Technical Migration Guide: Adobe Commerce to Shopify

Adobe Commerce to Shopify: How to Achieve Faster Growth and Lower Overhead

The mounting complexity of Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) is forcing technical leaders into a critical decision: invest heavily in platform overhaul or migrate to a more agile, high-performance solution like Shopify. For many scaling brands, the growing infrastructure burden, upgrade fatigue, and integration overhead have made migration to Shopify not just attractive, but necessary. This guide focuses on executing a successful migration, including core architecture trade-offs and a step-by-step execution framework.

Why Migrate from Adobe Commerce to Shopify: Time and Technical Overhead

For technical decision-makers, the transition offers a compelling answer to the timeline pressure of seeing ROI. Migrating involves trading some low-level control for managed infrastructure, leading to a significantly reduced operational burden. This results in faster release cycles and less time spent maintaining environments.

Estimated Migration Windows

Among enterprise brands, even extremely customized Adobe Commerce estates can usually be migrated to Shopify in nine months or less. Mid-market to large brands typically complete the transition in three to six months.

DevOps Workflow Shift

The shift to Shopify necessitates adopting new patterns for development, deployment, and QA. In Adobe Commerce Cloud, teams follow a mandatory “Integration -> Staging -> Production” pipeline, which can become a bottleneck due to environment merges and patch overload.

• Adobe Commerce Model: Requires pushing code to a Git repository, triggering builds and deployments across multiple environments (integration, staging, production). Teams must manually configure environment relationships, variables, and service-scaling options.
• Shopify Model: Eliminates server management and autoscales behind the scenes. Deployment involves pushing theme changes, custom apps, or headless storefronts via the Shopify CLI and version control. This reduces environment-level testing of server capacity and streamlines build/merge cycles.
• CI/CD: While Adobe Commerce has a built-in environment pipeline you are obligated to follow, Shopify pushes you to create your own staging or development setup (via dev stores or unpublished theme branches).

Shopify’s Answer to Complex B2B

Shopify Plus offers a dedicated B2B on Shopify feature set designed for enterprise requirements. These features can replicate or extend the complex quoting and unique workflows handled by Adobe Commerce, leveraging the same admin panel for streamlined operations.

• Custom Price Lists: Assign distinct price tiers to specific companies or groups.
• Net Payment Terms: Offer payment schedules such as Net 30 or Net 60 directly through the Shopify admin.
• Company Profiles: Associate multiple buyers with a single company and control permissions for purchasing or payment.
• Custom Logic: Extend complex purchase flows using Shopify Functions for custom discount logic, shipping rules, or checkout enhancements. You can also build custom apps or use a headless approach for advanced quoting, RFP processes, or multi-level approval workflows.

The Crucial Data Transition: Flattening EAV

Adobe Commerce retains a data model that is complex due to the large number of tables and the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) approach for products. The core challenge of migration is systematically flattening these EAV attributes into Shopify’s simpler product schema (products, variants, and metafields).

Understanding EAV vs. Shopify Data Structure

In Adobe Commerce’s EAV model, product attributes are stored across separate tables based on data type (varchar, int, decimal, text). For example, a simple hoodie product might have its name stored in catalog_product_entity_varchar, material details in catalog_product_entity_text, and price in catalog_product_entity_decimal. This creates multiple table joins just to retrieve basic product information.

Shopify simplifies this with a flat structure where a product contains core fields (title, description, price) plus variants for different options (size, color) and metafields for custom data. This eliminates complex joins and improves performance while maintaining flexibility.

Practical Data Mapping Steps

• Inventory all attributes: Export your EAV attributes and categorize them as critical, variant-worthy, or metafield candidates
• Consolidate overlapping attributes: Standardize multiple “Color” or “Material” attributes into unified fields
• Create mapping documentation: Specify exactly where each Adobe Commerce attribute maps in Shopify (title, vendor, metafield, variant, etc.)
• Transform and load: Use ETL processes or custom scripts with Shopify’s GraphQL Admin API to migrate the flattened data
• Complex attributes (like size and color) that were stored separately in EAV must be flattened into Shopify’s product options and variants, which generate automatically.
• The migration phase is a critical opportunity to prune or consolidate redundant or unused legacy attributes, streamlining the new store’s data structure.

A 4-Phase Migration Framework

Successful Adobe Commerce to Shopify migrations follow a proven four-phase approach that minimizes risk while maximizing speed to market.

• Superior Scalability: Shopify powers high-volume enterprises globally, automatically scaling to handle traffic spikes with ease and without the manual server management and tuning often required by Adobe Commerce.
• Reliable Infrastructure: Provides 99.9% historical uptime, with automatic scaling and a Global CDN built-in for fast load times and reliability across regions.
• Faster Feature Deployment: Because custom apps and the front end are isolated from Shopify core updates, teams gain faster release cycles. This reduces time to market for new features compared to the multi-environment branching model in Adobe Commerce.
• Reduced Overhead: Shopify’s managed approach substantially cuts down on dev hours spent on routine patches, environment troubleshooting, and hotfixes, reducing maintenance costs.

Migrating from Adobe Commerce to Shopify is not just about changing platforms; it’s about building a stronger, more flexible foundation for your brand. It creates opportunities to remove workarounds, unlock scalability, and give your team a true competitive edge.

If you’re ready to learn more about migrating from Adobe Commerce to Shopify, contact Ecommerce Partners today to execute your transition quickly and confidently.