Most Magento-to-Shopware migrations do not fail because of the data import. They fail because of what the importer does not address, and this often only becomes apparent once the new shop is already live.
That is the uncomfortable truth behind a project that looks harmless on paper. Shopware provides a free tool that extracts products, customers and orders from the Magento database. The demo runs, figures appear, green ticks. It is precisely this smoothness that is the trap. The real work – and the real risk – lies in the areas that the wizard deliberately leaves out: front-end, interfaces, business logic, SEO. Anyone who plans the project around the importer rather than around these gaps is miscalculating the project.
This article is for retailers and teams who have decided in principle to switch to Shopware 6 and now want to know where the problems lie in detail. Whether the switch is even worth it is another matter. This is about the implementation: the five challenges that migration projects actually get stuck on, and how to plan for them in advance rather than fixing them afterwards.
The time pressure involved is no figment of the imagination. Support for Magento Open Source 2.4.6 ends on 11 August 2026, and for 2.4.7 in April 2027. There are no plans for a “Magento 3”; Adobe has shifted its strategic focus to cloud-native services. This means that replatforming is not a matter of style but of deadlines for many existing shops.
Challenge 1: The importer migrates data, but not cleanly
Let’s start with what seems the least problematic. Shopware provides a free plugin, the Migration Assistant, which supports Magento 1 and 2 as source systems via the Magento migration profile. The new Shopware installation connects to the Magento database in read-only mode – nothing is changed at the source – and transfers products, categories, manufacturers, customers, orders and media.
So much for the marketing. In practice, however, this very profile has documented weaknesses, particularly with regard to order data. Some orders are imported as net orders, even though they should be gross. Delivery address, dispatch method, dispatch status and dispatch costs are missing after the import. The table that Shopware needs to calculate the correct tax for the items (order_delivery_position) remains empty. These are not merely cosmetic flaws. These are incorrect figures in the accounts and order history, and they only come to light when someone checks an old invoice or the VAT figures do not add up at the end of the month.
In short: the importer is a good first step, not a complete migration. Order data should be checked on a random basis after migration and not simply imported blindly. Historical orders are a special case anyway. Many projects deliberately choose not to migrate them on a 1:1 basis, but instead archive them separately and start Shopware with a clean order database. For most retailers, this is the more robust solution, as it ensures that the accounts are based on a system free from hidden import errors.
Challenge 2: The data models do not align
The reason for this friction runs deeper than a faulty plugin. Magento and Shopware describe the same things – a product, a variant, an attribute – in fundamentally different ways.
Magento stores product data in the EAV model (Entity-Attribute-Value), a highly flexible but fragmented structure in which a single product is spread across dozens of tables. Shopware 6 uses a more modern, clearly structured entity model. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the two, particularly when it comes to variants. An example where migrations really hit a snag: a configurable product with three axes, such as size by colour by material. In Magento, the variants are attached to a parent product as a separate ‘configurable product’ structure; in Shopware, they are created from properties and a variant matrix. Anyone who simply copies the Magento structure over will end up with either duplicate products, missing combinations, or variants that customers can no longer select in the shop. This is precisely why many projects require a mapping script or a middleware tool to translate the Magento logic into Shopware logic. In our experience, a Magento migration is therefore more labour-intensive than an upgrade from Shopware 5 to 6, where the structures are at least similar.
In practical terms, this means that the more bespoke your Magento data model is (with many custom attributes, complex variant axes, and evolved category structures), the less the standard importer will help, and the more the migration will become a data project. Clean product data is no afterthought here; well-thought-out product data management determines whether the migration will be a simple move or a complete rebuild of the catalogue.
Challenge 3: Extensions with no equivalent – the real cost driver
When a migration project goes over budget, it is rarely down to the products. It is down to a Magento extension for which there is no equivalent in Shopware.
Every established Magento shop has a layer of extensions: a product configurator, specialised tax or pricing logic for B2B tiered pricing, an ERP integration, a marketplace connector, a custom-built loyalty programme. Take the ERP integration as an example, as it affects almost every shop. In Magento, this was often a ready-made connector plugin: install it once, configure it, and it’s up and running. In Shopware, there may not be a suitable plugin for that exact ERP system, and so the off-the-shelf connector becomes an in-house development project involving requirements analysis, interface design and a testing phase. A configuration item turns into a development item. This shift is the reason why the extension issue throws timetables off course, not the number of products. Plan for this proportion from the outset as Shopware development with its own budget.
Which approach is the right one for each function (an existing Shopware plugin, in-house development or an external integration) can only be decided on a case-by-case basis, not across the board. This is precisely why the extension inventory is the most important task in the entire preparation process, and it is most frequently underestimated. If you honestly list at the outset which extension serves which business process and which of these are truly worth retaining, you’ve got half the project costing sorted. Often, the migration even turns out to be an opportunity to finally weed out functions that have been dragged along for years. The truly business-critical interfaces to ERP, PIM and CRM, on the other hand, belong in a properly structured API integration and third-party integration, and it is these that dictate the timetable.
Challenge 4: The frontend is a new build, not a migration
Here we dispel the most persistent misconception: the design does not carry over. It cannot be carried over.
Magento themes are based on Luma or PWA Studio, Shopware 6 on Twig templates, and for composable setups on the Vue/Nuxt-based Shopware frontends. These are different technologies that have nothing in common apart from the purpose of displaying a shop. There is no converter that transforms a Magento theme into a Shopware theme. The front-end is rebuilt from scratch in every migration project: storefront templates, components, checkout customisations, and responsive behaviour. Anyone who has ever had to recreate a checkout with three payment methods, voucher logic and B2B price display knows that this takes weeks, not days.
This may sound like extra work, but it is actually the real opportunity offered by the migration. Instead of preserving an outdated theme, you rebuild the storefront to the latest standards: more performant, easier to maintain and immediately accessible. Shopware 6.7 (May 2025) has specifically tailored the standard themes to the requirements of the European Accessibility Act, using semantic HTML. This is good news, as the accessibility in accordance with the BFSG has already been mandatory for online shops since 28 June 2025, not just in the future. Anyone building a new site from scratch should incorporate it straight away, rather than having to retrofit it later under pressure. Budgeting the new front-end development as a ‘migration’ nonetheless is one of the most costly planning mistakes. It is a development project with its own scope.
Challenge 5: SEO, the biggest business risk of the entire project
And so we come to the point that determines success or failure – technically unremarkable, yet commercially huge: the URLs.
Magento and Shopware structure their URLs differently. A Magento product page typically uses a path such as /catalog/product/view/id/1234, whilst Shopware generates ‘friendly’ URLs by default. If, during the relaunch, every product and category page is given a new address and the old ones lead nowhere, you’ll lose – in one fell swoop – the rankings you’ve built up over years, and with them the organic traffic that drives sales. Imagine 5,000 product pages, each with years of accumulated link juice, all returning a 404 error on the day of the go-live. This is not a hypothetical risk, but the most common reason why a technically sound relaunch still ends up costing money. A slump in organic visibility lasting weeks or months is more expensive than developing any new extension.
The safeguard is conceptually simple but prone to errors in implementation: a complete redirect mapping that redirects every old Magento URL via a 301 to its new Shopware counterpart, plus the transfer of metadata, structured data and a correct XML sitemap. ‘Complete’ is the key word. It is not enough to redirect the top 100 pages, because it is precisely the long tail – comprising thousands of product and filter pages – that, taken together, accounts for the lion’s share of organic traffic. This mapping needs to be part of the project planning from day one, not the week before go-live.
In short: the migration is only complete when Google finds the new shop in exactly the same way as the old one. Everything before that is technical; this is business.
What this means for your project planning
When you put these five challenges together, a realistic picture emerges, and it looks quite different from the importer’s marketing demo. A Magento-to-Shopware migration is rarely just a simple data transfer. It is a replatforming project involving five parallel areas of work, of which the data import is the smallest. Depending on the complexity, a timeframe of three to six months is realistic. To find out whether the switch is the right move for your shop at all, see Magento vs. Shopware comparison.
My advice, as someone who oversees such projects: make taking stock of your extensions and planning the redirects your first task, not your last. Treat the front end and interfaces for what they are: development projects with their own budget. And check the imported order data before you rely on it. The next concrete step is therefore not a migration on a hunch, but an honest assessment: Which extensions are linked to which business processes, what does the URL inventory look like, and where are the interfaces? This assessment forms the basis of every robust Shopware migration with expert support. It takes a few days and saves the months that a project started blindly would waste.
Because the calculation set out at the start remains the same: anyone who plans the project based on the importer is miscalculating the project. Anyone who plans it based on the five gaps is calculating it correctly and will face no surprises on go-live day.
The services page Shopware migration by an agency shows how such a project is supported, from the initial assessment right through to redirect mapping.