Shopify Migration Timeline for Established DTC Brands

If your store is already doing serious revenue on Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or a custom stack, "just migrating to Shopify" is not a weekend project. The platform switch is the easy part. Protecting your traffic, your subscriptions, your ERP integrations, and your team's sanity is the work.

Here is the timeline we use with established brands replatforming onto Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Phase 1 — Discovery & data audit (weeks 1–2)

• Inventory every integration: ERP, 3PL, ESP, reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, CDP.
• Export and clean catalog data: products, variants, metafields, redirects, customer accounts.
• Map every URL on the current site. This becomes your redirect plan.
• Decide: Shopify or Shopify Plus? Plus is required for B2B, custom checkout, multi-store, and >$1M GMV with tax/wholesale complexity.

Phase 2 — Theme & checkout build (weeks 3–6)

• Build on a modern Online Store 2.0 theme or headless if your team can support it.
• Rebuild PDP, PLP, cart, and account flows. Do not lift-and-shift the old design — most of the conversion lift comes here.
• Configure checkout extensibility (Plus) for any custom logic that used to live in checkout.

Phase 3 — Integrations & data import (weeks 4–7, parallel)

• Wire ERP/3PL through Shopify Flow, native connectors, or middleware.
• Import historical orders for customer continuity.
• Migrate subscriptions cleanly — Recharge, Skio, or Shopify Subscriptions, with a tested customer-comm plan.

Phase 4 — QA, redirects, soft launch (week 8)

• 301 every old URL. This is where most brands lose 20–40% of organic traffic if rushed.
• Run a staging cutover with a real subset of traffic.
• Pixel parity: GA4, Meta CAPI, TikTok, Klaviyo events all firing identically.

Phase 5 — Cutover & stabilization (week 9 + 30 days)

• DNS swap during your lowest-traffic window.
• Monitor Search Console, conversion rate, and AOV for 30 days. Expect a 1–2 week dip; full recovery in 4–6 weeks if redirects and schema were done right.

What goes wrong

• Redirects done as an afterthought. Plan them in Phase 1, not Phase 4.
• Subscription migration without customer comms. Churn spikes if customers don't know.
• Forgetting metafields. They drive your PDP. Map them before you import.

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If you're scoping a Shopify or Shopify Plus migration, get a quote and we'll build the timeline against your actual stack.