Australian benchmarks back this up. Local agency pricing guides put professionally built Shopify stores at $10,000 to $50,000, with Shopify Plus builds running $30,000 to $100,000+, and Australian Shopify developer rates sitting around $80 to $200 per hour. Migration-specific quotes for platforms like Neto typically land between $5,000 and $25,000+ depending on complexity.
So instead of one number, here is what each budget tier actually buys, and where the money goes. For platform-specific move detail, see our guide to migrating from Neto, Magento or WooCommerce.
The ~$5K migration
At this level you are paying for a competent lift-and-shift, not a rebuild.
Expect an off-the-shelf theme from the Shopify Theme Store, configured to roughly match your brand. Colours, logo, fonts, homepage sections. No custom design work.
Data migration covers products, customers and usually a limited window of order history, moved via CSV export or a migration app. Nobody at this price is hand-cleaning your product data - what comes out of the old platform is what goes into Shopify.
You get standard app installs (reviews, email, shipping), basic 301 redirects for your top pages, and enough testing to confirm checkout works. Integrations are limited to whatever connects natively.
This is fine for a store with a few hundred clean SKUs, no B2B pricing, no ERP, and a theme-friendly brand. It is not fine for anyone else, and the shops quoting $5K for complex stores know that.
The ~$15K migration
This is the realistic floor for most established Australian merchants, and where the work starts looking like engineering rather than data entry.
The theme is still a premium base, but properly customised: bespoke sections, product page layouts built around how you actually sell, metafields set up so your team can manage content without a developer.
Data migration is complete and audited. Full order history, customer accounts with tags and segments preserved, product data cleaned and restructured for Shopify's product and variant model. Discrepancies get reconciled, not ignored.
Integrations get real attention: Xero, your shipping stack (Australia Post, Shippit or StarShipIT), Klaviyo with flows rebuilt and historical revenue attribution intact, Google and Meta tracking rebuilt properly on Shopify's current checkout.
Critically, you get a full redirect map - every old URL matched to its new home, not just the top 50 pages - plus structured pre-launch testing and staff training.
The $40K+ migration
Now you are re-platforming a business, not moving a website.
This tier covers custom design and front-end build, ERP or WMS integration (the single biggest cost driver on any project), B2B functionality with company accounts and negotiated price lists, Shopify Markets configured for international selling, and custom app development to replace logic your old platform did natively.
Testing is staged and scripted: data validation, integration testing under load, UAT with your team, a rehearsed cutover plan with a rollback option. On Plus-scale projects, this phase alone can be weeks of work.
If your revenue depends on wholesale customers logging in and seeing their pricing, or on orders flowing untouched into an ERP, this is your tier. There is no cheap version of that work, only versions that fail quietly after launch.
What blows budgets out
Four things, reliably:
ERP and warehouse integrations. Middleware, field mapping, edge cases like partial fulfilments and returns. Scope this first, not last.
B2B pricing. Customer-specific price lists, tiered pricing and payment terms need Shopify's B2B features (a Plus capability) or apps, and your pricing rules never map across one-to-one.
Custom checkout and discount logic. Anything scripted into your old checkout must be rebuilt as Shopify Functions and checkout extensions. Worth knowing: Shopify's legacy checkout customisation is gone - checkout.liquid was sunset for Thank you and Order status pages in August 2025, and Shopify Scripts stopped working on 30 June 2026. Any migration done now lands on Checkout Extensibility from day one, which is the right outcome but real build work.
Bad data. Inconsistent SKUs, duplicate customers, orphaned images. Cleaning it is unglamorous and billable. Budget for it or inherit the mess.
Why the cheapest quote usually costs more
Cheap quotes are cheap because they exclude the work that protects revenue. Redirects get skipped, so years of Google rankings die at launch and organic traffic drops for months. Order history gets left behind, so your service team flies blind. Tracking gets pasted in rather than rebuilt, so your ad platforms optimise on garbage.
Fixing a botched migration costs more than doing it properly once, because you pay for the original job, the rescue job, and the lost revenue in between.
Australian specifics worth knowing
Platform costs are separate from build costs. Shopify's Australian plans currently run about $52/month for Basic, $149 for Grow and $575 for Advanced (less on annual billing), with Plus starting around US$2,300/month.
Make sure your build includes proper GST setup: tax-inclusive pricing configured correctly, GST registration reflected on invoices, and tax behaviour tested for export orders if you sell overseas.
And insist on local shipping integrations being scoped explicitly - Australia Post, StarShipIT, Shippit, Sendle, or your 3PL's connector. This is where offshore or template quotes quietly fall over, because they assume US carriers.
Getting a real number
A useful quote requires someone to look at your catalogue, your integrations and your data before naming a figure. Anyone who quotes without doing that is guessing, and you will pay for the guess.
If you are weighing up a move to Shopify, send us the basics - current platform, rough SKU count, what needs to connect - and we will come back with a straight answer on scope and cost. Read more about our Shopify migration process, or start an enquiry.