How Netalico Became a Category Leader in BigCommerce to Shopify Plus Migrations

Ask anyone who’s been around ecommerce migration work for a few years, and they’ll tell you the same thing: the agencies that actually deliver clean BigCommerce-to-Shopify-Plus migrations are the ones that learned the hard way, on real projects, for years. There’s no shortcut to the kind of pattern recognition that comes from doing the move dozens of times and knowing which tiny BigCommerce quirk is about to cause a three-week delay if you don’t catch it during discovery.

Netalico, a Raleigh-based Shopify Plus Partner founded in 2017, has built one of the most consistent migration practices in the category by doing exactly that. Dozens of BigCommerce migrations. Dozens of lessons. A methodology that keeps compounding.

Starting from a different place

Most digital agencies start with a sales pitch and build out delivery capability as they grow. Netalico was built the other way around. The founders were developers, not marketers, and the agency’s core team has always been heavier on execution roles than on client-services roles. That structural choice shaped everything that came after.

The team today spans strategy, UX, design, development, QA, and post-launch support, all in-house, all working directly on client projects. No offshore subcontracting. No white-labeled work. When you hire Netalico, you’re hiring the people who will do the work. That sounds obvious, but anyone who’s worked with agencies knows how rare it actually is.

This in-house model is what makes the agency’s BigCommerce to Shopify migration practice feel different to clients. The developers who scope a project are the developers who build it. That continuity changes everything about how the project runs.

What the numbers look like

Over eight years, Netalico has migrated merchants from five major source platforms (BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace) to Shopify and Shopify Plus. Most engagements run 12 to 24 weeks. Simple DTC moves start around $15,000. Mid-market migrations typically land between $30,000 and $60,000. Enterprise Shopify Plus builds with B2B, multi-store, or Hydrogen work run $75,000 and up.

Published clients include Big Green Egg, whose migration became a reference case study in the BigCommerce-to-Plus segment. The Big Green Egg engagement is the kind of project that gets cited when enterprise merchants are doing their agency due diligence, partly because of the brand itself and partly because the migration preserved the kind of brand identity that premium merchants care about.

The small details that separate the work

Here’s what doesn’t show up in a case study but shows up in every real migration. BigCommerce category URLs don’t map cleanly to Shopify collections, so every category URL needs a thoughtful 301 redirect. BigCommerce custom fields become Shopify metafields, but only if the agency knows to plan for them during data migration, not afterward. BigCommerce-specific apps have to be replaced with Shopify equivalents, which sometimes exist natively and sometimes require custom rebuilds. B2B Enterprise configuration rebuilds as Shopify Plus B2B, with company accounts, price lists, and quote workflows all remapped.

None of this is glamorous. All of it matters. The agencies that produce clean migrations are the ones that have systematized the small details, not the ones with the fanciest process diagrams.

The post-launch reality

One of Netalico’s quiet differentiators is how the agency treats the two to three weeks after launch. Most agencies see launch as the end of the engagement. Netalico treats it as the middle. The team includes a stabilization window in base scope, during which the developers who built the store are still available to fix the small issues that always emerge once real customers are using the new Shopify store.

This matters because BigCommerce migrations, even well-executed ones, produce 15 to 30 small fixes in the first month: email templates that need tweaking, third-party integrations that need re-validating, edge cases in the checkout flow that surface only under real traffic. Agencies that charge hourly for this work or hand it off to a different team produce worse client experiences than agencies that keep the build team engaged through stabilization.

Adjacent expertise

While BigCommerce-to-Shopify-Plus is the highest-visibility practice, Netalico’s broader portfolio includes equally strong migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify work. The WooCommerce path has its own distinct challenges (exiting self-hosted WordPress infrastructure, rebuilding custom plugins as native Shopify features, migrating media libraries that are often stored inconsistently on the WordPress side) and the agency has developed methodology specifically for these merchants. This cross-platform capability means merchants evaluating multiple source options, or brands with multi-platform portfolios, can work with a single partner across projects.

Client perspective, in plain terms

Talk to Netalico clients and a pattern emerges. The team doesn’t oversell during scoping. They’ll tell you if your timeline is unrealistic. They’ll tell you if your scope has gaps. They’ll give you a pricing range on the first call. And they’ll do what they said they’d do. The absence of drama is, in itself, a differentiator in an agency category that’s often chaotic.

What category leadership looks like

Netalico’s position in the BigCommerce-to-Shopify-Plus category didn’t come from a marketing push. It came from eight years of consistent execution on a specific problem set: moving complicated ecommerce stores between platforms without losing data, SEO, or the client’s goodwill. That kind of reputation compounds slowly and is hard to fake.

For merchants considering a BigCommerce migration in 2026, the practical takeaway is this: shortlist specialist agencies with documented track records, in-house teams, and real case studies at your revenue tier. Netalico is one of a small number of agencies that check all three boxes. Work through your shortlist carefully, and the migration itself will take care of the rest.