How long does a Shopify migration take?

At the short end: a few thousand products with clean data, a single market and currency, standard shipping rules, no subscriptions, a theme used close to how it was designed, and one person able to approve decisions quickly. Projects like this are mostly configuration and content work.

In the middle: a bespoke design, a catalogue with complicated variants or configurable products, several integrations to a fulfilment or accounting system, and a redirect map covering tens of thousands of URLs. Three to four months is realistic.

At the long end: subscriptions to migrate with their payment arrangements intact, business-to-business pricing and account structures, several markets with different catalogues and tax treatment, a warehouse or resource planning system to connect, and historical order data that has to come across.

The range is wide because the platform move itself is rarely the hard part. What takes time is everything attached to the store that has grown around it over the years.

Discovery and data mapping first, and it is worth more than it seems. Every product attribute, every collection rule, every customer field and every URL has to have a destination decided. Projects that skip this discover the gaps during the build, when changing course is expensive.

The build itself is usually the most predictable phase. Templates, navigation, collections, cart and account pages follow a known sequence, and a competent team can estimate it closely.

Integrations are the least predictable. Anything depending on a third party's timeline, credentials, sandbox access or documentation will take longer than planned, and this is where most schedules slip.

Content and quality assurance take longer than most plans allow. Checking a few hundred product pages, testing checkout with real payment methods across devices, verifying every redirect and confirming tax and shipping behaviour is genuine work, and rushing it is what produces a bad launch week.

Then there is a stabilisation period after go-live. Reserve two to four weeks for the issues that only appear with real customers and real orders.

A bespoke design rather than a theme. Custom design adds a full cycle of design, review and build, and it is the single largest schedule item most stores choose.

Subscriptions. Moving active subscriptions means moving billing arrangements, which involves the payment providers and cannot be rushed. Start it early and expect the timeline to be set by others.

Business-to-business trading. Company accounts, price lists, payment terms and approval flows are a project in themselves, and they need the sales team's input rather than only the developers'.

Multiple markets. Different catalogues, currencies, tax rules, languages and domains multiply the testing surface, and translation is usually the long pole rather than the configuration.

Historical data. Bringing across years of orders and customer records is achievable and slow, and it is worth asking what will actually be used. Many stores keep the old system read-only for a period instead.

Name one decision maker who can approve design, copy and scope without a committee. On most projects, waiting for approval accounts for more elapsed time than any technical task.

Start the redirect map in week one, not in the final fortnight. It is a data exercise that can run in parallel with everything else, and leaving it late is the most common cause of an organic traffic drop after launch.

Cut scope rather than quality. Launching with the core catalogue and adding the secondary features afterwards is almost always better than delaying, because the store starts earning on the new platform sooner and the remaining work gets real usage data behind it.

Audit the app list before you migrate rather than after. Every app that comes across brings configuration, cost and page weight, and a migration is the one moment when removing what is unused costs nothing.

And freeze changes on the old store during the final weeks. A catalogue moving underneath a migration is a data reconciliation problem that nobody budgeted for.