July 17, 2026
A few years ago, moving to Shopify meant trading enterprise functionality for ease of use. You gained a simpler platform, but you gave up the deep customization, the B2B capability, and the integration depth that larger operations depend on. That trade-off no longer exists. In 2026, Shopify carries the enterprise features that once forced businesses onto heavier, costlier platforms, and it does so at a fraction of the running cost. The question for most ecommerce leaders is no longer whether Shopify can handle the work. It is whether the platform they are on today is quietly holding their growth back.
Royal Cyber is a Shopify Plus Partner with more than twenty years of enterprise delivery experience and over 500 enterprise customers. Our Shopify Practice has migrated businesses from Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce, commercetools, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and fully bespoke platforms, with zero downtime on go-live day.
Why 2026 Is Different: The Calculus Has Changed
Four shifts have moved the decision from “someday” to “now.”
- AI commerce by default. Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol with Google means your products become discoverable inside ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity automatically, for every merchant. Discovery is no longer something you bolt on later.
- B2B on every plan. Company accounts, volume pricing, and B2B catalogs are now free on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans. The Plus-only barrier that kept wholesale operations on heavier platforms is gone.
- Shopify Scripts deprecated on June 30. Shopify Scripts stopped running. Any merchant still relying on them has broken checkout logic today, along with a clear migration path to Shopify Functions.
- The total cost of ownership gap keeps widening. On average, Shopify’s total cost of ownership runs materially lower than competing platforms, according to independent analysis. Legacy platform costs, by contrast, rarely plateau.
⚠️ If you are still on Shopify Scripts: Your checkout customizations stopped working on June 30, 2026. This affects any checkout logic built on the old Scripts system, including discounts, shipping rules, and payment conditions. Migration to Shopify Functions is the fix, and we can scope it in a single session.
What Migration Looks Like From Where You Are
Every platform carries different pain points, different data complexity, and different things worth preserving. Here is what a move to Shopify involves depending on where you are starting.
Adobe Commerce Cloud / Magento → Shopify Plus
Most common enterprise migration in 2026The businesses leaving Adobe Commerce are rarely unhappy with what it can do. They are unhappy with what it costs to make it do things: developer retainers, extension conflicts, security patches, and a renewal that gets harder to justify each year.
What moves to Shopify
- Full product catalogue — custom attributes, variants, media
- Customer accounts, order history, loyalty point carryover
- ERP integrations rebuilt against Shopify APIs (NetSuite, SAP, Dynamics)
- Multi-store architecture simplified via Shopify Markets
- 301 redirect map protecting all indexed SEO rankings
- Checkout customisations migrated from Scripts to Shopify Functions
Salesforce Commerce Cloud → Shopify Plus
Heavy SI dependency, highest per-change costThese are the migrations where we most often hear "we never fully got the value we paid for." The platform is capable, but implementation is expensive, ongoing cost is high, and the cartridge-based architecture means even routine changes require Salesforce-certified developers. The rebuild is often an opportunity, not just a cost.
What moves to Shopify
- Pricing and promotional logic rebuilt as Shopify Functions
- Checkout rebuilt via Shopify Checkout Extensibility (Plus)
- Customer data and full order history
- A/B testing and personalisation — now native in Shopify Spring '26
- Business intelligence and analytics integrations
- Storefront rebuilt on Shopify Liquid or Hydrogen
SAP Commerce Cloud → Shopify Plus
Commerce layer moves; SAP ERP staysSAP migrations are their own category. The commerce layer and the ERP are deeply coupled, and the right answer is almost never to rip and replace everything at once. What works is moving the storefront to Shopify while keeping SAP doing what it is genuinely good at, and rebuilding the integration layer between them.
What moves to Shopify
- Commerce storefront — SAP ERP stays intact
- Real-time inventory sync rebuilt via SAP Integration Suite
- Customer-specific pricing via Shopify B2B price lists
- Order writeback to SAP ERP rebuilt via API
- Product data from SAP or connected PIM (Akeneo, Contentful)
- Headless option: Hydrogen on Next.js for maximum performance
commercetools → Shopify Plus
Maximum flexibility became maximum overheadThe pitch for commercetools was composability: maximum flexibility, everything headless, the API as the product. For businesses without deep technical resources in-house, what they got instead was maximum complexity. The frontend is often worth preserving, and Shopify Hydrogen, which now runs on any JavaScript framework including Next.js, can protect that investment.
What moves to Shopify
- Custom product types mapped to Shopify metafields & metaobjects
- Discount engine rebuilt as Shopify Functions
- Existing headless frontend preserved on Shopify Hydrogen
- Search (Algolia, Constructor) reconnected to Storefront API
- Customer data and cart history
- Pricing rules rebuilt as Shopify price lists
WooCommerce → Shopify
Most common migration we run — fastest to completeMore migrations come from WooCommerce than from any other platform, and the pattern is almost always the same. It worked well until it did not. A plugin update broke something, then two more things. Performance degraded as the catalogue grew. These are typically our fastest migrations.
What moves to Shopify
- Full product catalogue — transformed from WordPress post/meta model
- Customer accounts and order history
- WordPress blog content preserved
- Yoast SEO settings and URL structure mapped to 301 redirects
- Plugin functionality replaced with Shopify apps or Functions
- Payment gateway reconfigured (Shopify Payments or existing PSP)
BigCommerce → Shopify Plus
SaaS-to-SaaS — lowest migration riskThis is the most straightforward migration we handle, because both are modern SaaS platforms. The reasons businesses move are usually specific: a larger app ecosystem, better checkout conversion, and a more capable native B2B offering, now free on all plans after Spring '26.
What moves to Shopify
- Full product catalogue, customer data, order history via API migration
- Multi-currency and multi-language via Shopify Markets
- Custom pricing logic rebuilt using Shopify Price Lists and Functions
- Stencil templates rebuilt on Shopify Liquid or Hydrogen
- Apps and integrations switched to Shopify equivalents
- B2B configuration migrated to Shopify's native B2B
Custom / Bespoke Platform → Shopify Plus
Discovery-first approach; most variable complexityThese are the migrations we find most interesting, and the most variable. Every custom platform is different, and what makes them work is investing properly in discovery before writing a single line of code. Once the data model is mapped, the migration itself is usually less complicated than it looks from the outside.
What moves to Shopify
- Product data extracted from custom database via bespoke migration scripts
- Customer and order data migrated with full history
- Business logic rebuilt using Shopify Functions, metafields, and apps
- Integrations rebuilt against existing back-office systems
- Storefront rebuilt — often the most visible improvement
- Documentation created throughout — future-proofing the new platform
What Platforms Actually Cost to Run
The running cost of an ecommerce platform, covering license, hosting, development, and maintenance, varies enormously by platform. The figures below are representative annual ranges for a mid-market operation.
Source: representative industry ranges based on Royal Cyber client engagements and published Shopify TCO research. Individual costs vary significantly based on team size, catalogue complexity, and integration requirements.
What Good Migration Looks Like
The technical side of migration is rarely what goes wrong. What goes wrong is misaligned expectations and undocumented integrations that surface late. Our process is built to find those things before they become problems.
Migration Readiness Assessment
We audit your platform, data, integrations, and SEO footprint before anything moves. You receive a Migration Readiness Scorecard: what needs to move, in what order, at what risk level.
Migration Planning
A phased roadmap, a parallel build, and a 301 redirect map. Your existing store stays live throughout. No downtime, no dark period for your customers.
Build & Data Migration
Full product catalogue, customers, order history, integrations. Custom migration scripts for each data type. Zero data loss.
Testing & Go Live
End-to-end QA, performance benchmarking, Core Web Vitals check. Blue/green cutover: DNS switches in minutes, not hours.
30-Day Hypercare
We stay on through your first month of trading, not to fix problems that should not exist, but to optimise performance and support your team.
Three Tiers, One Starting Point
Every migration begins with a free Readiness Assessment, and that is what determines which tier fits your situation.
Tier | Best for | Typical timeline | Complexity |
|---|---|---|---|
Bronze | WooCommerce, BigCommerce, simple custom builds | 6 to 12 weeks | Low to Medium |
Silver | commercetools, mid-market Adobe/WooCommerce, B2B requirements | 3 to 4 months | Medium to High |
Gold | SFCC, SAP, enterprise Adobe Commerce, complex ERP integrations | 4 to 8 months | High to Very High |
Conclusion: One Question Worth Sitting With
If your platform disappeared tomorrow and you had to rebuild from scratch, with the same team, the same budget, and the same goals, would you choose the same platform again? Most people pause before answering, and that pause is usually the answer.
The barriers that once made replatforming feel risky have largely fallen away. The functionality is there, the cost case is clear, and the migration process is well understood when it is run by a team that has done it many times.
As a Shopify Plus Partner with more than twenty years of enterprise experience and over 500 enterprise customers, Royal Cyber runs migrations from every major platform with a phased approach, zero data loss, and no downtime on go-live day. Our job is to make the move feel less like a leap and more like a planned, measurable step forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Your existing store stays live throughout the build, and the cutover uses a blue/green DNS switch that completes in minutes. A full 301 redirect map is prepared in advance to protect indexed URLs and preserve SEO equity, so rankings carry across rather than reset.
It depends entirely on your current platform and complexity. WooCommerce and BigCommerce moves often complete in six to twelve weeks, while enterprise Adobe, SFCC, and SAP migrations run three to eight months or longer. The free Readiness Assessment gives you a firm timeline before any commitment.
All of it moves. Product catalogs, customer accounts, full order history, and back-office integrations are migrated using custom scripts written for each data type, with zero data loss as the standard. Existing ERP, PIM, and payment connections are rebuilt against Shopify’s APIs.
Royal Cyber is a Shopify Plus Partner with more than twenty years of enterprise delivery experience and over 500 enterprise customers. We have migrated businesses off Adobe, SFCC, SAP, commercetools, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and bespoke platforms, and we back every project with a structured, phased process and a 30-day hypercare period after go-live.
Yes. Complex, integration-heavy migrations are our core strength. We rebuild checkout logic from deprecated Shopify Scripts to Shopify Functions, reconnect ERP and PIM systems through the integration layer, and handle deeply coupled SAP and Salesforce environments with a discovery-first, phased approach that keeps your business running throughout.
Author
Practice Lead- Shopify
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