Move Off BigCommerce Without Losing Catalog, Customers Or Rankings

Most single-storefront migrations take 4 to 6 weeks. Stores with B2B pricing, a custom Stencil theme, or a headless React storefront usually run 6 to 10 weeks. Multi-storefront Shopify Plus consolidations can take 10 to 16 weeks depending on how many integrations need reconnecting. BigCommerce migrations have one advantage over most: the API is well documented and complete, so extraction is predictable and the schedule is driven by rebuild work rather than data archaeology. What stretches a timeline is option sets that do not map to Shopify variants and price-list logic that needs restating in Shopify B2B.

Yes. Products, variants, images, categories and custom fields are extracted through the BigCommerce API and mapped to Shopify products, variants, collections and metafields. Option sets that do not map cleanly to Shopify variants are flagged during data mapping so nothing gets silently dropped. That flag list matters, because BigCommerce allows option and modifier combinations Shopify's variant model does not express directly, and the resolution is a merchandising decision: which options become variants, which become metafield-driven line-item properties, and which are retired. You approve that list before the import runs against your new store.

Customer groups and their assigned price lists are transferred into Shopify Plus B2B as company profiles with the same price list assignments, so wholesale customers log in after launch and see the negotiated pricing they had before. Where BigCommerce price lists used rules Shopify B2B expresses differently, those rules are restated rather than approximated, and we test with real customer accounts across several tiers before cutover. We also confirm which groups are genuinely in use, since inactive customer groups are one of the most common things carried forward by accident in a B2B migration.

Yes. We rebuild the storefront on Hydrogen, reusing components and design decisions where the underlying architecture allows. Typical rebuild effort runs 30 to 50 percent of a fully greenfield headless build, since the product and page requirements are already defined. What does not carry over is anything bound to BigCommerce's own APIs and data shapes, so the data layer is rewritten against Shopify's Storefront API. This is also a sensible moment to ask whether headless still earns its keep, because a Shopify OS 2.0 theme is cheaper to maintain and sufficient for many catalogs.

A full one-to-one redirect map is built and tested before cutover, mapping every BigCommerce URL pattern to its Shopify destination. Updated XML sitemaps are submitted to Search Console within 24 hours of launch, so re-indexing starts immediately instead of after rankings have already dropped. BigCommerce and Shopify differ in their URL conventions for products, categories and paginated pages, so the map is generated from your actual indexed URLs rather than from a pattern rule alone. Rankings are baselined beforehand, which is what makes any post-launch movement diagnosable instead of a matter of opinion.

Yes. Customer records are migrated along with their group or tag assignments, and historical orders are imported as archived Shopify orders tied to the matched customer, so customers see their past order history when they log in after the switch. Archiving them is deliberate: importing historical orders as live ones would trigger notifications and distort your Shopify analytics from day one. Customers will need one password reset, because no platform exports passwords in readable form, and we prepare that message alongside the rest of the launch communications.

Reviews are migrated into a Shopify reviews app with their original ratings, text and submission dates preserved, so the social proof your products already earned does not reset to zero on launch day. Dates matter as much as ratings here, because an app that stamps everything with the import date makes years of genuine feedback look manufactured. Which review app you land on is decided with you early, since the export format and the app's import capability together determine what is possible, and switching apps after launch means doing this work twice.

Yes. Stencil uses Handlebars templating that does not run on Shopify, so we rebuild the same look and feel as a Shopify OS 2.0 theme using sections, which means your team can edit pages afterwards without a developer. The rebuild is an opportunity rather than pure cost: Stencil themes usually carry years of accumulated tweaks, and we inventory what is still used before recreating it. Anything genuinely custom in behavior rather than styling is rebuilt as a section, app block or Shopify Function so it stays on the theme upgrade path.

Yes. We identify every app and integration connected to your BigCommerce store during the audit stage, then reconnect equivalent Shopify apps or build a custom API layer where no direct equivalent exists, so back-office workflows keep running after cutover. BigCommerce and Shopify webhook payloads and product identifiers differ, so a sync layer cannot simply be repointed: field mapping and idempotency keys are rebuilt. Anything finance or fulfillment depends on is cut over with the old integration still available as a fallback until reconciliation confirms the new one is complete.

Multiple regional storefronts typically consolidate into a single Shopify store using Shopify Markets for currency, language and regional pricing, which usually reduces the number of separate plans and catalogs your team keeps in sync. Consolidation is not automatic though: it only works when the regions share a catalog and a fulfillment model. Where regions have genuinely different products, legal entities or warehouses, separate expansion stores under one Shopify Plus organization is the honest answer, and we model both options with the operational cost of each before you commit.

The DNS switch itself happens during a scheduled low-traffic window and typically completes within minutes. All data migration, theme building and QA happen beforehand on a private staging store, so the live BigCommerce site keeps running normally until the moment of cutover. A short final delta sync captures orders and customers created after the main import, which is why cutover is scheduled rather than opportunistic. We also keep your BigCommerce plan active for a period afterwards as a reference for reconciliation and support queries, rather than cancelling it on launch day.

A reconciliation pass compares product counts, order totals and customer records against the original BigCommerce data, redirect rules are tested for the highest-traffic URLs, and checkout, account login and search are manually verified on the live Shopify store before we hand off. You get that reconciliation as a document rather than a verbal assurance, including anything deliberately not migrated and the reason. Test orders are placed and refunded through each live payment method, because a checkout that works on staging with test credentials can still fail on production configuration.