Migrating Salesforce to Shopify

From Salesforce to Shopify: why migrating your orders and customers from SFCC to Shopify is easier than you think

For years, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) was the default answer for enterprise fashion. It was powerful, it was flexible, and it was where the big brands lived. But the landscape has shifted. Maintenance is heavy, release cycles are slow, and the total cost of ownership keeps climbing, while the rest of the ecosystem (apps, payments, retention tooling, international selling) has quietly standardised around Shopify.

More and more brands are looking at the numbers and arriving at the same conclusion: it's time to move. And then, almost immediately, the same fear comes up.

"What happens to all our data?"

Years of orders. Thousands of customers. Purchase histories, addresses, lifetime value, the repeat buyers you've spent a fortune acquiring. The idea of losing any of it, or worse, importing it in a mess that takes months to untangle, is enough to make brands delay a move they know they should make.

So let's deal with the part that worries brands most: migrating your orders and customers. Done properly, it's far more straightforward than its reputation suggests. Here's how it actually works.

The real worry isn't the storefront, it's the history

Rebuilding a beautiful Shopify store is the visible, exciting part of a migration. But it's rarely what brands are nervous about. The worry sits in the invisible part: the historical data.

That history matters for three reasons:

• Customer experience. Returning shoppers expect their order history, addresses and details to still be there. Starting them from zero feels like a broken promise.
• Operations. Support, returns, warranty and reconciliation all depend on being able to look up an order that happened two years ago.
• Growth. Your purchase history is your retention engine. Segmentation, lifetime value, repeat-purchase windows, win-back flows: none of it works without the data behind it.

Lose the history, and you don't just lose records. You lose the foundation your next year of revenue is built on. That's exactly why it deserves a rigorous, tested process, and not a quick export and import while hoping for the best.

How an SFCC migration actually works

At its core, the move comes down to one challenge: SFCC and Shopify speak different languages. SFCC hands you your order data as a large XML export, often a gigabyte or more for an established brand. Shopify needs that same information delivered in a structure it understands, through a tool called Matrixify.

The work sits in the translation between the two, done faithfully and to the cent. We break it into four stages.

1. Organise the data first

Before a single order is moved, we scan the whole SFCC export to understand what's actually in it: every currency, every country, every shipping method, the discounts, the gift and staff orders, the cancelled orders, and the addresses that don't follow the standard format. We report what we find back to you and flag anything unusual before we generate anything. No surprises halfway through.

2. Translate, order by order

Each historical order is rebuilt in full, with its products, shipping, payment and fulfilment, so it lands in Shopify as a complete and accurate record instead of a partial one. This is where experience matters, because the edge cases are where most migrations quietly break (more on those below).

3. Validate to the cent

This is the step that separates a real migration from a risky one, and for us it's non-negotiable. After the file is built, every order is checked automatically: order counts must match the source exactly, every financial total must reconcile to within two cents, fulfilment quantities must add up correctly per SKU, and every tracking number in the source has to appear, one-to-one, in the result. If something doesn't reconcile, it gets caught here, and not by your finance team three months later.

4. Import in clean batches

Large catalogues are split into manageable batches and imported in order, never splitting an order across two files, with each batch validated on its own. The result is a Shopify store that carries your full history, intact.

The details that protect you

The reason migrations get a bad name is rarely the straightforward orders. It's the awkward ones. A tested process handles them by default:

• Discounts and free items. Prices are calculated on a tax-inclusive basis, so that 100%-discounted products, free shipping and staff orders all come across correctly, with no inflated revenue and no broken totals.
• International addresses. House numbers and additions are put back together to local convention, and province or state codes are filled in automatically for the countries Shopify requires them for (the US, Canada, Australia, Italy, Spain and others), even when the source data left them blank. Postcodes are normalised so addresses validate cleanly.
• Phone numbers. SFCC phone formats often fail Shopify's strict validation, so they're handled on purpose rather than left to throw errors on import.
• Tracking and fulfilment. Where tracking exists, it's preserved and matched to the order it belongs to, so your post-purchase and returns picture stays whole.

And one principle sits above all of it: we never guess. If an order is ambiguous or broken, we flag it so a person can check it, instead of making up data to fill the gap.

What about your customers?

Your customers come across with their history, because their history is their orders. Every imported order carries the customer's identity, contact details and addresses, so Shopify rebuilds customer profiles and reconnects them to everything they've ever bought from you.

In practice, that means once you're live on Shopify you get back:

• Customer records with their full order and address history
• The purchase data that powers segmentation and lifetime-value analysis
• A clean foundation for retention: your Klaviyo flows, win-backs and loyalty programmes have real history to work with from day one

One thing worth knowing up front, and it works in your favour: logins don't carry across, and on Shopify they don't need to. Shopify's new customer accounts are passwordless. Instead of a password to migrate or reset, customers simply enter their email and receive a one-time code to sign in. So there's no password reset to manage at launch and nothing for customers to remember. They log in, see their full history, and carry on. The only thing it asks of you is a short heads-up in your launch comms about the new sign-in step, which we'll help you plan.

An effortless migration

A migration feels effortless for your team because the hard part is handled for you, by a process that's been built, tested and validated to leave nothing behind.

That's the part we take care of. As a Shopify Premier partner, among the top 0.2% of Shopify's global network and one of the few agencies in Europe at that tier, we've moved established fashion brands onto Shopify without losing the history that makes them valuable. We pair the technical rigour above with a fashion-first understanding of what your business actually needs on the other side: a store that's faster to run, cheaper to maintain, and ready to grow.

If you're on SFCC and the numbers are starting to point towards Shopify, your data doesn't have to be the thing that holds you back.

Thinking about migrating from Salesforce to Shopify? Get in touch, and let's map out what your migration would actually look like: orders, customers, history and all.