Migrating to Medusa: why, and how to do it right

Moving a webshop is one of the most nerve-racking projects in e-commerce. Everything that worked for years (products, customer accounts, Google rankings, warehouse integrations) has to keep working in the new place. At the same time it is the moment to clean up what has been pinching for years.

This article is about moving to Medusa: why companies do it, from which platforms it makes sense, how to approach it step by step and when you are better off not doing it. How we carry it out as an agency is described on Migrating to Medusa.

Migrating or replatforming?

Two words that are often used interchangeably:

A move to Medusa is almost always replatforming. Medusa is a headless engine: the storefront is rebuilt, and logic that now lives in plugins or apps gets its own place in modules and workflows. That is more work than copying data. It is also why it pays off.

Why companies switch

The same reasons keep coming back in the customer stories Medusa publishes. We only mention what the stories themselves say, with the source.

• Costs that grow with revenue. Healthletic paid €22,300 per month on Shopify Plus in platform and transaction fees. After the move, "selling more no longer increases the platform bill" (Medusa: Healthletic). Medusa Cloud charges a 0% fee on your revenue (Medusa pricing).
• Too little control over the backend. Eight Sleep started on Shopify in 2017. According to Medusa, high costs and limited control over the backend became a bottleneck, with more than ten 3PLs and more than thirty markets (Medusa: Eight Sleep).
• Plugins that clash. At Patyna, the intertwined logic in WooCommerce meant that changing one part of the system could cause problems elsewhere. After the move, time spent on maintenance and debugging halved (Medusa: Patyna).
• B2B complexity. EKI migrated from Magento to Medusa to handle more than 20 million product configurations and customer-specific prices (Medusa: EKI).
• Merging several shops. Shingyo, our own project, ran twelve separate WooCommerce shops that now come together in one Medusa B2B engine (Shingyo case).

From which platform?

Medusa migrations in practice

The first six are Medusa customer stories, with Medusa's figures. Only Shingyo is an Alpha Digital project.

Step 1: inventory and data mapping

Every migration starts with a list. Which products, variants, customers, orders, discount codes, gift cards and content do you have? Which apps or plugins do you use, and which of them actually do something? Which processes live outside the shop, in spreadsheets or emails?

Then comes the mapping: which field in the old system becomes which field in Medusa? Products and variants are usually simple. Customer groups, price agreements and custom fields take more thought. Order history is a choice: sometimes keeping the old system as an archive is better than a half import. Wipertech did bring everything along: according to Medusa more than 800,000 historical orders, in just over four months (Medusa: Wipertech).

Customer passwords usually cannot be moved. Plan a proper email or a "set your password" flow for existing customers.

Step 2: SEO and redirects

Every URL with traffic or backlinks gets a 301 redirect to its new location. You export the old URLs from the sitemap, Search Console and your analytics, map them to new URLs and test them before go-live. Meta titles, descriptions and structured data come along.

A redirect is the right technical step, but no guarantee of the same ranking. Rankings also depend on content, speed and competition. If you let an agency promise a ranking, you are buying a sentence. More on this in From WooCommerce to Medusa: when a migration pays off.

Step 3: the new storefront

Because Medusa is headless, you rebuild the storefront, usually in Next.js. That is the moment to improve design, speed and conversion instead of recreating the old theme. Start with the pages that make money: category, product, cart and checkout. What a storefront does and does not solve is covered in What a headless Next.js storefront does and does not solve and under Headless Next.js storefront.

Step 4: integrations

ERP, WMS, PIM, accounting, shipping, payments, email and search: everything that now talks through a plugin or app gets its own integration in Medusa, often as a workflow that reacts to events. For each integration, make clear which system is the source for which data. At Shingyo this included an integration with the Picqer warehouse software. See Medusa integrations.

Step 5: testing and cut-over

Test with real data: real products, real price agreements, real payments in test mode. Let the people who process orders every day test the admin, not just the developers. Plan the cut-over at a quiet moment, with a freeze on product changes, a final delta import and a fallback plan.

Medusa makes a phased move possible. Eight Sleep started with fulfilment and moved the rest after that. Healthletic kept old subscriptions and fulfilment temporarily in Shopify via a sync plugin. That way not everything has to move in one night.

Step 6: aftercare

The first weeks after go-live are the most important. Check orders, payments, integrations and 404 reports in Search Console every day. Keep budget free for small adjustments: something always comes up that nobody foresaw. How we do that is described under Medusa maintenance and support.

When a migration makes less sense

Be honest about the reason. A migration makes less sense if:

• the pain is mainly an outdated theme; a new theme is cheaper;
• your shop is small and you have no long-term developer or agency;
• you have just done a major upgrade and the shop runs stably;
• your processes are standard and your current platform handles them well;
• a busy period is coming up soon, such as the holidays.

In those cases we often advise staying and cleaning up.

What does a migration cost?

A fixed price cannot be given, because the scope varies enormously. What determines the price:

We give a custom quote after a free intro call; how we scope a migration is described under Migrating to Medusa. You can compare platform costs after the move in the articles above.

Plan your migration

Not sure whether a migration pays off? Bring your current shop to an intro call: the platform, the plugins or apps you use, and what currently happens outside the shop. We will tell you honestly whether Medusa fits, or whether cleaning up is enough. Request a callback or book an intro call. All Medusa services at a glance: Medusa services.

Sources

Dollar amounts from the sources are converted to euros at the ECB rate of 5 November 2026 (1 euro = 1.1224 US dollars) and rounded.