Magento multi-store to Shopify: how the migration works

Magento's multi-store architecture — one database, multiple websites and storefronts — is one of the most powerful things about the platform and one of the trickiest things to migrate off. There is no Shopify equivalent of a Magento multi-store setup. What you get on Shopify is different: either separate stores (separate admin panels, separate Stripe connections, separate app installs) or Shopify Markets (one store, multiple regions with localised pricing and language).

If your Magento install has more than one store, you need to make a decision before the migration starts. This guide explains what the options are and how Move to Shopify handles each one.

What Magento multi-store actually looks like

Magento's hierarchy is: Website → Store → Store View.

• A website has its own root category, its own customer account scope, and its own pricing. It is effectively a separate catalogue that happens to share the same Magento installation.
• A store lives inside a website and sets the root category.
• A store view is a presentation layer on top of a store — typically used for language variants (English/French, for example) or for A/B testing different site designs.

The most common multi-store configurations we see:

1. One Magento install, two countries. A merchant with a UK store and a DE store sharing one database. Different prices, different currencies, different catalogues (or a shared catalogue with market-specific pricing).
2. One Magento install, one catalogue, multiple language views. Products are the same; each store view presents them in a different language with translated attributes.
3. One Magento install, several brands. A parent company runs multiple brands on a single Magento instance. Entirely separate catalogues, customers, and order histories.

Move to Shopify's default wizard is designed for a single storefront migration: one Magento store into one new Shopify store. Multi-store migrations require a brief scoping conversation first. Use the Notes for the migration field on Step 3 of the wizard to describe your setup — we will reply within a business day before starting anything.

Option 1: Separate Shopify stores

If the Magento websites have genuinely different catalogues, different customer bases, or different brand identities, the right answer is usually separate Shopify stores.

What this means in practice:

• Each brand or regional store gets its own Shopify store, its own <name>.myshopify.com subdomain, and its own Shopify subscription.
• We run a separate migration for each Magento website or store scope. For Move to Shopify's €129 fixed pricing, that is €129 per destination Shopify store.
• Each store has its own product catalogue, customer base, and order history.

This is the clean option. The migration is straightforward for each store in isolation. The cost is proportional to the number of stores.

When this is the right call:

• The stores have different catalogue structures.
• The stores have different customer bases with no overlap.
• The stores have different Stripe accounts or payment providers.
• The brand identities are distinct enough to warrant separate Shopify Admin panels.

Option 2: One Shopify store with Markets

If the Magento stores share a catalogue and differ mainly by language and regional pricing — the localised-storefront model — the right destination is a single Shopify store using Shopify Markets.

Shopify Markets allows one store to present different currencies, languages, and domain names to customers in different regions. It requires the Shopify plan or above (no Plus required for basic Markets functionality, but Plus adds the multi-language storefront capability).

What this means in practice:

• We migrate the catalogue from one Magento store view (usually the default store view) into one Shopify store.
• Translated content from other store views goes into Shopify's translation layer (via the Shopify Translate and Adapt app, or a third-party translation app).
• Pricing rules for different markets are configured in Shopify Markets after migration.
• URL redirects are created for every store view's URL structure, pointing to the correct Shopify URL.

When this is the right call:

• The store views share a product catalogue — the same SKUs with translated titles and descriptions.
• Regional pricing is a markup or markdown on a shared base price, not a completely different price list.
• The merchant wants one admin panel, one order stream, one customer base.

Option 3: Extracting one store view from a multi-store install

In some cases, a merchant running multi-store just wants to migrate one of those stores to Shopify and leave the rest on Magento for now.

This is straightforward. Use the Notes for the migration field in the wizard to specify the store_id or store view code you want extracted. We filter extraction to that store view only — other stores on the same install are untouched.

Common reasons:

• Shutting down one regional brand and moving it to Shopify while keeping the main Magento install running.
• A phased migration: migrate one brand at a time over several months.

How to tell us what you need

When you fill in the wizard on /start?source=magento, use the Notes for the migration field on Step 3 to describe your multi-store setup. A useful note looks like:

Two Magento websites in the same install: store_id=1 (UK, English, GBP) and store_id=2 (DE, German, EUR). Separate catalogues with about 20% product overlap. Want two separate Shopify stores.

Or:

Single catalogue, three store views: English, French, and Dutch. Shared products with translated attribute data. Want one Shopify store with Markets for each region.

We read every note before starting. For multi-store setups we will reply within one business day to confirm the plan and ask any clarifying questions before the build kicks off.

What does not change because of multi-store

• The €129 pricing is per destination Shopify store. Multiple stores means multiple payments, each charged only when you accept and transfer that store.
• The staging review process is the same for each store.
• Redirect handling works the same way: we capture every URL pattern from the relevant store view and create 301 redirects to the Shopify destination.

If you have several Magento brands or installs that need regular re-migration (brand portfolio, agency account), the self-serve Graftport platform is built for exactly that — multi-brand accounts, reusable mapping templates, parallel runs.

Next step

Fill in the wizard and describe your setup in the notes field. We will be in touch within a business day to confirm the plan.

Start your migration at /start?source=magento

Related reading:

• How to migrate from Magento to Shopify with Move to Shopify
• What does not migrate from Magento to Shopify