The biggest cost of migrating a store is not the invoice for the move, but what you can lose when it is done carelessly. I hear “what does migrating an online store cost” most often from owners whose subscription platform has started to weigh on them: fees grow with sales, and the room to change anything runs out. The honest answer is this - the move itself is a countable, one-off expense, while the real risk sits elsewhere: in traffic from Google and in continuity of sales. Let us take both apart.
What the cost of migrating a store to another platform is made of
A migration is not “copying the store”, it is five separate jobs, each with its own weight in the quote:
- Moving the data - products with variants (sizes, colours) and images, the customer base, the order history. That is the foundation: if something is lost here, the rest does not matter.
- Design - recreating the current look on the new platform or, more often, a new design. If you are moving, it is usually because the old store was limiting you in something - visually included.
- Integrations from scratch - payments, couriers and parcel lockers, accounting, possibly stock. You cannot take plugins from the old platform with you; every integration is connected and tested again.
- URL mapping and 301 redirects - every old product, category and post address has to point to its new equivalent. An unremarkable line on the list, and yet it decides whether Google finds its way around the new store.
- Testing the whole purchase path - from landing on a product page, through cart and payment, to the confirmation email and the courier label. Only that closes the job.
What the migration price depends on
Where a specific store lands within the brackets is settled in practice by four things:
- The number of products and variants - a few dozen products move differently from a few thousand items with variants and individual photos.
- The source platform - exports from subscription platforms are often incomplete: some data (order history or custom fields, for instance) does not come out of the system directly and has to be extracted with workarounds.
- The number of integrations - every payment gateway, every carrier and every external system is a separate configuration and a separate test.
- Design: move it or design it - recreating the existing look is cheaper, a new design for the brand is more expensive, but it is often the very reason for the move.
As for indicative market reality in Poland (not a price list): migrating a small store is usually around 3,000-15,000 PLN, depending on the product count and integrations. On my side, projects run fixed-bid, typically around 5,000-10,000 PLN net - with a specific written quote before the start, no hourly billing and no surprises along the way.
What helps: before you ask for a quote, write down three things: how many products you have (and whether they have variants), which platform you are leaving, and which integrations you use - payments, couriers, accounting. With that list, the first quote you get will be accurate rather than approximate.
Migrating from a hosted platform to WooCommerce - the most common scenario
In Polish reality I most often move stores off Shoper - a good platform to start on, but the subscription and commissions grow with sales, and access to your own code is limited. The technical trap is that the export does not map one to one: variant structures, descriptions and customer data need mapping into WooCommerce’s format, not simply loading a file. The whole process - what comes out of the export, what has to be worked around and in what order - I set out in a separate piece: migrating from Shoper step by step.
Does migration lose Google rankings - the biggest hidden cost
Here is the answer to why the cheapest offer is sometimes the most expensive. A store that has spent years collecting traffic from Google has that traffic tied to specific page URLs. Changing platform almost always means changing URLs - and if nobody prepares a redirect map, Google lands on hundreds of non-existent pages. Traffic you worked years for can collapse in a few weeks, and rebuilding takes far longer than the migration itself.
The good news: that risk is controllable - with URL mapping, redirects and a post-launch check. How to do it properly I described in the piece on migrating without losing your Google rankings. If you remember one sentence from this article, make it this one: in a migration, the “301 redirects” line on the quote matters more than the colour of the buttons.
How long a migration takes and how to spot somebody competent
A typical store migration takes me 4-6 weeks. And what matters more than the deadline is how those weeks look:
- The new store is built on staging - a working copy at a separate address, invisible to customers and Google.
- The old store keeps selling normally throughout the build - nothing changes for customers until the switch day.
- The switch is one agreed moment: the domain swap, syncing the last orders, enabling the redirects. Zero interruption in sales.
If somebody proposes “we will switch the store off for the move” - that is a red flag. Every day of downtime is genuinely lost orders and no gain from a new platform makes it back.
When a migration is worth it at all
Simple arithmetic: add up the annual platform subscription, sales commissions and fees for extra modules. If that sum approaches or exceeds the cost of building your own store, migration stops being an expense and starts being an investment that closes, because WooCommerce takes no commission on your orders. I break down the full picture on the other side - what and how much a store of your own costs - in the piece on what a WooCommerce store costs. And if you want to see how I approach e-commerce stores in general, everything is there: from design to post-launch support.
Frequently asked questions
How long does an online store migration take? Typically 4-6 weeks, depending on product count and integrations. Throughout that time the old store works and sells normally.
Does migrating a store lose Google rankings? It does not have to - provided a full map of old and new URLs is created along with 301 redirects. That is the single most important technical element of the whole move and the first thing worth asking about in a quote.
What happens to orders and customers during a migration? The order history and customer base move to the new store. The one snag: customer passwords cannot be moved between platforms, so on first login the customer sets a new one - worth warning them with a short email.
Does the store stop working during migration? No. The new store is built on a working copy while the old one sells until the switch day - a well-run migration happens with no interruption to sales.
On Shopify, PrestaShop or a local SaaS and thinking about moving? I run migrations to WooCommerce without losing search positions and without pausing sales. Describe the store and you will get a quote with a date.