Migrating to Shopify Plus with Graftport

Shopify Plus is a different beast from standard Shopify — higher API rate limits, Shopify Markets for multi-currency and multi-language, B2B storefronts, Launchpad, Flow, and a dedicated Merchant Success Manager. Those capabilities are exactly why merchants migrate to Plus. They also introduce a few decisions that do not arise on a standard Shopify migration. This guide covers how Graftport handles a Plus destination and what your team needs to decide before the first run.

Why merchants migrate to Shopify Plus

The common reasons:

Consolidating multiple standard stores. A group with six regional Shopify stores — one per country — consolidates into a single Plus store running Shopify Markets. Every customer, order, and product history from each regional store migrates into a single destination, with market-specific pricing and language preserved as Markets configuration.

Replatforming from Magento. Most large Magento installs are on Shopify Plus post-migration, because the catalogue sizes and multi-store requirements that led them to Magento in the first place fit Plus better than standard Shopify. Graftport's Magento connector handles M1 and M2.

Replatforming from WooCommerce. WooCommerce merchants who have extended WordPress beyond its comfortable range — bespoke checkout flows, large order volumes — often choose Plus as the destination for its API headroom.

Moving between Plus stores. A brand acquisition, a Shopify Plus store split, or a rebuild on a new Plus plan are all Shopify-to-Shopify migrations with a Plus destination.

What changes about migration when the destination is Plus

Higher API throughput on load

Shopify Plus stores have significantly higher Admin API rate limits than standard Shopify stores. In practice this means the load phase — writing products, customers, and orders to the destination — runs faster against a Plus destination than against a standard one, for the same catalogue size.

If you are doing a large migration (tens of thousands of products or hundreds of thousands of orders), a Plus destination will visibly shorten your load window compared to a test run against a standard development store.

Multi-location inventory

Graftport syncs destination Shopify store locations automatically the moment a migration is created. This is the same behaviour for both standard and Plus, but it matters more on Plus because Plus merchants commonly run warehouses, retail locations, and third-party fulfilment centres as separate Shopify locations.

Before you run the migration, confirm that the destination Plus store already has all the Shopify locations defined. If a location on the source does not have a matching location on the destination, inventory for that location will not load correctly. The inventory mapping in Graftport's resource editor shows you exactly which source locations are matched and which are unresolved.

Shopify Markets and multi-currency

If your source is a multi-store Magento install or a set of separate regional Shopify stores, the destination Plus store likely uses Shopify Markets. Graftport does not configure Markets automatically — Markets is a Plus admin decision about which languages, currencies, and domains serve which customers. Your team sets that up on the destination before or in parallel with migration.

What Graftport handles: every product and customer record is loaded into the destination correctly, with product prices and customer locales preserved as data. The Markets configuration that maps those prices to regions is your Shopify admin team's job.

Metafields at scale

Migrating from Magento to Shopify Plus typically means mapping a significant number of Magento EAV custom attributes. These land in Shopify as metafields — standard Shopify infrastructure on all plans, but used more extensively on Plus stores where the catalogue has more complex attribute sets.

Graftport's mapping editor lets you decide per attribute whether it becomes a variant option (for attributes that drive Shopify variant selectors), a product-level metafield, or a variant-level metafield. On a Plus migration from Magento, spend time here before the first live load. It is the decision that most affects how your Shopify Liquid templates and metafield API calls will work post-migration.

See Mapping Magento custom attributes to Shopify metafields for the mapping editor walkthrough, including the metafield type decisions.

What Graftport migrates to a Plus destination

The data scope is the same regardless of whether the destination is standard Shopify or Plus. For each source platform:

Shopify Plus-specific features — Launchpad schedules, Flow automations, Scripts — are not data; they are platform configuration. They do not migrate and need to be rebuilt on the destination Plus store.

What your team handles on the Plus destination

Graftport delivers the data layer. On a Plus destination, your team's post-migration checklist typically includes:

Shopify Markets setup. Languages, currencies, domains, per-market pricing rules. This is Plus admin configuration, done before or after data migration.

B2B company setup. If the source had a wholesale or B2B channel (common in Magento multi-store installs), Plus's B2B feature needs configuring separately. Customer tags from the migration can seed the B2B customer assignment.

Flow and Scripts. Any automation or checkout scripting built on the source platform needs equivalents on Plus using Flow or the Shopify Functions API. These are bespoke to your previous platform and cannot be migrated automatically.

App reinstallation. Every Shopify app — subscriptions, reviews, loyalty, search — needs reinstalling and configuring on the destination Plus store. The data those apps need (customer history, order records) is already there from the migration. The apps themselves need to be pointed at it.

Theme. Graftport does not touch the Shopify theme. A Plus migration is often the moment teams rebuild the storefront in a new theme architecture. That theme work runs in parallel with data migration.

Running the migration

The migration setup and run sequence for a Plus destination is the same as for any other Shopify destination. If you have not done a Graftport migration before, start with the setup walkthrough:

Setting up your first Graftport migration — the step-by-step walkthrough from wizard to first dry-run.

For multi-brand consolidations onto a single Plus store:

Migrating multiple brands on one Graftport account — how to structure one tenant with multiple migrations running in parallel, shared monthly allowance, and separate mappings per brand.

A note on Shopify Plus development stores

Shopify's Partner program offers free development stores for testing. For Plus-tier testing, you need a Shopify Plus sandbox — available to Plus merchants and to Shopify Partners under certain arrangements. Before your first rehearsal run, confirm you have a Plus sandbox to stage into, not a standard development store, so the API rate limits and Markets features reflect what production will look like.

If you do not have a Plus sandbox, stage against a standard development store first to verify data integrity, then do a final dress rehearsal against the actual Plus destination before DNS flip.

Starting a Plus migration

Sign up at app.graftport.com, create a migration with your Plus store as the destination, and run the first dry-run. For multi-brand or consolidation projects, the pricing page has the form to get a quote matched to your specific source platform count and brand structure.