Everyone wants to know what a migration costs.
The answer is always the same: it depends.
That is not a dodge. It genuinely depends on what you are migrating from, what you are migrating to, how much data you have, and what features you need.
But here is the reality of migration pricing and what actually drives the cost.
Why There Is No Fixed Price
A migration is not a commodity. It is not like buying a laptop where the price is fixed and everyone pays the same.
Every ecommerce business is different. Your data is structured differently. Your features are different. Your integrations are different. Your priorities are different.
A simple store with 500 products and no custom features takes a few weeks and costs a few thousand pounds.
A complex store with 50,000 products, B2B functionality, ERP integration, and custom checkout takes months and costs tens of thousands.
Anyone offering fixed-price migrations either has not looked at your store properly, or is planning to cut corners when the complexity becomes clear.
What Actually Drives Cost
Here are the main factors that affect migration cost:
Data Volume
More products, more customers, more orders means more time to migrate and test.
- 500 products: low cost
- 5,000 products: medium cost
- 50,000 products: high cost
Data Quality
Clean, well-structured data migrates quickly. Messy data with duplicates, missing fields, and inconsistencies needs cleaning first.
If your product data has inconsistent categories, missing images, incomplete descriptions, or duplicate SKUs, someone needs to clean that up. Either you do it manually or you pay someone to write scripts to clean it programmatically.
Custom Features
Standard ecommerce features (products, checkout, orders) are quick to migrate. Custom features (bespoke pricing, unusual checkout flows, custom integrations) take development time.
Each custom feature adds cost. Sometimes significantly.
Integrations
Does your store talk to other systems? ERP, warehouse management, accounting, email marketing, PIM?
Each integration needs reconfiguring on the new platform. Some are straightforward (modern APIs with good documentation). Some are complicated (legacy systems with no documentation).
Platform Complexity
Migrating from a simple platform to another simple platform is cheap. Migrating from a complex platform to a simple one requires rethinking how things work. Migrating from anything to a complex enterprise platform requires serious development.
Design Work
Are you keeping your existing design or rebuilding it? A like-for-like migration where you recreate the current design on the new platform is cheaper than a full redesign.
If you want a new design as part of the migration, that is a separate project and separate cost.
Testing Requirements
How thoroughly do you want things tested? Basic smoke testing is quick. Comprehensive testing of every feature, edge case, and integration takes time.
Most businesses need somewhere in the middle.
Realistic Price Ranges
Here are rough costs for different types of migration. These are UK prices and include data migration, setup, testing, and support. They do not include ongoing platform fees or apps.
Small, Simple Store
- 500 to 1,000 products
- Standard checkout
- No custom features
- Basic payment gateway
Cost: £3,000 to £6,000
Timeline: 4 to 6 weeks
Medium Complexity
- 5,000 to 10,000 products
- Some custom features
- 2 to 3 integrations (email, accounting)
- Customer accounts and order history
Cost: £8,000 to £15,000
Timeline: 8 to 12 weeks
High Complexity
- 20,000+ products
- Multiple custom features
- B2B functionality
- ERP or WMS integration
- Multi-warehouse
- Complex pricing or promotions
Cost: £20,000 to £50,000
Timeline: 16 to 24 weeks
Enterprise
- Massive product catalogue
- International stores
- Complex integrations
- Custom everything
- High-availability requirements
Cost: £50,000+
Timeline: 6 months or more
These are estimates. Your actual cost depends on your specific requirements.
What Is Included?
A proper migration should include:
- Discovery and planning
- Data mapping and migration
- Theme setup or development
- Integration configuration
- URL redirects for SEO
- Testing (checkout, payments, integrations)
- Team training
- Post-launch support
If someone quotes you a price and any of these are missing, ask why.
What Is Not Included?
These costs usually do not include:
- Ongoing platform fees (Shopify subscription, etc)
- Monthly app costs
- Content creation (rewriting product descriptions, photography)
- Major design changes beyond recreating what you have
- Additional custom development after launch
- Ongoing support beyond the initial post-launch period
Make sure you understand what is and is not included in any quote.
The Cheap Option Trap
You will find agencies offering migrations for £1,500 to £2,000.
These are not real migrations. They are automated data imports with minimal setup and no proper testing.
What you actually get:
- Products imported (but probably with errors)
- Basic theme setup
- No custom feature replication
- Minimal testing
- No post-launch support
When things go wrong (and they will), you are on your own.
Then you pay another agency to fix the problems, and the total cost ends up higher than if you had done it properly in the first place.
The Enterprise Option Trap
At the other end, enterprise agencies will quote you £100,000 for a migration that should cost £20,000.
Why? Because enterprise projects are priced based on what they think you can afford, not what the work actually costs.
You get excellent project management, detailed documentation, and lots of meetings. But the actual technical work is often the same.
There is a middle ground. Experienced developers who know what they are doing but do not have the overhead of a big agency.
How To Get a Realistic Quote
Do not accept a quote over email without discovery.
A proper quote needs:
- Someone to look at your current platform
- Review your data structure
- Understand your custom features
- List your integrations
- Discuss your requirements
- Assess the risks
Only then can they give you an accurate quote.
If someone quotes you without this, they are guessing. And when they discover the actual complexity, the price will go up.
When Price Should Not Be The Main Factor
If your store does £500,000 a year, a £10,000 migration is 2% of annual revenue. If it protects your SEO, preserves your customer data, and keeps you trading throughout, it is cheap.
A £2,000 migration that loses you a month of sales, tanks your SEO, and requires another £5,000 to fix is expensive.
Do not optimise for the lowest quote. Optimise for the lowest risk.
What To Do Next
Start with discovery. Get someone to assess your current setup properly and give you a realistic quote based on what is actually involved.
Budget more than you think you need. Migrations always reveal unexpected complexity.
And remember that the cheapest option is rarely the best value.
Need help with your migration? Our Platform Migration Service starts with a thorough discovery phase so you get an accurate quote based on what you actually need. Book a call and we will give you an honest assessment.
