Migrating from Tiendanube to Shopify: what carries over and what doesn't

Migrating a store isn't exporting products and importing them on the other side. That's the easy part, the one anyone solves in an afternoon. The part that costs money when done wrong is the URLs, and it's exactly the part left for last.

Here's what actually happens in a Tiendanube to Shopify migration, in the order we'd do it.

First: do you actually need to migrate?

Honest decision up front, because migrating has a real cost and sometimes it isn't justified.

Migrating makes sense if: you've hit customization limits you can't work around, you need integrations your platform doesn't have, your catalog grew to where administration eats hours, or you sell across channels and need unified stock.

It doesn't make sense if: the real problem is that your store gets no traffic. Changing platforms doesn't bring visitors. If you sell little because nobody finds you, the work is acquisition, not migration, and we develop that in why your website doesn't bring you clients.

If you're still choosing between platforms, there's the Shopify vs Tiendanube comparison and the WordPress, Shopify and Next.js one.

What migrates cleanly

• Products. Title, description, price, SKU, inventory and variants. Export to CSV and import. Variants are where things break most often, because the two platforms structure them differently: check every product with more than two options one by one.
• Images. They migrate, but it's worth using the move to convert them to WebP and give them descriptive alt text. If you never did, the migration is the moment.
• Collections and categories. They get rebuilt. There's no faithful importer, so plan them by hand, and again it's a good chance to fix an architecture that grew without a plan.
• Customers. Contact details and addresses, yes.
• Historical orders. Importable as reference records. They won't be operable orders, but they serve support and preserve each customer's purchase history.

What never migrates

Worth knowing before you sign anything:

• Your customers' passwords. For security reasons they don't travel. Your customers will have to reset on first login. You need to warn them beforehand with an email explaining the change, or you'll get a flood of "I can't log in".
• Active subscriptions and recurring payments. If you bill recurring, this gets rebuilt with the new payment provider. It's the most delicate point of the whole migration if your model is subscription-based.
• Product reviews, unless you use an app that stores them in its own cloud and is available on both platforms.
• Apps and their configurations. Each platform has its own ecosystem. You have to map app by app what equivalent exists, and sometimes none does.
• The theme and design. It gets rebuilt. There's no theme conversion between platforms.

The part almost nobody plans: the URLs

This is where SEO gets lost, and it gets lost in a way that takes months to notice and months to recover.

The two platforms build routes differently. If your product lived at one path and moves to another on Shopify, every link Google had indexed breaks. The result is hundreds of 404s and an organic traffic drop that gets mistaken for "the new store doesn't work".

What to do:

1. Export your complete current URL inventory before touching anything. All of it: products, collections, pages, blog posts.
2. Map that inventory against your destination URLs on Shopify. One table, old against new, no gaps.
3. Set up a 301 for every URL that changes. Not a bulk redirect to the homepage: Google treats that as a soft error page and transfers nothing.
4. Keep the URLs you can. Every path that doesn't change is work you don't have to do.
5. Watch Search Console for the following four weeks. The 404s that show up are the ones that escaped your table.

The full method is in redesigning a website without losing SEO, and it applies to a store migration the same way.

The order we use

1. Inventory of URLs and apps in use. Before creating anything.
2. New store in development, password-protected, not indexed.
3. Products, collections, customers and historical orders.
4. Theme, and a Core Web Vitals review before launch.
5. Payments, shipping and invoicing configured and tested with a real order.
6. The 301 table loaded and verified.
7. Email to customers about the password reset.
8. DNS cutover during your lowest-sales window.
9. Four weeks of monitoring 404s, positions and conversion.

Step 5 is the most underestimated in Mexico, because payments, shipping and electronic invoicing have local requirements that don't come solved out of the box. We cover it in selling with Shopify in Mexico.

What it costs when it goes wrong

It isn't the cost of the migration, it's the cost of the drop: lost organic traffic that takes months to return, customers who can't get into their account and never try again, and recurring orders that cancel themselves because billing wasn't rebuilt properly.

If your store already generates revenue and you can't afford a dip, that's exactly the kind of project we do in our Shopify development service, with the redirect table as the first deliverable rather than the last.