BigCommerce to Shopify Migration: The Complete 2026 Guide

If you're a BigCommerce merchant wondering whether it's time to move, you're not alone. Hundreds of brands have made the switch over the past year, and their reasons go well beyond features. The conversation has shifted to money.

The Fee That Changed Everything

On June 1, 2026, BigCommerce introduced an Open Payment Provider Fee of 0.6% to 2% on every order processed outside its approved gateway list. For years, BigCommerce's strongest argument against Shopify was straightforward, no transaction fees. That argument no longer holds.

For a brand doing $5M a year, a 1% fee quietly eats $50,000 in annual revenue. That is not a platform preference. That is a business problem.

BigCommerce vs Shopify: The Financial Reality

The new fee is only part of the picture. The broader cost comparison was already tilting toward Shopify before June 2026.

BigCommerce vs Shopify

BigCommerce's pricing model ties plan upgrades to revenue thresholds. The more your business grows, the higher your tier, even if you never needed what that tier includes. Shopify's monthly plans are fixed. You pay for what you choose, not for how well your store is performing.

Signs Your Brand Has Outgrown BigCommerce

Not every brand is at the tipping point. But certain patterns show up consistently in stores that have stayed too long on a platform that stopped serving them.

Your team is spending more hours managing the platform than actually growing the business. Every customization, even a minor one, requires a developer. Your app stack is a collection of tools that barely talk to each other, stitched together to cover gaps the platform should handle natively. Performance slips during traffic peaks, right when it matters most. And plan upgrades are arriving not because you need new features, but because your revenue crossed a threshold.

If more than one of these sounds familiar, the platform is likely costing you more than your monthly subscription fee.

What Can Be Migrated and What Cannot

One of the most common fears before a BigCommerce to Shopify migration is losing something important. Here is an honest breakdown.

Products transfer cleanly, including titles, descriptions, images, variants, SKUs, pricing, and inventory levels. Customer accounts move with contact details and address history. Order history comes across for continuity in reporting and customer service. Blog posts, pages, and SEO metadata including page titles, meta descriptions, and alt text also migrate successfully.

BigCommerce product categories become Shopify collections, and the mapping needs to be handled deliberately to preserve your navigation logic. Custom product options, variant structures, and third-party integrations do not carry over automatically. Each one needs a Shopify equivalent identified before launch, not after.

Customer passwords cannot be transferred between platforms. This is a platform-level security limitation on both ends. After your Shopify store goes live, you will need to send password reset emails to your customer base. Plan that communication early so your customers are not caught off guard on day one.

Your BigCommerce theme does not transfer either. That is not necessarily a loss. Migration gives you a clean moment to rebuild with Shopify's mobile-first architecture, which matters considerably given that the majority of eCommerce traffic today arrives on a phone.

How to Migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify

A migration done properly is methodical. Rushing any phase creates problems that surface at the worst possible time, usually during launch or the first big traffic event.

Step 1: Audit and back up your store. Before anything moves, document what exists. Products, variants, customer data, order history, URL structures, integrations, custom code, and configurations. Export everything from BigCommerce as CSV files and store those backups separately. They are your safety net.

Step 2: Set up your Shopify store. Create your account, keep it password-protected while you build, and configure your core settings like taxes, shipping, payment gateways, staff permissions, and primary currency. Most brands migrating from BigCommerce land on Shopify Advanced or Shopify Plus based on their revenue and operational complexity.

Step 3: Choose your migration method. Three routes exist. Manual CSV import works for smaller stores with simple catalogs and gives you direct control, but requires reformatting since Shopify's import structure differs from BigCommerce's. Migration tools like Cart2Cart, LitExtension, and Matrixify automate the heavy lifting for mid-sized stores and reduce the risk of mapping errors, always run a demo migration first before committing. For stores with large catalogs, custom integrations, B2B workflows, or established SEO rankings, an agency-led migration is the route that protects what you have built.

Step 4: Transfer your data and rebuild the storefront. Start with the product catalog, then customer accounts, then order history. Check variants, images, inventory levels, and SKU mapping carefully at each step. Use this moment to improve your storefront rather than replicate it. Shopify's theme library and mobile-first design standards give you an opportunity to build something better than what you had.

Step 5: Set up 301 redirects. This step is not optional. BigCommerce and Shopify use different URL structures, which means every product, collection, and blog page URL will change. Build a complete URL mapping document before launch, implement all redirects inside Shopify, and submit your updated XML sitemap to Google Search Console immediately after going live. Stores that handle this properly typically see organic traffic stabilize and recover within 60 to 90 days.

Step 6: Test everything, then launch. Run through the full customer journey on staging before anything goes live, homepage to product page, add to cart, checkout, payment, and email confirmation. Test across devices and payment methods. Pick a low-traffic window to launch and watch performance closely for the first few weeks.

Mistakes That Cost Brands the Most

Skipping the pre-migration audit is how products go missing and integrations break silently on launch day. Migrating during peak season, especially Q4, is how a technical project becomes a revenue crisis. Forgetting 301 redirects is the single most common cause of organic traffic drops after a migration, and rebuilding that ranking equity can take months.

Assuming every BigCommerce app has a direct Shopify equivalent is a mistake that shows up in post-launch scrambles. Audit your app stack before migration and identify alternatives as part of your setup, not as an afterthought. And rushing the testing phase almost always creates a customer experience problem on day one that takes weeks to repair.

The AI Gap Between the Two Platforms

Shopify Sidekick is included in every Shopify plan at no additional cost. It writes product descriptions, builds marketing copy, creates Flow automations, and reads your live store data, all from a single interface. BigCommerce has no native equivalent.

At Codilar, we have built on top of that with Store Decode, an AI-powered audit tool that analyses your store the way a customer actually experiences it and surfaces ranked conversion, performance, and UX gaps before they affect your revenue.

What Migration Looks Like With the Right Partner

Codilar is a premium Shopify Plus Partner with 11+ years of experience and a team of 240+ specialists. Every migration we deliver is documented for zero downtime, zero data loss, and full SEO preservation.

Beyond the Beach, a UAE-based lifestyle retail brand, came to Codilar to migrate their eCommerce platform to Shopify Plus. The store needed more than a data transfer. It needed features rebuilt from the ground up like virtual try-on for eyewear, a custom loyalty point redemption system at checkout, staff discount logic built through Shopify Functions, and performance improvements across the board. The outcome after migration:

• 51% growth in conversion rate
• 23% increase in average engagement time
• 3% reduction in bounce rate
• 9% increase in transactions per purchaser

❝

A beautiful store that doesn't translate opportunity into value isn't a viable store, it's a liability. We built something that's both effortless to use and impossible to ignore.❞

Mohammad Aamir | Shopify Practice Head at Codilar

13+ Years of Experience

Codilar has delivered similar outcomes for global brands including Reebok, Oakley, Ajmal Perfumes, and Marina Home across markets in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. Explore the full portfolio.