field. If your team uses these notes for service context, they will be in the right place.

Orders

What moves

Your entire order history migrates. For each order:

• Line items — product name, SKU, quantity, unit price, and variant details.
• Tax lines — individual tax amounts and labels, matching the Magento order totals.
• Shipping lines — carrier name, method, and shipping charge.
• Fulfillment status — whether the order was fulfilled, partially fulfilled, or unfulfilled. Fulfilled orders show the fulfillment date.
• Payment method and status — whether paid, pending, or refunded.
• Refunds — partial and full refunds are included, line-item by line-item.
• Order comments and history — the timeline notes from the Magento order history tab appear in the Shopify order's timeline.

Order numbering

Magento's order increment IDs (e.g. 100000123) do not map to Shopify's sequential order numbers. On the new store, orders have Shopify-native order numbers. The Magento order ID is preserved in a custom attribute on the Shopify order, so you can look up historical orders by their original Magento number.

Your reporting will reflect this: Shopify's built-in reports count orders from the migration date. Historical revenue and AOV for the period before migration are visible in the order records but fall outside Shopify's standard report date filtering. Export the historical orders from Graftport's output or from Shopify's order export if you need them in an analytics tool.

Disabling staff notifications before loading orders

This is important. Before we load your order history, disable Shopify Staff email notifications on the destination store: Settings → Notifications in the Shopify admin, turn off new-order staff emails. Re-enable them after loading is complete.

Without this step, Shopify sends a new-order notification email to every staff member for every historical order loaded — often thousands of emails in a short window. We prompt you to confirm this is done on the review step in the wizard; confirming incorrectly here is the most common preventable mistake in a Magento migration.

What does not move

Stored payment methods. Credit card tokens are held by Magento's payment provider, not by Magento itself, and they cannot be transferred to Shopify. Customers with saved payment methods will be prompted to re-enter them on the new store.

Abandoned cart data. Magento's quote table (partially completed carts) is not migrated. In-progress carts at the time of migration are lost.

Gift cards and store credit. These are complex and platform- specific. If your Magento store has gift card or store credit balances, contact us via the notes field in the wizard — we handle these on a case-by-case basis.

Verifying on staging

Once the build is ready and you have the staging link, verify customers and orders specifically:

Customers (sample 10–20):

• Open a customer account in Shopify Admin.
• Confirm name, email, and address book match the Magento record.
• Check the order count on the customer account matches what you see on the orders list.
• Confirm accepts_marketing is set correctly for customers you know were newsletter subscribers.

Orders (sample the last 50):

• Browse the orders list. Confirm order count looks right for your store size.
• Open a few orders. Confirm line items, totals, tax, and shipping look correct.
• Check one or two refunded orders — confirm the refund is present.
• Confirm fulfilled orders show the correct fulfillment date.

If anything is off, reply to the staging email. We re-run with corrections, no charge, before you pay anything.

Ready to see your customer and order data on Shopify?

The wizard takes about two minutes to fill in. We aim to start the build within one business hour, and most stores are ready for staging review within a working day.

Start the migration at /start?source=magento

Related reading:

• How to migrate from Magento to Shopify with Move to Shopify
• What does not migrate from Magento to Shopify