Stay High had been on Magento 2 since 2020. The platform itself was technically fine — but Magento's total cost of ownership had crept up year over year in ways that were no longer defensible.

Hosting on Magento Cloud was running $3,800/month. The dedicated Magento developer retainer was $4,500/month. License fees and the various Magento-specific extensions added another $1,100/month. Total platform cost: $9,400/month, $112,800/year.

The B2B side of the business was the trickier piece. Stay High has about 200 wholesale buyers who order monthly. The B2B catalog ran on Magento's B2B module, which worked but required ongoing maintenance whenever Magento pushed updates. Three times in 2024, a Magento patch broke a B2B feature, requiring an emergency fix from their developer.

Marcus, the CTO, reached out in November 2024 after evaluating Shopify Plus over a long weekend. His specific concern: We have 8,000 SKUs and a B2B portal that 200 wholesale buyers depend on. The SEO traffic is 40% of our revenue. If migration breaks any of those three things, the business is in trouble.

We did a paid audit instead of the free version because the scope warranted it — Magento Plus migrations are complex enough that 30 minutes wasn't enough to give Marcus real confidence. The paid audit took 4 days, included a Magento data export review, and produced a 14-page migration plan with risk assessment.

Three big risks identified:

• SEO loss risk from 8,000 product URL changes. Magento's URL rewrites table had 11,400 entries (history of URL changes over 4 years). Every one needed a 301 redirect.
• B2B downtime risk. 200 wholesale buyers couldn't lose access during migration. We needed parallel-running B2B on Shopify Plus before cutover.
• Custom Magento extensions. Stay High had 7 custom-built Magento extensions, including a custom configurator for one product category. These needed to be rebuilt as Shopify apps or theme code.

The proposal: $48,000 fixed scope, 4 weeks, with a clause that we'd extend to 6 weeks at no additional cost if any of the three risks materialized. Marcus signed within 48 hours.

Week 2 ran three parallel tracks. Two devs worked on the Shopify Plus theme (Dawn fork with custom B2B sections). One dev rebuilt the Magento custom extensions as Shopify apps. The PM worked with Stay High's wholesale ops manager to map the 200 B2B accounts to Shopify Plus's B2B catalog system.

The custom configurator was the biggest lift. The Magento version used a custom database schema and JavaScript widget. We rebuilt it as a Shopify embedded app using Shopify Polaris and Shopify's App Bridge. The new version was 40% faster (because it ran on Shopify's infrastructure, not their hosting) and gave Stay High's team an admin UI for managing configurator rules without developer help.

Week 3 was data migration. 8,000 products, 14,000 variants (2,400 products had variant options), 45,000 customers, 280,000 orders going back 4 years. The AI-assisted migration scripts handled 92% of the data without manual intervention. The remaining 8% — mostly custom Magento attributes with edge-case data — required one-off Liquid filters.

The B2B catalog migration was the most interesting work. Magento's B2B module uses customer groups for pricing. Shopify Plus B2B uses catalogs. Same concept, different data model. We mapped 12 Magento customer groups to 12 Shopify B2B catalogs, including customer-specific price lists and net 60 payment terms.

We scheduled the cutover for Sunday at 6am ET — lowest traffic window. The DNS change took 7 minutes. By 7am the site was live on Shopify Plus.

The first 24 hours were tense for Marcus. We watched Google Search Console for indexation issues, monitored the order feed, and kept the B2B portal under close observation. Total launch-day issues: 4 redirects that hadn't mapped correctly (fixed within 30 minutes of detection), and one B2B customer whose custom price list had a typo (fixed in 10 minutes).

The SEO question was the big one. Conventional wisdom says migrations cause rankings to drop for 4-8 weeks before recovering. We had a different prediction: with the comprehensive 301 mapping and preserved metadata, rankings would recover within 2-3 weeks. We were right. Search Console showed full ranking recovery within 19 days of launch. Some product page rankings actually improved post-migration because Shopify's page speed beat Magento's.

The B2B migration taught us something we didn't fully appreciate going in. Magento's B2B module is feature-rich but complicated. Shopify Plus B2B is simpler but has fewer edge-case features. For Stay High, simpler was better — their wholesale ops manager learned the new system in two days, vs. the 3-week training their team had needed for Magento B2B four years earlier.

If we ran this project again, we'd run the B2B parallel-running period for an extra week. We had 200 wholesale buyers, and a small subset of them placed orders only once per quarter. About a dozen of them didn't place an order until 3 weeks post-launch — meaning issues for their specific accounts surfaced late. Future B2B migrations: 4 weeks of parallel running, not 2.

The other lesson: we under-priced the configurator app rebuild. We quoted it as included in the $48K fixed scope, but the actual development was closer to $18K of effort. We absorbed the difference because we'd committed to the price, but in future enterprise migrations we'll line-item custom app work separately from the migration itself.