When should I migrate?
When platform and transaction fees pass roughly $30K to $50K a year, when your checkout blocks revenue you cannot capture, or when you need custom B2B or integration logic.
Guide · By Rowland Saer · October 23, 2026
Shopify Plus or Magentoto MedusaA decision guide
When to migrate, what moves, and how a phased migration keeps your store selling.
- Phased: the live store keeps selling
- SEO redirects tested before cutover
- 30 days of post-launch support
In 60 seconds
When should I stay?
Stay on Shopify Plus if you must launch in weeks with no engineering team, or if your fees sit well under $30K a year.
Stay or migrate
Four signs it is time
to move
The tradeoff is real: Medusa gives you control, and you need engineering capacity to use it.
Fees pass $30K to $50K a year
Platform plus transaction fees at that level usually justify the engineering cost of owning the stack.
The checkout blocks revenue
Custom pricing, B2B terms or regional rules that the platform and its apps cannot cover.
You need deep integrations
An ERP, PIM or marketplace logic that apps cannot cover.
You want to own the code
Control over the stack instead of renting a platform's limits.
What moves
What moves in a migration,
and what does not
Medusa's own Shopify migration tooling is mainly aimed at catalog data.
Catalog moves first
Products, variants, prices, images, inventory levels and collections.
First
Customers and orders follow
Possible extensions of the catalog import, planned separately.
Next
CSV import is lossy
Inventory quantities are not migrated and images stay as links to Shopify's CDN. The API-based path is re-runnable and handles both.
Know the limits
What no importer moves
Theme and storefront code, checkout logic, apps and their data, redirect rules, and order history your finance team needs.
Plan it
How it works
A phased migration
that keeps selling
Seeed ran this approach for Province Electric Supply, an electrical distributor that moved from Magento to Medusa with a direct DDI Advantix ERP integration and a central PIM.
01 / AUDIT
Audit
Map products, customers, orders, apps, integrations and URLs.
02 / MODEL
Model
Decide how your data fits Medusa, and which system owns each record.
03 / BUILD
Build
Stand up Medusa, a Next.js storefront and a CMS such as Payload or Builder.io next to the live store.
04 / INTEGRATE
Integrate
Connect payments, ERP and search, and test against sandboxes.
05 / VALIDATE
Run in parallel
Validate orders, taxes and SEO redirects before any traffic moves.
06 / LAUNCH
Cut over
Switch traffic, keep the old store available for fallback, and support the launch for 30 days.
$30K–50K
yearly fees where migrating starts to pay off
$20,000
where Seeed projects usually start
30 days
of post-launch support
FAQ
Common questions
How long does it take to migrate from Shopify Plus to Medusa?
It depends on integrations, data volume and the number of storefronts. Seeed scopes the timeline after an audit of your catalog, integrations and URLs, and runs the migration in phases so the live store keeps selling.
Will we lose SEO when we migrate?
Not if you plan redirects. A phased migration maps every old URL to its new one, tests the redirects in parallel and keeps the old store available for fallback during cutover.
What does Medusa's migration tooling cover?
Mainly catalog data: products, variants, prices, images, inventory and collections. Customers and orders are possible extensions. Storefront code, checkout logic and apps need separate work.
Can Medusa connect to Square?
Yes. Seeed maintains @weareseeed/medusa-square-plugin, a Medusa v2 plugin with bidirectional sync of catalog, customers and inventory, plus payments and OAuth.
Start with the audit
Scope drives cost and timeline, so we scope both after the audit. Seeed projects usually start at $20,000.
