Migration from Magento to Shopify: costs, B2B, integrations and challenges

Recorded at the start of Q4 2026 (premiere 12 October 2026), so the descriptions of Shopify features and Magento support dates reflect that time; we leave out the teaser at the start of the video.

Is the rise in Magento migration inquiries driven by end of support?

Tomek: Hi, this is Tomek Runowicz.

Maciek: And Maciek Czerniak.

Tomek: We run wecanfly, an agency that helps established brands with complex migrations to Shopify Plus.

Maciek: And this is Flying with Shopify, the channel where we talk to e-commerce experts and founders. Welcome to another episode. Tomek, hi.

Tomek: Hi.

Maciek: We thought it would be a good idea to talk today about the dirty word starting with "M." Migration or Magento? Both.

Tomek: Take your pick.

Maciek: Exactly. When I click around our HubSpot, I see a clear rise in inquiries from clients who want to migrate off Magento. I'm talking about big brands, e-commerce businesses with real momentum. You handle most of those inquiries, so I'm wondering whether, in your view, this is linked to the announced end of support for successive Magento versions. It's 2026. In August, support ended for version…

Tomek: 2.4.6.

Maciek: Exactly. Next year support ends for the following versions: 2.4.7 and then 2.4.8. Would you attribute the rise in interest to that?

Tomek: Yes. By way of introduction, let me say a bit more about the situation you described. You can see it in Poland, but I think globally too. Magento typically served brands we classify as enterprise businesses: large, with a correspondingly high level of traffic. And Magento really was seen as the ideal technology for them. Either that or a custom build; Shopify appeared in that comparison far less often until now. But recently, and here I fully agree, the most common inquiry we get looks like this: the client is on Magento and wants to see other options, meaning Shopify, and mostly Shopify Plus.

Is it about the end of support you mentioned? I wouldn't call it the main reason they come to us. End of support for a given Magento version is nothing new. As you said yourself, we have versions 2.4.6, 7, 8. The numbering alone tells you there have been quite a few versions. That's the nature of this product; it's constantly being developed.

Maciek: That's true of every digital product. It's the same with Windows or with browsers.

Tomek: Of course. It's not the main reason. Upgrading a Magento version, especially for someone who is several versions behind, is often a big challenge in itself. It's a big project, and that raises the question of whether to consider a different technology, since you'll have to invest anyway. But the questions we get most often fall into two main areas, I'd say.

The first: clients are a bit tired of what developing an e-commerce store on Magento looks like. In an e-commerce manager's mind, modifications, upgrades and adding new features will always mean development, sometimes by an external agency and sometimes by an in-house team. These are projects that need careful planning. If we want to introduce a loyalty program, we'll probably plan it as something like a three-month project of preparation so it's configured properly, and so on. So they feel they're responding too slowly to market needs and to what they observe in their own store, and that what's available in e-commerce today may be starting to pass them by.

The second thing, of course, is cost, which always comes up. Coding is getting faster and faster today, but it still requires highly specialized knowledge and people with that kind of experience. Maintaining Magento infrastructure is also an investment. We'll probably come back to cost topics specifically. For an owner or an e-commerce manager, maintaining or working on Magento isn't just about thinking of the store as a business to optimize, but as a business and a technology that has to be developed, maintained and updated. Those are the two areas we hear about most when we talk about Magento: first, the level of complexity and the speed of responding to what's happening in the market, and second, the cost of the whole Magento infrastructure, including the people who work on it.

Maciek: What's interesting is that Magento itself is pushing its clients to migrate to its own cloud solution, which is effectively SaaS Magento. In my view, that's an admission that there's a certain problem with open-source installations.

Tomek: Definitely. You can look at it from two perspectives. One is exactly that problem: they see that a cloud solution will be more efficient for the merchant, because they then take on part of the infrastructure updates. But on the other hand, there's certainly some business cynicism in it, meaning tying the client to themselves.

Maciek: It's simply a better business model.

Tomek: A better business model for the vendors, so it really is going in that direction. Definitely.

Who in the company wants to migrate, and who is wary of it?

Maciek: Let's expand on the reasons brands want to move off Magento. You mentioned infrastructure and costs; we'll develop that topic. Sales processes involve various stakeholders. I assume, and in fact I know, that each of these people has slightly different problems. Can you talk about that?

Tomek: First, let's identify who. Three personas come to us. Sometimes it's one meeting with all three people in the room.

Maciek: Usually it's the whole so-called buying committee.

Tomek: Yes, the whole buying committee, but it's three people and they really do have slightly different perspectives. The first is the owner, sometimes the board, depending on the size of the company. He sees the change as an opportunity for the whole business. He doesn't just sit inside his own technology; he watches the whole market and the competition and exchanges views with other owners, so he's the one who most often gets FOMO. Especially today, when there's more and more AI around and more solutions that help in e-commerce. He starts to worry that the competition will get too far ahead, because every time he goes to the team and says, "Listen, let's roll out another thing," he hits processes and the fact that it takes time and commitment. That's why he's probably most often the biggest supporter of the move and the least attached to the technology they have.

The second person is definitely the e-commerce manager. For them, the move is above all about getting more operational freedom. An e-commerce manager is held accountable in the company for delivering results, responding to customer needs, being able to identify them and address them in the product. But they work in the Magento technology they have and have to adapt to what that technology allows and what the IT team, in-house or external, allows. They often come to us with a feeling of, I won't say helplessness, but of not being able to be effective in their work. E-commerce managers, especially at big brands, are super intelligent people with big ambitions and often great track records, because they've been running these businesses for many years. They feel they could work more efficiently, and that's a huge everyday blocker for them.

The third group is, let's call it broadly, IT. Even if you use an external agency, practically every large enterprise with a Magento store has some CTO in the organization, or a person responsible at least for coordinating work with the agency, so someone purely technical. Here the situation can go two ways, because this can be a person who is a huge supporter of the current tool.

Maciek: Often its author, too.

Tomek: Often its author, exactly, or at least a co-creator. That person looks at the change very skeptically. We understand why. First, someone is touching their baby, their product. Second, they're very technologically savvy, so they see all the potential risks of the migration. Because we have to say it: this will be a move to something different. Even if that something is simpler, the whole process requires a lot of commitment. I won't say we like these people the most, but conversations with them are the most productive. They're very aware and ask a huge number of precise questions. Not to torpedo the idea, but to be sure it's a good, smart decision and that the company won't lose out on the move.

What do technical people ask about?

Maciek: So what do they ask about, for example?

Tomek: Most often it depends on how well these people know environments like Shopify and the licensed approach in general. First: they ask what Shopify will take care of under the license and what will remain their responsibility. The second thing, which comes up very often in our conversations: how we'll handle the unique solutions they have today. If a company has been running a Magento store for many years, a huge number of custom solutions and unique processes have been built there. We're talking about returns processes, discount code systems, loyalty programs, reviews collected from customers. Many key areas were built specifically for Magento, and they know these aren't a market standard, because companies want to stand out with these solutions.

So they ask to what extent these solutions in their current form will be addressed and how far we'll be able to recreate them on Shopify. In other words, whether the move will affect the processes and the technical structure of the business. Those are usually the two areas: how Shopify works and how it differs from Magento, and what their business will look like after the move, whether they'll have to give something up, standardize something or simplify it. These are very technical questions. Beyond what the store offers the customer, they ask about integrations, about the order flow between the ERP, the WMS and the PIM, about customer experience handling and so on.

Maciek: So they're often really questions about feasibility.

Tomek: Exactly, that's what they're worried about.

Maciek: I think until now this mainly came from the belief that Shopify, which is what we do, is more for small and mid-sized companies and isn't necessarily suited to large businesses or enterprises. But the case studies of big brands we've helped move, especially in the Polish market, like Eveline Cosmetics, Selsey or Nutridome, are convincing the unconvinced. And I have the impression there are more of these conversations now.

Tomek: Of course. We hear this directly from Shopify, because for more than a year Shopify has been present in the Polish market through a team that looks after it. They say exactly the same: more and more conversations are opening up with companies that hadn't considered Shopify before. And examples from their own industry are cited directly. As you mentioned, Eveline Cosmetics, one of the biggest online cosmetics stores in Poland. When competitors see that, they no longer ask whether it can be done and whether it will work. They see how it operates, that the company keeps developing, keeps growing and is delivering very good results, and that knocks out potential arguments against. Big implementations like that in a given industry definitely unlock these conversations.

What happens when the author of the code leaves?

Maciek: When you were talking about the reasons that lead companies to look for an alternative to Magento, it struck me that it's not only technical debt that matters. These features are built partly to stand out, but often, to put it colloquially, it's just duct-tape engineering: workarounds and patching technical problems. On top of that there's a human debt, or rather a human risk. Someone wrote that code. Someone coming in from outside as an agency, or joining the team, very often finds it hard to get their bearings. There's always the risk that this person leaves the company. And then what? I'm not saying business continuity is broken, because the store keeps running, but you have a period of inertia until someone takes it over, gets to know it and is able to continue development.

Tomek: Yes. I think it's precisely from that kind of fear, of course on a broader, global scale, that the idea of licensed e-commerce solutions was born. So that we push away the risk of dependency. It's a good example, because someone might think: if a store earns hundreds of millions a year, the structure must be perfectly optimized, roles in the teams are properly replaceable, and the agency has everything well documented. Reality shows it's sometimes completely different. Even businesses that big were built on the shoulders of one specific person, one very specific specialist, who is here today and may decide to leave tomorrow. That fear then becomes very real, and at large scale it's a huge risk for the whole business. Hence the idea of leaving the worrying about technology to the technology provider. That's why Shopify is gaining huge popularity. I don't think there's any doubt about that.

What do cost conversations look like?

Maciek: It's a recurring theme: "Leave the technology to us and focus on your business." I think you left out one fairly important role that appears in some organizations: the finance director, or, as we say on LinkedIn, the CFO. Sometimes that role is played by whoever controls the budget, the founder or the marketing director. The Polish market is very price-sensitive, and the conversation often comes down to cost. What do those conversations look like?

Tomek: It's no secret. Internally we sometimes even joke that conversations about migrations and complex projects begin and end with maintenance costs, not with whether we'll be able to do it on Shopify…

Maciek: It's rare that we tell a client, "That can't be done."

Tomek: That's exactly the point. Most often it comes down to money, and that's completely understandable, because Shopify's business model is that you pay for a license, and at a certain scale that license turns into a percentage of revenue. That's one of the objections we hear often: "Why should I pay Shopify more and more as I grow? The bigger I get, the more I have to pay them." The second thing is the cost of the apps we use to tailor Shopify to the client. On top of that there are fees that come up fairly often, though there are situations where you can avoid them: transaction fees added on standard payment gateways. It adds up to a very real amount that needs to be calculated.

I'm a fan of the approach where, in conversations with clients, we're usually the ones who push to start with money. First, the choice of Shopify plan depends on the scale of the business and its growth plans, and we don't want the client to overpay. When we prepare estimates for clients, we try to show the costs as precisely as possible, including a worst-case scenario. And it's worth remembering that the costs we show are practically complete. Beyond the plan, the apps and the Shopify fees, there are no other costs of running and maintaining the store.

Someone will object: "Fine, but I'll still need an agency. I'll have to pay an agency, or my own specialist." The answer is: not necessarily. Shopify is built so that operating, day-to-day management and even developing the store within the organization don't require a strictly technical person. That's why e-commerce managers, people from marketing and the people who work with it every day handle it so well. For example with Sidekick, which recently gained another great capability: modifying templates and design. Through ordinary conversation, through prompting, we can manage the store without deep technical knowledge. With Shopify, external agency support is optional, not mandatory.

In our estimate and comparison, we show very real costs, which we can even forecast as the business grows, because, as we said, the percentages depend on the company's revenue. When we prepare our part, we always leave room for the client to calculate what it looks like for them on Magento. The first reaction is often: "But I don't have any fees there."

Is Magento Open Source really free?

Maciek: It's free.

Tomek: It's free, especially if someone has Magento Open Source, because Magento definitely offers that option. It's a huge trap, and a great exercise for anyone to do; we always encourage it. Yes, there's no license fee, but we maintain the infrastructure that has to carry it. "Fine, but that's a fixed cost for me." It isn't fixed, because the more the business grows, the more traffic the site gets and the more happens on it, the more resources you need to handle it. Second: I can't imagine running Magento today without a technical person. Even if we use…

Maciek: A team.

Tomek: Yes. Even if we use an external agency that does Magento exclusively, there's no way a large organization won't have someone who knows the technology, knows its possibilities and limitations and how to work with it. So most often we're paying for at least one full-time position, sometimes more.

Maciek: Often some kind of SLA as well.

Tomek: Exactly, an SLA on top. That's another interesting observation. In briefs and RFPs, clients ask us to price an SLA as well. But with Shopify Plus, Shopify is responsible for the platform, not us. Shopify provides the SLA.

Maciek: For free.

Tomek: For free, within that price. Back to the calculation. We have people in the organization who are tied specifically to Magento. If we use an external agency, it's easy to calculate the average monthly contract with that agency. Here too, I'd encourage taking, for example, the whole previous year into account, because it's not always a typical retainer with a fixed monthly amount. As store owners, we develop the store over the year and sometimes need more work, so costs can vary from month to month. I'd average them over the whole year, from the high points of the season, like Black Friday, to the flat periods when not much is happening.

I'd take all of that into account. I'd take, as I said, the technical person on our side. I'd take the infrastructure I have to maintain and pay for. And I'd take something that a very small share of clients notice: the lost benefits of not being able to roll out a given modification or feature quickly. A perfect example: a loyalty program, because we've identified that customers expect it. They're loyal, we have a large share of returning customers, we see that they buy more from us, and serving them pays off much better.

Maciek: Sometimes they ask us for that feature directly.

Tomek: Or they ask directly whether something like that exists. With Shopify, and not in an extreme case but in a completely standard one, within a week we'll come up with the idea and a strategy, use a ready-made app, configure it, prepare it and launch it. On Magento we'd have to set up a project for it, which has to be designed and developed. I'd expect a good few months of work. Now let's calculate how much we lose during those months without the program, when customers can't use it, can't buy and can't become even more loyal. That's just one example, and there are plenty of things like that. On Shopify, these features and changes happen practically instantly. Not only are the migration itself and building the store much faster than on other platforms, but above all so are developing it and adapting it to your needs. That's a huge cost that also has to be factored in when comparing one platform with another.

When do companies most often look for a new platform?

Maciek: When you were talking about technical challenges, it reminded me of a conversation at the Base Week event, where we talked with e-commerce founders about, among other things, technology. I said that for us, Q4 very often brings a flood of inquiries from companies that are frustrated, and sometimes, to put it mildly, angry about how their platforms cope with higher traffic. Technical problems seem to be a very common, seasonal reason that pushes companies to change.

Tomek: Yes. If I had to mark on the annual calendar the two moments when we most often get inquiries about switching platforms, including from Magento of course, the first is the start of the year. That's obvious: companies are past the busy season, have usually reviewed their results and what didn't go well, and know what lessons they want to draw. We're talking about very aware clients who want to plan the next year well. The second is those who remember what happened a year earlier, but do so, for example, just before the summer holidays.

Maciek: The last quarter, as we've also said before, is often a lens for us, or a stress test of the site, which amplifies all the problems, both technical and operational. It really is a good moment to look at what works. Maybe at the end of the quarter, check where the bottlenecks were in individual departments and processes, and try to calculate how much money we could have made if we'd solved them earlier.

When is moving off Magento not a good idea?

Maciek: To be fair, because to someone listening this might bring to mind that famous meme of the lion grooming itself, I suggest we also talk about when moving off Magento isn't a good idea and when Shopify might not be the right choice.

Tomek: Absolutely. I'd mention two things. In this episode we really do sound like people who see only the advantages of Shopify and, maybe not smearing Magento, but telling the bitter truth about it. But contrary to appearances, and maybe paradoxically, our sales conversations, right after finances, most often start with validating whether Shopify really is right for the client.

So who do we tell "stay on Magento"? The truth is this: if your system is well configured and you don't run into situations where your store can't deliver and can't handle the traffic load; if you have efficient processes in the organization and waiting for changes to your store doesn't take too long; if you have competent people and the platform is constantly developed and up to date; and finally, if your business processes are truly unique, meaning it isn't just a typical e-commerce tool but also handles, for example, additional sales-related services you add for the customer, then I don't see clear grounds for Magento to absolutely be replaced. I'd also consider whether you operate in only one market, for example, because Shopify often wins by making international expansion much easier and faster. I'd start from there and realistically assess how satisfied I am with my team, with how my store performs, and whether it simply delivers what it's supposed to.

The second thing: with Shopify itself, there are a few things that mean we have to accept some standardization and simplification in certain processes. It's an interesting thread that I'll expand on. When we analyze the unique solutions clients have on Magento and ask us to check whether they can be recreated on Shopify, we sometimes run into their own internal conclusion: do we really need this level of complexity, or have we gone a bit too far?

Maciek: Maybe that simplification is actually desirable.

Tomek: Shopify publishes store performance reports on an ongoing basis. Comparing Magento with Shopify, it's a 5% higher checkout conversion on Shopify. That's a very real benefit in Shopify's favor, with a checkout that isn't necessarily as overloaded or as unique as clients sometimes have on Magento. I'm not talking about giving up key store features, because, as you said, on Shopify we really can recreate and handle practically every one of them. But sometimes compromises are needed, and if we feel the merchant isn't ready for them and there's a justification that everything has to stay as it is, then Shopify really isn't the ideal fit. Then we don't go any further.

I remember a recent conversation with a client who wanted several independent Shopify backend stores, with very different vendors and brands, plugged into a single storefront, while for the end customer everything was supposed to be very unified on the front end. OK, that can be done on Shopify. But in specific cases like that, the investment and the modifications may turn out to be so advanced that we'd be needlessly rebuilding something that works on a somewhat different model. In situations like that, we advise against it and either point to another solution or recommend staying with what the client has now.

Why are Magento agencies adding Shopify to their offer?

Maciek: Let me make one quick digression before we move on. Just as Magento is in a way admitting that the business model it used to sell is less profitable, I've also noticed that agencies that until now did strictly Magento or strictly Shopware are somewhat capitulating and adding Shopify to their offer, because they can't convince some clients to go with other platforms. So they say, "Fine, we'll build you that Shopify store."

Tomek: Yes. I think that's a really nice metric, or observation, showing that this, in quotation marks, forced fitting of Magento to a given store and explaining that only Magento can handle it…

Maciek: Doesn't hold up anymore.

Tomek: Doesn't hold up anymore. That's exactly the point, because the situations where we advise against Shopify are really rare. It's a drop in the ocean compared with clients' needs and what we can do for them on Shopify.

Maciek: Because Shopify, as we've discussed, doesn't make sense if you have a very low-margin business.

Tomek: That's a separate point. Yes, of course, because fees tied to transactions and revenue, for example, will have an impact.

Maciek: They can simply wreck your unit economics. Or if you have a marketplace model.

Tomek: A marketplace model on Shopify is also too convoluted.

Maciek: For now. We're at the start of Q4 2026.

Can Shopify Plus handle B2B?

Tomek: Yes. I think, Maciek, since you say "for now," it's a good moment to talk about this, because it evolves incredibly over time. What Shopify gets criticized for in these conversations, we often hear as dismissing it out of hand: "Because you don't have this, because you can't handle that, because the technology won't support it." It's a good opportunity to say what comes up most often in those questions.

The first thing a client comes with, especially if there's someone on the team who is skeptical about the move, is B2B, for example. The client says: "Listen, B2B is a huge part of our business, and Shopify is more for B2C. We know there's a B2B module, but it's more of an add-on for those who want it." With the Shopify Plus plan we now get a genuinely full-fledged B2B platform. What do we mean by that? Handling very individual trade agreements with customers, creating accounts for individual employees of our distributors and customers, separate rules for each, even at the employee level. Tailoring catalogs per branch, handling typical B2B discounts, deferred payment on invoice and mechanisms typical of this sales channel. We can knock those arguments down very quickly, and on top of that we tell them: "This platform is already ready for you. We don't have to build it or create it. We configure it for your mechanisms and signed agreements, but we don't build its logic, because it already exists."

How do you run multiple markets, currencies and entities in one store?

Tomek: The second thing. This of course comes from what Shopify looked like a year or two ago and how much it has changed since. Clients say: "OK, you say it's a global platform for international sales, but I can't have different currencies and different markets in one store, because I have to create more instances." That really is mostly how it looked on Shopify until now. And that makes managing the store harder: I have several admin panels I have to switch between.

Maciek: Data synchronization.

Tomek: Data synchronization, yes. You might need some kind of data bus to unify it and communicate with the ERP. And this is where Shopify Markets comes in. The feature has been in Shopify for almost two years, but today it's so advanced that from one admin panel we can open another market and assign products to it. In one panel we effectively have a separately managed storefront for a given country. We can set prices for that country individually, as well as delivery and payment methods. And finally, to dispel the doubts of people who think, "OK, but for me another country means another legal entity": that's no problem at all. In Shopify Markets we assign a different entity, not the one for our main store, but the one responsible for the German market. And through inventory routing we set the German market to be served exclusively from stock held in Germany.

Maciek: Different VAT rates.

Tomek: Different VAT rates, calculating them and removing them for B2B. That's the second thing that comes up fairly often in conversations, and we already have ready answers for it. Sometimes I feel our sales meetings always follow a very similar script of client questions, doubts and concerns, which for us are completely standard topics.

What are the biggest concerns about migrating?

Maciek: Right, you mentioned concerns. Can you name any other concerns about migrating? We've talked a bit about costs and a bit about the feasibility of various things.

Tomek: Yes. As we said, there are always concerns about feasibility and we talk about them, but serious risks are very rare. The biggest risk that gets raised, and one that is fully justified, is certainly the SEO migration, meaning our organic rankings. For every e-commerce owner, migration as a process is a huge risk of breaking business continuity, because we can't switch off the current store and, some time later, launch a completely new one in a new reality and "start over." We're talking especially about enterprise setups, with huge sales volume and huge traffic on the site. So there are objections about whether the rankings we've built up over many years will suffer after the migration, because these are often long-established businesses. That's the first concern.

The second concerns the processes themselves. In the whole system the client works in, their infrastructure, during the migration we want to pull out one element and replace it with another: we pull out the Magento e-commerce platform and put Shopify in its place. Very often we don't change the ERP, the PIM, the order and returns systems, the marketing systems, the CRM and so on. We don't replace any of that. So the client worries that after the switch we won't recreate the infrastructure well enough for the processes that worked until now to keep working, or that they'll look different. That second concern comes up very often and we always have to address it. First we analyze the project itself at the sales stage and prepare for the technical questions, and then in discovery workshops, once the processes are fully mapped out, we agree very specifically how we'll take care of them during the migration.

Those two areas come up most often and we do have to deal with them, but for both replacing the store within the whole infrastructure and the SEO migration, we have well-established processes. They're critical parts of the project and we attach huge importance to them, so that nothing changes for the worse for the client in this area.

When does the cost of migration pay back?

Maciek: Can we say, maybe on average, when the cost of a migration pays back?

Tomek: I don't want to say it, but "it depends" is definitely the most accurate answer. So let me expand on what it depends on. The migration itself is a budget we pay an agency to carry it out. On top of that there are internal costs, because some people will be involved in the process. From a cost perspective, that can definitely be calculated. But when it comes to when it pays back, we need to consider not only the numbers, amounts and calculations we did at the start, because that's where we began. We compared how much maintaining Shopify will cost us versus Magento, as we've been discussing. That's the first element, and it shows how much we save each month.

The second, and really huge, part of the analysis is above all what we gain from the new platform. A great example is companies that want to open up to, or think more boldly about, international expansion. As we said, launching a new market usually means a side project, even a very large project within the organization, because it requires redesigning the system's structure or building something alongside it. A process like that can take several months. On Shopify, if we use Markets and the new market is closely aligned with the main one, we launch it in a week or two. So we unlock the ability to develop the store much faster than before. That speed and efficiency translate directly into the cost of the platform.

The second point, comparing costs: on Shopify we don't need strictly technical people dedicated to the technology. It's rare for a company that has moved to Shopify to then hire an in-house Shopify developer. Those are very extreme cases, because, as we said, the knowledge isn't needed in a form or quantity that would justify a separate role. That's definitely a huge advantage.

So if I have to say how long it takes for the investment to pay back: we had a client who told us openly, "Listen, your investment paid back for me in a month, because I let go of four people who ran Magento for me, and that's how much I paid you to implement my solution, and since then I do it myself." For large businesses, though, I'd say it's a period of 6 to 12 months, depending on how advanced the business is and how strongly it's growing. The more development and the more solutions added after launch, the bigger the savings the company will see, and the more they'll actually affect business results.

What good can be said about Magento?

Maciek: I'm wondering whether we can say something good about Magento to balance out this stream of arguments. I think it's worth mentioning an advantage of Magento that I see right now: with the open-source version, development, which used to be clunkier and really took a lot of time, is becoming much more efficient. I have the impression it's getting shorter now because an open-source solution is more friendly to AI agents, and code is easier and faster to write. That may also be worth taking into account.

Tomek: Of course. Changes in how code gets written are generally causing a certain revival of open-source solutions, because it really is more convenient and faster and can translate into more value.

Maciek: That leaves one fundamental question. You can also write AI-assisted code very easily and quickly in headless Shopify, for example in Hydrogen, and you can vibe-code it. But why? Do you really suddenly need to solve all the payment problems and invent solutions that are already ready-made or available to install?

Tomek: You've touched on one thing that hasn't come through yet in this episode. We talked about FOMO, about the fear that something is passing us by. And it's really important that with a licensed solution like Shopify, we'll always be up to date with every new development. Even if, as you said, development is getting simpler, we don't even have to think about it when we want the store to deliver what customers expect right now.

Maciek: Agentic commerce, which we've talked about.

Tomek: Agentic commerce, or selling on social media channels. We mentioned it before, we even had a presentation on the topic: Shopify has always followed the principle, and is still true to it, of being wherever the customer is at a given moment.

Maciek: A nice case from last week: Facebook released its agent Muse, and a few days later Shopify was already connected to it.

Tomek: That's exactly what we mean. It's not you and your team who have to think about it. Another interesting case is Eveline, our client. When Shopify ran a campaign with TikTok for the launch of TikTok Shop in the Polish market, they selected brands that were a perfect fit for it. Who did they pick? Brands that are on Shopify. They took Eveline Cosmetics, and the company didn't have to prepare for it at all.

Maciek: Technologically.

Tomek: Technologically, that's what we mean. It's a huge advantage: all you need to do is follow what Shopify publishes, and it will tell you about many things itself, and you can make use of it.

What questions should you ask yourself before deciding to migrate?

Maciek: OK, as we slowly head toward wrapping up and some kind of conclusion: could you suggest three or four questions that the owner, or anyone on the team of a brand on Magento, should ask themselves to judge whether it's a good moment to switch?

Tomek: Sure. I'd address them to the whole buying committee, because, as we said, these are different people and each has a slightly different perspective, but the conclusion should come from the whole team. First, I'd take an honest look at the last 12 months of the store in terms of the costs of maintaining the current solution, including all the aspects of those costs I mentioned. Second, I'd analyze all the projects that couldn't be delivered or took much longer than originally planned, and look at them through the lens of lost benefits: how much they may have held back the store's growth. Third, a very technical one: I'd check which Magento version I'm on, how safe I feel, meaning whether I'm on an old version that needs updating, what risk comes with that, and whether I accept it or would rather find a solution that frees me a bit from having to think about it.

Maciek: Great. I think we've covered the topic fully. If any of you would like to talk more about migration, we'll put Tomek's contact details in the description. Shall we promise, for example, a downloadable spreadsheet with a total cost of ownership calculator?

Tomek: I think so.

Maciek: What's the harm in promising?

Tomek: What's the harm in promising? Two things. First, we'll definitely link to Shopify's page with its TCO calculator. With the caveat that it often uses US market costs, so let's be skeptical, or adjust those values down a bit. Second, we'll prepare a simple Excel calculator ourselves that shows which items you need to include in this kind of estimate.

Maciek: Great. Thanks a lot for the conversation.

Tomek: Thanks to you too, Maciek.