Migrating an Online Store from Shopify to Seo-Gen CMS
Store owners usually start thinking about leaving Shopify when monthly bills for the plan and apps keep growing, while the store needs Ukrainian and English versions, email on its own domain and full access to SEO settings. Shopify remains a convenient platform for getting started, and it makes sense to move away from it once its structure starts getting in the way of selling in your own market.
When does it make sense to leave Shopify?
The Seo-Gen team migrates stores from Shopify to Seo-Gen CMS by hand: the catalog, collections, product pages, images, copy, meta tags and a one-to-one copy of the design. Seo-Gen CMS has no automatic import from Shopify, so everything that moves and every acceptable difference from the original is listed in the estimate up front, and we prepare 301 redirects for the old URLs.
The reasons to move are almost always financial or organizational: the store has grown, and with it the subscriptions, fees and number of third-party services needed for everyday tasks. Below are four situations where a migration from Shopify usually pays off, and for each one we show how the same task works in Seo-Gen CMS.
The Shopify details below come from its Help Center and pricing page as of September 2026, so compare them with your own plan before deciding. If none of these situations applies to your store, there is no reason to move yet, and we will tell you so during the consultation.
Plans, apps and transaction fees
Shopify charges a monthly fee for its plan, and the plan you choose sets both the feature set and the subscription amount. When a store accepts payments through third-party payment providers, a transaction fee is added on top, and its rate also depends on the plan.
Shopify publishes the amounts for each plan on its pricing page and changes them from time to time, so the exact figures for your store are best checked there. For a decision about moving, it matters more to understand what makes up the monthly bill, and below we cover two items on top of the plan itself.
Transaction fees for a Ukrainian store
Shopify's own payment service, Shopify Payments, does not list Ukraine among its supported countries, so a Ukrainian store accepts payments through third-party providers. That means a transaction fee is charged on every sale on top of the plan fee, and the rate of that fee depends on the chosen plan.
The bigger the turnover, the more visible this item becomes in the store's total bill, so it is worth budgeting for it separately. A Seo-Gen CMS subscription is counted per site from UAH 990 a month, with the final amount set by how large the site is and which features it uses.
Apps on top of the plan
Apps come on top of the plan: the Shopify Help Center describes monthly subscriptions, usage-based charges and one-time purchases. The apps themselves are built by third-party developers, and refunds for them are handled through those developers as well.
Translations, domain email, forms and SEO tools are built into Seo-Gen CMS itself, and what exactly goes into your plan is confirmed at signup. Which tasks of your installed apps the system core takes over is shown below in a separate table in the section about apps.
Language versions with their own values
According to the Shopify Help Center, a store can sell in up to twenty languages on regular plans and up to thirty on Shopify Plus, while translations are added through the Translate & Adapt app, third-party apps or a CSV upload. For a store that works in Ukrainian, Russian and English, that means a separate translation workflow and constant checks that every language version has received its own copy.
In Seo-Gen CMS, three languages are built into the core, and each language has its own copy, its own field values and its own Title, Description and H1 meta tags. The system outputs hreflang markup between language versions automatically, so Ukrainian-speaking shoppers see the Ukrainian page in search without manual edits to the theme template.
What does a Shopify migration include?
Our specialists move the store by hand, page by page and catalog section by catalog section, and compare every product page with the original before launch. This kind of Shopify migration to another platform touches everything shoppers see and search engines take into account, and we record the exact list for your store and acceptable differences in the estimate after the audit.
| On Shopify | In Seo-Gen CMS |
|---|---|
| Products | Product pages with name, description, photos, brand, SKU, barcode, price, currency and availability |
| Collections | Catalog categories with the same nesting and order |
| Variants, product details and filters | Their scope and look on product pages and in the catalog are agreed during the audit |
| Images | Media library with crops for different screens and a zoomable product gallery |
| Pages | Pages built from blocks in the editor |
| Blog | Posts with categories, tags and authors |
| SEO title and SEO description | Title, Description and H1 for every page and every language |
| Theme | One-to-one design: header, footer, blocks, fonts, colors, mobile version |
| Customers and order history | Moved after the audit, with scope and format recorded in the estimate |
When I prepare redirects for a store leaving Shopify, I first export the old redirects and the full URL list from the admin, then look separately for links to products inside collections, which are easy to miss. Right after the domain switch I check the most visited product pages and collections by hand: where the old URL leads, what response code it returns and whether the Title matches. This makes it easier to keep SEO intact and to find the cause quickly if a page slips in the first weeks.
How does migration from Shopify to Seo-Gen CMS work?
The move happens in steps, and each step ends with a check whose result the store owner sees and approves. Until the domain switch shoppers order on Shopify, and the new site opens to them complete, with no empty sections or unfinished pages.
We name the timeline together with the estimate, because it depends on how many products, collections and languages the store has and how complex the theme is. This is also the core of our Shopify migration service: a fixed order of work that runs from the first audit to the domain switch.
Store audit and estimate
First we study the whole store: collections and their nesting, product pages with variants, content pages, the blog, the theme, language versions and installed apps. Along the way we build a table of URLs with meta tags and flag the product pages and collections that shoppers reach from search and external links.
The post-audit estimate is split into four lists: one-to-one elements, parts rebuilt from blocks, apps replaced by the system core, and places where the result may differ from the original. You pay this amount once, and you choose the subscription plan yourself and pay for it separately from the migration.
Catalog, pages and blog
We fill in Seo-Gen CMS product pages from the export and the live store pages: name, description, photos, brand, SKU, barcode, price with currency and availability. Shopify collections become catalog categories, and product details and variants go onto the product page in the way we agreed during the audit.
We build content pages from blocks in the editor, move blog posts together with their categories, tags and authors, and upload images to the media library. For every page and every language we fill in the Title, Description and H1 right away, so that no page on the new site is left with empty meta tags.
One-to-one store design
We reproduce the look of the store one to one: the header, footer, menu, home page blocks, product pages, fonts, colors and mobile version. We rebuild the Shopify theme with Seo-Gen CMS tools and compare it with the original page by page on desktop and phone screens.
Colors, fonts and themes are stored in a design system with an edit history, and the mobile and tablet breakpoints are set for the specific store. Global zones hold the header, footer and 404 page, so a new menu link or footer banner added once shows up across the whole store right away.
Cart, orders and payment
After the move the store runs on Seo-Gen CMS with a categorized catalog, product pages, a cart and checkout, while the manager handles incoming orders in the admin panel. The manager is notified of each new order by email and in Telegram, and the shopper can pay for the purchase online.
We agree payment and delivery methods for the new store during the audit, so that shoppers place orders after the move in the same familiar way. Past orders from Shopify and the customer base can also be moved, and the audit sets the scope of this data.
What we actually did
Dental clinic · Kyiv and Chernihiv
+44% clicks from search
A domain with no history and a site on a website builder. We built the semantic core for both cities, reworked the landing pages and built the link profile from zero. In four months: 34.8k clicks, impressions 1.32 → 1.76M, DR 0 → 41.
E-commerce · international
+96% clicks in two months
A catalog of digital 3D models. We clustered the semantics, rebuilt the hub pages and fixed duplicates and indexing errors. Google users 247 → 532, CTR 2.4% → 4%.
Medical center · Ukraine
+68.75% visibility in the first month
Narrow visibility and a small semantic core at the start. Semantics, landing page structure, metadata and internal linking, then gradual link building.
How much does it cost to migrate a store from Shopify?
A manual Shopify store migration with a one-to-one design starts at UAH 25,000, and the final sum depends on what the audit shows. Four things drive the cost: how big the catalog is, how complex the theme is, how many languages the store has and how long the redirect map gets.
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Shopify store migration, one to one | from UAH 25,000, final price by estimate |
| Extra development beyond the estimate | UAH 600 per hour |
| Start subscription | from UAH 990 per month per site |
| Business subscription | from UAH 1,900 per month per site |
| Platform subscription | from UAH 4,500 per month for 5 sites |
You pay for the migration once, and the monthly subscription covers site hosting, scheduled backups, monitoring, support and all updates, security updates included. If you pay for a Seo-Gen CMS subscription a year ahead, it costs 20% less, while the price of the store migration stays the same.
Why move your store from Shopify to Seo-Gen CMS?
As a Shopify alternative, the system suits stores that sell in the Ukrainian market and want SEO, languages and email in one system with a clear subscription in hryvnias. SEO settings are part of the core here, and the store owner edits them without calling a developer and without buying extra modules.
Under the subscription, the agency looks after hosting, backups, updates and HTTPS on each domain, while ownership of the site data stays with the merchant. If you ever decide to leave Seo-Gen CMS too, you take your copy, URLs, images, meta tags, markup, redirects and form submissions in one export, and you pay nothing for it.
Send us your Shopify store address, and we will run an audit. In the estimate we will show the migration scope, the URL map and the final price.
Related services
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WordPress → Seo-Gen CMS
Migrate from WordPress to Seo-Gen CMS: page and design import, original URLs, 301 redirects, meta tags and canonical. SEO, forms and backups without plugins. From UAH 25,000.
Horoshop → Seo-Gen CMS
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Magento → Seo-Gen CMS
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Answers to your questions
Can a Shopify store be migrated automatically?
Seo-Gen CMS has no automatic import from Shopify, and the system offers such an import only for WordPress sites. Shopify replatforming to Seo-Gen CMS is done by our specialists by hand: the catalog, collections, product pages, content pages, blog, images, meta tags and design.
Manual migration lets us check every page with our own eyes and decide in advance how product variants and details will look on the new site. Your estimate lists the work for your particular store and any allowed deviations from the original before a single product page is moved.
Will rankings hold after a move from Shopify?
After a platform change, search engines recrawl product pages and collections, so short ranking fluctuations after a migration from Shopify are possible. To keep them from turning into a long drop, every URL under /products/ and /collections/ needs a match on the new site, and meta tags have to move over in full.
Right after launch we check the most visited product pages and collections, and then we monitor indexing and crawl errors for several weeks. A page that falls out of the index is looked up in the map, and its 301 rule is corrected in the admin without a developer.
What happens to /products/ and /collections/ URLs?
They enter the redirect map alongside the URLs of content pages, blog posts and products opened inside collections. For every old URL we set a new page on Seo-Gen CMS, and after the domain switch it returns a 301 redirect in a single hop.
A shopper who arrives through an old bookmark or external link lands on the same product page or the same category of the new site. The 301 code tells search engines that the page has moved for good, and after a while the new URL appears in results in place of the old one.
How can I export products from Shopify myself?
In the Shopify admin, open Products, click Export and choose all products or the part of the catalog you need, and the system will generate a CSV file. Large exports are emailed to the store owner, so check in advance that you have access to that mailbox.
Product images are not included in this file, and the SEO title and SEO description fields are filled in only where they were changed by hand. For the estimate, this export and the store address are usually enough for us, and we collect images and meta tags from the pages ourselves.
Can customers and order history be migrated?
Yes, the customer base and order history can be moved after the audit: Shopify exports them as CSV files, and we look at which fields they contain and what the store needs on the new site. Every store's exports are different, so we decide on moving them after the audit, together with the owner.
The estimate records which customer and order data moves to the new site, in what form, and what stays in the archive export only. Shopify does not include customer passwords in the export, so they cannot be moved, and we agree on this point in advance.
Can we keep selling on Shopify during the migration?
Yes, your Shopify sales continue normally during the whole project, and nothing has to be paused before the domain switch while the new site is built and tested alongside. We schedule the launch of the new site away from sales, seasonal peaks and big ad campaigns, so that the move does not coincide with a rush of shoppers.
It is worth keeping the Shopify subscription until the new site is live and the old URLs return redirects. Before closing the old store, the owner should save exports of products, customers, orders and redirects on their side.
Moving a store off Shopify makes sense when spending on the plan, apps and fees keeps rising, and the store needs its own language versions, domain email and full access to SEO settings. The Seo-Gen team moves the catalog, collections, pages, blog and design by hand, and a 301 redirect map keeps the old /products/ and /collections/ URLs working.
The migration starts at UAH 25,000, we fix the final price in the estimate after the audit, and the Seo-Gen CMS subscription is paid separately in hryvnias. All store data belongs to you throughout, and you can export it on any day without extra charges.
We reply within one business day. No newsletters, no “just a reminder” calls.
He will look at the site himself instead of passing it to a manager.
More on: Migrating an Online Store from Shopify to Seo-Gen CMS
Shopify URL structure and the 301 redirect map
Shopify URLs follow a rigid pattern: products always live under /products/, and the store's collections live under /collections/. The Shopify Help Center calls the /products, /collections and /collections/all paths fixed, and they cannot be reassigned inside the platform.
These URLs cannot be abandoned during a move, because search engines rank products and collections by them, and shoppers arrive through bookmarks and external links. That is why, before the migration, we collect every store URL in a spreadsheet and assign each one a new address on Seo-Gen CMS, and this spreadsheet becomes the redirect map.
Which URLs go into the redirect map?
The map includes every URL at which the store opens now or opened in the past, including redirects already created in Shopify itself. The Shopify Help Center allows exporting them as a CSV file, and we carry these old links over into the new map so that links earned over years of trading are not lost:
- product pages at URLs like /products/product-name;
- collections under /collections/ and the full product list at /collections/all;
- products opened inside a collection, at URLs like /collections/collection/products/product;
- content page URLs, such as the shipping, payment and contact pages;
- blog post URLs, including posts from every blog in the store;
- redirects already configured in the Shopify admin.
For each row of the map we set a new address, and pages without a match on the new site go to the closest relevant catalog section. We do not redirect all old URLs to the home page, because search engines treat such a redirect as a lost page and do not pass on its accumulated value.
How do we set up 301s and check them after launch?
Shopify redirects after migration are created right in the Seo-Gen CMS admin, so neither server access nor a paid app is needed for them. An old URL goes straight to the final page with no redirect chain, and all new URLs end with a slash, so spelling variants do not create duplicates.
For the domain, the system has an assistant for DNS records at the registrar, the HTTPS certificate is issued automatically, and after the switch we walk through the map row by row and look at the response code of each old URL. Next we open the new pages to review their Title, canonical URL and markup, and a button in the admin confirms domain ownership in search engines, which brings crawl and indexing errors into view immediately.
How do you export products from Shopify?
To export products from Shopify, open Products in the store admin, click Export and choose all products, the current page or a filtered list. The file comes as a CSV in UTF-8 encoding, and for large exports, for example all products or a product with more than a hundred variants, the finished file is emailed to the store owner.
The Shopify Help Center itself lists the limits of this export: product images are not included in the CSV file, and the SEO title and SEO description fields are filled in only where they were edited by hand. So we collect images from the store's pages separately and check meta tags against the live pages, so that no empty values end up on the new site.
Before the migration we ask the store owner to make several data exports in the Shopify admin. Our team uses them to prepare the estimate and decide what to move, and the owner keeps them as an archive for when the old store is closed:
- a CSV file with all products, variants and stock levels;
- a customer export with names, emails, phone numbers and addresses;
- an order export together with transaction history;
- a CSV file with redirects from the Shopify admin;
- a list of installed apps and the tasks they handle.
Using these files, we can move past orders and the customer list to the new site, and their scope and format are settled after the audit and spelled out in the estimate. Shopify leaves customer passwords out of the customer export, and we discuss this point with the owner separately.
Which Shopify app tasks does the Seo-Gen CMS core cover?
In a Shopify store, some everyday features, from translations to forms, are added through separate apps. During the audit we go through the list of installed apps and check for each one whether Seo-Gen CMS itself handles the same task without a separate subscription.
| Store task | How Seo-Gen CMS handles it |
|---|---|
| Ukrainian and English translations | Three languages in the core, each with its own copy, values and meta tags |
| Domain email | Receiving mail in the admin panel, sending from the domain address, mailboxes and an email log |
| Forms and inquiries | Forms on pages and in pop-ups, notifications by email and in Telegram |
| Newsletters | Subscribers and newsletters with delivery, open, click and unsubscribe statistics |
| Product markup | Product and Offer structured data, Schema.org and an organization profile |
| SEO checks | Detection of duplicates, broken links, broken images and empty URLs |
| Backups | Scheduled backups and restore |
| Customer contact | A dedicated Telegram bot for every site |
Email on your store's domain
Shopify creates addresses on the store's domain only as forwarding, and messages land in a mailbox hosted by a third-party email service such as Gmail or Outlook. You cannot reply to a customer from your domain address through that forwarding, and the Shopify Help Center suggests connecting a separate email hosting service for replies.
In Seo-Gen CMS, domain email works inside the system: mail sent to the site's address arrives right in the admin panel, replies go out from your domain address, and mailboxes and the email log are set up in the same place. Form submissions arrive by email and in Telegram, so the store manager does not have to keep several different services open at once.
SEO settings without workarounds
In Shopify, the beginning of product and collection URLs is fixed by the platform, and the store owner can change only the last part of the address, which the admin calls the URL handle. The robots.txt file can be edited through the robots.txt.liquid template, but the Shopify Help Center calls this an unsupported customization and warns that a mistake can cost the store all of its traffic.
Seo-Gen CMS keeps these settings in its core: meta tags and the canonical URL, hreflang, Schema.org markup, the sitemap, robots, 301 redirects and URLs with a trailing slash. The store owner or their SEO specialist changes them in the admin panel directly, and built-in checks look for duplicates, empty URLs, broken links and broken images.