Shopify to Medusa Migration

Why UAE stores leave Shopify

Shopify is a good default until the store needs something your plan doesn't include. For a UAE store, that point comes early.

• Native card payments need Advanced or Plus. Shopify Payments in the UAE is available on those two plans only. On Basic and Grow, cards go through a third-party gateway.
• BNPL orders carry an extra fee. Shopify charges a fee on orders paid through third-party gateways such as Tabby and Tamara. Its UAE pricing lists 2% on Basic and 1% on Grow, falling to 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus.
• Custom checkout logic is Plus-only. Shopify Scripts ended on 30 June 2026, and custom Functions apps need Plus.
• B2B is limited below Plus. If you sell wholesale as well as retail, you either upgrade or work around the limits.
• Managed Markets isn't open to UAE-based merchants. Shopify's managed route to selling abroad isn't on the table.

None of these is a reason to move on its own. Together, for a store with real volume and its own way of selling, they mean paying more each year for less control.

What Medusa changes

Medusa is open-source commerce under the MIT licence. Products, carts, pricing, orders and payments run as modules in a Node.js service you own, on a PostgreSQL database, with a Next.js storefront in front.

There's no plan tier to climb. Checkout rules, B2B pricing and region-specific logic are code in your repository, not features unlocked by an upgrade. Medusa Cloud takes no percentage of your sales, and Medusa's own claim is that running on it costs a tenth of Shopify Plus. We test that claim against your numbers in the audit rather than take it on trust.

UAE payments: we build the providers

This is where most Medusa projects in the region stall. Medusa's only official payment provider is Stripe, which is available to UAE businesses. Community plugins for the regional gateways were written for Medusa v1 or are no longer maintained.

So we build them. Tabby, Tamara, Checkout.com and N-Genius each become a custom Medusa payment provider, written for your store, tested end to end before launch and handed over as code you own. Stripe can sit alongside them if it suits you.

Prices stay right too. Medusa sets tax-inclusive pricing per region or currency, so AED prices can include the 5% VAT.

How the migration runs

1. Store audit: catalogue, customers, orders, apps, theme customisations and the URLs that earn traffic.
2. App mapping: each Shopify app becomes a Medusa module, custom code, an external service or nothing.
3. Data import with Medusa's migration tooling, released in August 2026. Its custom API import is resumable and moves inventory and images. The CSV route loses data, so we keep it as a fallback.
4. Payment providers built and tested for every gateway you use.
5. A Next.js storefront on your existing URLs, with Arabic and right-to-left layout built in.
6. Parallel run, reconciliation and cutover.

Shopify and Medusa, side by side

Your URLs stay where they are

Shopify fixes its paths: products live at /products/<handle> and collections at /collections/<handle>. On Medusa the storefront owns routing, so we rebuild the same paths exactly. Product URLs don't change, nothing needs a redirect, and rankings, backlinks and shared links keep working.

Customer accounts and passwords

Shopify doesn't export customer passwords, so no migration can carry them across. You choose how customers get back in: one-time-code sign-in, where they receive a code by email and never need the old password, or a reset campaign timed with launch. Customer records, addresses and order history move either way.

Cutover without a big bang

Both platforms run in parallel. Shopify keeps trading while Medusa runs on your real catalogue. When it's ready, we re-sync what changed, reconcile stock, orders and payments, and switch. Until then, Shopify is still there if anything is off.

Hosting and where your data lives

Medusa Cloud runs in three AWS regions: us-east-1, eu-central-1 and ap-southeast-1. Medusa lists its Cloud plans at $29, $99 and $299 a month. If your data should stay in the UAE, we self-host Medusa in AWS me-central-1 instead. The Next.js storefront can deploy on Vercel or alongside the backend.

Whichever you pick, customer data moves to a new platform. Under the UAE PDPL (Federal Decree-Law 45/2021), sending it to infrastructure outside the UAE is a cross-border transfer. We check the data-processing agreements with each provider and leave behind legacy data you no longer need.

What drives time and cost

Not catalogue size alone. A Shopify-to-Medusa project moves with the number of apps to replace, how much custom checkout and pricing logic you carry, how many payment gateways need a provider, how complex your variants are, and whether Arabic ships in the first release. We give you a fixed scope after the audit, not a range before it.

When this is the wrong choice

If your store runs happily on a standard Shopify plan, the catalogue is simple and nobody on your side wants to own code, stay where you are. Medusa gives you control, and control means owning a codebase. If you're starting a store rather than moving one, see ecommerce development. If Shopify still fits and needs work, see Shopify development.