Shopify to Medusa migration costs
The line items that rarely appear in the first proposal.
Many Shopify-to-Medusa proposals underestimate the same line items. The first quote often covers data export and a new storefront. It does not always cover tax recalculation, fulfillment rewiring, subscription logic, or the apps that were doing critical work quietly in the background. Those are the costs that stretch budgets - and they are easy to miss early.
Here is what we put in scoping conversations so teams can plan with clearer eyes.
The hidden line items
Tax and compliance. Shopify abstracts much of this. On Medusa, tax rules, nexus, and regional VAT handling need an explicit plan. Budget meaningful time if you sell across multiple countries.
Fulfillment and shipping. Carrier integrations, warehouse rules, and rate tables usually need to be rebuilt. If you use a 3PL, their connection rarely ports cleanly. Plan for it explicitly.
Subscriptions and loyalty. Existing subscription or loyalty tools do not always move automatically. Teams either rebuild on Medusa-native patterns or keep a parallel system until a later phase.
The migration is rarely the expensive part. The integrations the current platform was absorbing often are.
How we recommend clients plan
For a mid-market D2C brand moving from Shopify Plus to Medusa with a custom storefront, we typically plan in phases over a few months, sized to catalog quality and integration depth. Data migration is quicker when the catalog is clean, and longer when it is not. Checkout, payments, and the integrations that actually drive revenue deserve their own explicit scope.
The brands that migrate well do not try to replicate every current feature on day one. They ship a leaner storefront with the integrations that matter, then iterate on retainer. That is the line item that rarely appears in the first proposal - and the one that makes the migration stick.
When should you break a CMS collection into multiple?
When two kinds of content genuinely have different fields and different places they get used — not just because one has slightly more variety.
How do you handle nested references in Webflow?
Keep references to one hop wherever possible. If you find yourself needing two hops to render a single field, flatten the second collection into the first.
Do CMS items count toward site plan limits?
Yes — every collection item counts toward your CMS item limit regardless of whether it renders a page.
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Fixed monthly retainers on Webflow and Medusa JS — by the same people who wrote this.