The Shopify migration checklist for Indian D2C brands (Woo, Magento, Wix)

Here is the whole migration in two sentences. A Shopify migration does not fail because the products are hard to move — it fails because the URLs were left to 404, the subscriptions were discovered unexportable a week before launch, and the Razorpay and COD flows were never re-tested. Get the redirect map, the data model, the subscription port, and the India-specific stack right, and the rest of the move is mechanical.

I work from Delhi/NCR and I run migrations onto Shopify and Shopify Plus for D2C brands across India, the US, the UK, and the UAE. This is the checklist I actually follow, in order, including the India-specific steps every US-written migration guide leaves out. It is built on real cutovers — including the Mum & You move from Magento to Shopify Plus, which went live with zero indexation drop on day one.

Before you touch anything: the pre-migration audit

The most expensive migrations are the ones that start with an export button. Everything that goes wrong later — lost rankings, broken subscriptions, dead payment flows — was decided before the first row moved, by skipping the audit.

Before you move a single product, inventory four things about the source store:

• Every indexed URL. Pull the full list from Google Search Console, your XML sitemap, and a crawl (Screaming Frog does this for free up to 500 URLs). This list becomes the redirect map. If a URL is not on it, it will 404 after cutover.
• Every product, variant, and metafield. Not just the catalog — the option structure, the attributes, the custom fields. This is what the data-model translation is checked against.
• Every app and integration. Payment gateway, shipping, reviews, subscriptions, WhatsApp, analytics, GST invoicing. Each one has to be rebuilt or reconnected, and each one is a place the migration can silently break.
• Every recurring subscription. How many, on what gateway, storing what. Subscriptions are the single most common reason a migration slips its timeline, and the only defence is knowing the scope before you start.

This audit is the source of truth the entire migration is validated against. Skip it and you are migrating blind.

The migration checklist, in order

This is the nine-step sequence. It runs the same for WooCommerce, Magento, Wix, or a legacy Shopify theme — only the difficulty of each step changes with the source platform.

1. Run the pre-migration audit. The four inventories above. Done once, referenced constantly.
2. Freeze and snapshot the source store. Take a dated export of products, collections, customers, orders, and metafields, and agree a content freeze so the source data stops moving while you build.
3. Translate the data model. Map source concepts to Shopify concepts — Magento configurable products become Shopify variants, WooCommerce attributes become options and metafields, customer and order history maps to Shopify records — and validate row-by-row against the export. This is where a cheap migration cuts corners and a clean one earns its price.
4. Build the 301 redirect map. Every source URL gets an explicit Shopify destination. Products, collections, blog posts, CMS pages. This is the single most important SEO step in the entire move — more on why below.
5. Rebuild the theme on Online Store 2.0. Sections everywhere, metafield-driven content, Lighthouse 90+ on mobile, LCP under 2.5 seconds. A migration is the one moment you can rewrite performance without breaking a live store, so use it.
6. Port subscriptions and private apps. Move recurring purchases through the destination platform APIs. Rebuild Magento private extensions or Woo plugins as Shopify apps, Functions, or theme extensions. Design first-cycle opt-in where source tokens cannot be exported.
7. Reconnect the Indian commerce stack. Razorpay, COD, Shiprocket, pin-code serviceability, WhatsApp. This step gets its own section because it is where Indian migrations actually fail.
8. Run parity QA on staging. Checkout, payment capture, GST tax rates, shipping rates, discount logic, email and SMS flows — all tested on the staging store until they match the source store's behaviour exactly.
9. Cut over and monitor. Switch DNS, reauthorise live payment gateways, regenerate and resubmit the XML sitemap to Search Console, and watch crawl errors, orders, and Core Web Vitals daily through the first weeks.

The India-specific gotchas nobody's checklist covers

Almost every "Shopify migration checklist" online is written for a US store. It tells you to reconnect Stripe and PayPal and move on. An Indian D2C store runs on a completely different stack, and every piece of it has to be rebuilt by hand on the Shopify side:

• Payment gateway reauth. Razorpay, Cashfree, or PayU are set up as Shopify payment providers and reauthorised. Test-mode and live keys are different — a store that captured payments in test mode on staging will fail on the first real order if live keys were never swapped in.
• COD and partial-COD workflows. Cash on delivery is not a Shopify default the way it is assumed in India. COD, partial-COD (a token advance online), and COD verification via OTP all run through apps that must be reinstalled and reconfigured — and re-tested against real pin codes.
• Shipping and serviceability. Shiprocket, Delhivery, or a native aggregator gets reconnected, and pin-code serviceability rules — which pin codes you deliver to, which are COD-eligible — have to be restored. Miss this and customers in serviceable areas get "we don't ship here" at checkout.
• GST invoicing. GST-compliant invoicing and tax rates are rebuilt on the Shopify side. Tax overrides for different HSN categories do not carry across in a CSV export.
• WhatsApp and SMS. Order confirmation, shipping updates, and abandoned-cart recovery over WhatsApp and SMS are how Indian D2C brands actually communicate. Every one of those flows is an app integration that has to be re-wired and re-tested.

None of this is exotic. It is just invisible to a checklist written 12,000 kilometres away — and it is exactly the part that makes an Indian D2C migration ship clean or blow up on launch day.

Will migrating to Shopify hurt my SEO?

This is the fear that keeps most brands on a platform they have outgrown. The honest answer: not if the redirect map is done right — and entirely, if it isn't.

Google's own guidance is unambiguous: 301 redirects pass PageRank, so changing platforms does not require losing rankings. The link equity your old URLs earned carries to the new ones — as long as every old URL points to the matching new URL, not batched loosely and not dumped onto the homepage.

That is the whole game. On the Mum & You migration from Magento to Shopify Plus, the redirect map was validated URL-by-URL before cutover, and there was zero indexation drop on day one. No traffic dip, no ranking slide, no scramble to recover positions in week three.

Rankings slip during a migration for three reasons, all of them preventable:

1. Missing redirects — a URL that existed on the source store has no destination and 404s. Every 404 is lost equity.
2. Lazy redirects — everything points to the homepage instead of the equivalent page. Google treats a homepage redirect as a soft 404 and drops the equity anyway.
3. A sitemap that never gets resubmitted — Google keeps crawling the old URLs, finds them gone, and takes weeks to rediscover the new structure. Regenerating and resubmitting the sitemap on cutover day is a five-minute step that saves a month.

If your migration quote does not explicitly mention a URL-by-URL redirect map and a sitemap resubmission, the SEO risk is real. Ask about it before you sign.

Which migration path are you on?

The checklist is the same. The difficulty, timeline, and cost depend on where you are coming from.

Every path includes the same non-negotiables: SEO-safe 301 redirect mapping, a row-by-row data migration validated against the source, the Indian commerce stack reconnected, and a cutover plan with day-one monitoring.

What a migration actually costs in India (2026)

Migration pricing runs ₹1,25,000 to ₹6,00,000 ($1,500 to $7,000), published upfront. The floor covers a clean WooCommerce move with a straightforward catalog. The ceiling covers a Magento → Shopify Plus move with subscription APIs, private apps, and multi-currency.

Two things worth saying plainly, because the market hides both:

• A price far below the floor is a template swap, not a migration. A ₹30,000 "migration" moves your products with an app and leaves the redirect map, the data validation, and the payment reconnection out. The cost of that reappears as lost rankings and broken checkout in month two.
• Pricing should be published before a discovery call, not after. If you cannot find out what a migration costs without booking a sales call, the number is being set to what they think you'll pay, not what the work costs.

For the full four-tier framework this pricing sits inside, read the honest cost of hiring a Shopify developer in India in 2026. If you are weighing standard Shopify against Plus during the move, Shopify Plus vs Basic Shopify for Indian D2C brands covers exactly when Plus earns its fee.

The mistakes that turn a clean migration into a six-month mess

The pattern that ships clean: an audit first, a URL-by-URL redirect map, a row-by-row data validation, a parity-tested checkout on staging, a sitemap resubmitted on cutover day, and one person owning the launch so nothing falls between teams.

The pattern that fails, in the order it usually unfolds:

• Products moved by an app, URLs left to 404. Rankings gone by week three, and no one can say which pages were lost because there was no audit to check against.
• Subscriptions discovered unexportable the week before launch. Recurring revenue at risk, cutover slips, or customers get double-billed because the opt-in flow was never designed.
• Payment and COD flows tested only in test mode. Live keys never swapped, first real orders fail, and the brand finds out from angry customers instead of QA.
• No single owner. Design, development, and the launch are split across vendors, and the redirect map falls into the gap between them.

Every one of these is preventable with the checklist above. None of them is preventable by hoping the export button did its job.

What's next

If you are an Indian D2C brand on WooCommerce, Magento, Wix, or a legacy Shopify theme and you want the move done without losing rankings or revenue, the Shopify migration expert page has the Mum & You case study, transparent per-path pricing, and a 30-minute call link. I will tell you which path you're on, what the realistic timeline is, and where your specific store is most likely to break — before you commit to anything.

Related reads:

• The honest cost of hiring a Shopify developer in India in 2026 — the four-tier pricing framework this migration pricing sits inside.
• Shopify Plus vs Basic Shopify for Indian D2C brands in 2026 — when to migrate straight to Plus instead of standard Shopify.
• How to hire a Shopify developer in NCR — the Gurgaon & Noida playbook — how to scope the brief and vet the vendor before a migration.

Sources:

• Google Search Central — 301 redirects and PageRank
• Shopify — migrate to Shopify
• Shopify Help Center — redirecting URLs after migration