← All guides6 min readUpdated 10 May 2026

What doesn't migrate from Magento to Shopify: the honest list

What Move to Shopify does not migrate from Magento: extensions, configuration, customer passwords, promotions, and what to do about each limitation.

Every Magento migration starts with the same mental model: "we will move everything to Shopify." The reality is more specific. Shopify is a different platform — a hosted SaaS, not a self-hosted PHP application — and some things that live in Magento have no equivalent in Shopify's data model at all. This guide is the honest list of what does not migrate, why, and what to do about each item.

What Move to Shopify migrates (scope reminder)

Move to Shopify migrates: products, categories, customers, orders, and 301 redirects. That is the complete service scope for €129 fixed. Anything outside this list is either explicitly not included or requires a conversation before the build starts.

Customer passwords

What happens: every customer account migrates — email address, name, addresses, order history, and marketing consent. The password does not.

Why: Magento stores customer passwords as bcrypt hashes (or, on older installs, MD5). Shopify does not accept foreign password hashes. It maintains its own authentication system and cannot import a third-party hash into it.

What to do: after DNS flip, when a returning customer tries to log in to the new Shopify store, Shopify prompts them to set a new password via email. This is Shopify's standard account activation flow. No manual action is required from your side — Shopify handles the email automatically when the customer clicks "Forgot password" or attempts login.

Plan for a small customer service spike in the first two weeks after launch, from customers who expected their old password to work. A short heads-up email to your customer list before launch ("your account and order history are on our new store — click here to set a new password") cuts this spike significantly.

Magento extensions and modules

What happens: none of your Magento extensions migrate.

Why: Magento extensions are PHP code that runs inside the Magento framework. Shopify is a hosted platform with a fixed architecture. There is no Magento module that can be installed on Shopify.

The distinction: the data produced by extensions often does migrate, if it is stored in standard Magento tables that our pipeline reads. The functionality the extension provides does not.

Examples:

Magento extension	Data migrates?	Functionality migrates?
Reward points / store credit	No	No
Product reviews (Magento native)	No	No
Subscription billing	No	No
Advanced search (Elasticsearch)	N/A	No
Custom tax rules	N/A	No
Bundle builder extension	Partial (as metafields)	No

What to do: before the build starts, list every extension that affects customer-facing behaviour on your Magento store. For each one, decide whether a Shopify app equivalent exists and budget for installing and configuring it on the destination. Extension-driven functionality is the most common source of post-launch surprises.

Magento admin configuration

What does not migrate: Magento's system configuration — tax classes, shipping methods, payment methods, multi-currency exchange rates, store views, and website scope settings.

Why: this is platform configuration, not merchant data. Shopify has its own tax system, its own shipping zones, its own payment providers. None of them accept Magento configuration as input.

What to do: budget a day of Shopify admin setup after the migration to configure taxes, shipping zones, payment providers (Shopify Payments or your existing payment gateway), and any other store settings. This is separate from the data migration and is usually done by whoever manages the Shopify store operationally.

Cart price rules and promotions

What happens: Magento cart price rules and catalog price rules do not migrate as promotion objects on Shopify. Move to Shopify does not attempt to translate Magento's promotion engine into Shopify's discount system.

Why the complexity is real: Magento's cart price rules can be arbitrarily complex — multi-condition trees, customer segment rules, free product gifts, SKU-level discounts. Shopify's discount system supports a different, often narrower, rule set. A mechanical translation would produce incorrect behaviour in most cases.

What to do: export your active Magento promotions from the Magento admin (Marketing → Cart Price Rules). For each active rule, decide whether a Shopify discount can replicate it, and create the Shopify equivalents manually in Shopify Admin → Discounts. One-off coupon codes are quick to re-create; complex multi-rule promotions may need a Shopify app (several exist for advanced discount logic).

Expired and inactive promotions do not need to be re-created.

CMS blocks and static content outside pages/blog

What migrates: Magento CMS pages and blog posts migrate as Shopify pages and blog posts.

What does not migrate: Magento CMS blocks (reusable HTML snippets embedded via {{block type="cms/block" block_id="..."}} in templates) and widget configurations. These are theme-level constructs, not stand-alone content entities.

What to do: after migration, any CMS block content that should appear on the Shopify storefront needs to be either embedded directly in the Shopify theme as a section or recreated using a Shopify page builder app. This is theme work, not data work.

Magento customer groups (as segments)

What happens: customer group membership is read for each customer record. The group name migrates as a customer tag on the Shopify customer record. For example, a customer in Magento's Wholesale group will have the Wholesale tag on Shopify.

What does not migrate: the price rules, discount schedules, and tax class overrides that Magento customer groups control. Those are pricing configuration, not customer data.

What to do: if customer groups drove pricing in Magento, decide how to replicate that on Shopify. Options include Shopify's B2B feature (on Plus), metafield-gated prices via a Shopify app, or a trade portal app. The customer tags from migration give you the segmentation data — the pricing logic on top of it is Shopify configuration.

Multi-store configuration

What happens: if your Magento install has multiple store views or websites, Move to Shopify migrates a single-scope extract. Multi-store Magento installs with separate catalogues, separate customer sets, or separate order histories per store require per-store scoping, which is a different project shape.

What to do: if you have a multi-store Magento setup, contact us before starting the wizard. Multi-store migrations are quoted separately and scoped carefully before the build starts, because the right destination shape (one Shopify store with Markets, or multiple separate Shopify stores) depends on your business structure.

What this means for staging

When you review your staging Shopify store after the build, you are reviewing the data layer — products, customers, orders, redirects. You are not reviewing the functionality layer. The gaps in the list above are not bugs in the migration; they are decisions that need to be made on the Shopify side after the data is in place.

The right staging review order is:

Verify data completeness (product count, customer count, order count).
Spot-check data accuracy (field-by-field on a sample of records).
Verify redirect coverage (top URLs from Search Console, sampled).
List the extension-to-app decisions and schedule those for post-launch configuration.

Accept the staging store for €129 once the data layer is right. The Shopify configuration and app work that follows is separate from the migration fee.