"It depends" is an unsatisfying answer, but it's the accurate one, so let's break down what it actually depends on, with real ranges attached, so you can estimate where your own store falls rather than relying on a single generic number.
The three factors that matter most
Catalog size and complexity. A 200-product store with simple variants migrates faster than a 15,000-SKU catalog with complex attribute combinations, regardless of how good the tooling is — there's simply more data to map, validate, and spot-check.
Custom functionality. A store running mostly standard WooCommerce features migrates faster than one with heavy customization — custom checkout logic, subscriptions, wholesale pricing, or bespoke plugins all add real time, because that functionality typically can't be copied directly and needs to be redesigned for Shopify.
Content and SEO scope. A store with a large blog and years of accumulated URLs to redirect takes longer to migrate properly than a product-only store, purely because of the redirect mapping work involved.
Rough timelines by store type
Small store (under 500 products, standard features, minimal custom content): Typically 1–3 weeks from kickoff to launch, including theme setup, data migration, QA, and redirect mapping.
Mid-sized store (500–5,000 products, a handful of custom requirements, established blog content): Typically 3–6 weeks. The extra time mostly goes into custom feature planning, more thorough QA across a larger catalog, and a more involved redirect map.
Large or complex store (5,000+ products, subscriptions, wholesale/B2B logic, significant custom functionality): Typically 6–12+ weeks, sometimes longer for genuinely complex enterprise setups. These projects usually involve a discovery phase specifically to scope what needs to be rebuilt versus migrated, before any data transfer even begins.
What the timeline actually breaks down into
Discovery and planning (roughly 10–15% of total time). Auditing the current store, defining what needs custom handling, agreeing on scope. Rushing this phase is the most common cause of mid-project delays, because issues that should have been caught up front get discovered instead during data migration or QA.
Theme setup and design (variable, often runs in parallel with data work). Selecting or customizing a Shopify theme, applying branding, building out custom sections if needed.
Data migration (often the fastest phase, proportionally). With good tooling, moving products, customers, and orders is usually one of the quicker parts of the process — most of the time budget goes to what surrounds it, not the transfer itself.
QA and validation (roughly 20–25% of total time, and worth protecting). Checking every product category, testing checkout flows, verifying customer accounts, spot-checking that variants and pricing came through correctly. This step gets rushed more often than it should, and it's the step where migration problems actually get caught before customers see them.
Redirect mapping and SEO setup (variable based on site size, but non-negotiable). Building and testing the full redirect map, updating the sitemap, resubmitting to Search Console.
Launch and post-launch monitoring (ongoing for the first several weeks). DNS cutover, monitoring for broken links or unexpected errors, watching Search Console for crawl issues.
What speeds things up
Clean, well-organized source data speeds up everything downstream — a WooCommerce store with consistent categorization and clean product data migrates noticeably faster than one with years of inconsistent data entry. Having clear decisions made in advance about what customizations are actually necessary (versus "nice to have, we'll figure it out") also removes a common source of mid-project delay, since scope changes mid-migration are one of the biggest timeline risks on any project like this.
What doesn't speed things up, no matter how much you'd like it to
Rushing QA. It's tempting to compress the testing phase when a launch date is looming, but this is consistently where corners cut early show up later — as broken redirects, incorrect pricing, or missing customer data discovered after go-live, when it's far more disruptive and expensive to fix than it would have been during testing.
A realistic expectation to set
If someone promises a same-day, fully automated migration for a catalog of any real size or complexity with zero manual review, that's usually a red flag rather than a genuine time-saving feature — the QA step is where migration problems actually get caught, and skipping it trades a faster launch for a higher chance of post-launch surprises.