Coming from Magento, is shopify for us?

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Hello community,

we are a small brewery with a restaurant, event-location, offline store and online store. Traditional family business. The online store is currently running on a self hosted Magento 2 installation, which was installed, maintained and developed with a lot of custom code by my father in law, who unfortunatly passed away very suddenly in late 2025. Since I’ve been working in IT for >20 years, have some (dusty but still working) PHP know how and often helped him out with the code (rather than buying modules he developed them himselfe), I jumped in to keep things somehow up and running. Honstly, this is also the first e-commerce system I took over, so please excuse me beforehand if some questions seem dumb.

But since I have a young family and a (more than) full time job already I also face my own limits, especially since we started to become a target for cyberattacks. Unfortunatly the store is quite outdated as he was afraid to get all of his custom code working on newer versions. So I am currently running from CVE to CVE and try to patch things up as much as I can.

That’s why I tried to do some sort of really check also with the team on what do we really need of this customizations and I am looking for an alternative as SaaS application and got quite interested in shopify. I have some use-cases which I am trying to find answers for, if they are possible to achieve.

  1. We sell tickets to events in our location. This can be things like Parties, Training, Music events or on some recurring dates also a breakfast. Customers buy a ticket online, get sent an event Code (QR Code) and our team onsite has a small smartphone app (Self developed against the shop api) to check if the code is valid and check the people in. The number of available tickets differ per event.
  2. The breakfast event has a small speciality. We have 2 different prices for adults and (older) children. But both variantions deduct from the same inventory of available tickets.
  3. One product we sell is beer in bottles. We keep an inventory of available bottles and have several pre-configured boxes (6-packs, 20-packs) or allow customers to “mix and match” their own box with the sorts they like. Depending on the stock of bottles in backend some might not be available and not choseable for mix-and-match. So basically multiple articles have to share the inventory in the backend.
  4. We also sell gift-cards which are currently redeemable in our online-store, offline-store and the restaurant. The offline-store and the restaurant use a POS-System which unfortunatly does not have any interface to shopify, and also not directly to our Magento store. It currently works very well, that we customers can buy the gift cards online or we pre-generate them, print them, and store them in the offline-store / restaurant to sell them on-site. The teams use a small, simple, mobile app which allows them to scan a gift card and modify the balance, like if the customer has a 50€ gift card and a restaurant bill of 20€, the service can see the balance and simply deduct the 20€ from the gift card and can enter this in the POS. Might sound strange but this has been working very well also with the accounting and taxes stuff in the background :slight_smile: I’ve already checked some documentations of the shopify apis, and also found a GraphQL mutation to achieve this. I first found the (deprecated) REST API, which had some remarks on this, that customer support is required to access this API. So I just wanted to clarify if this use case would still be possible?
  5. As written above, I am currently quite limited time wise, but I also would like to invent a bit of time to get to know shopify, try a few things and check if our use cases are really possible. As far as I read, a “free” development / demo store is only possible if you have bought a store? I know about 3 “free days” and the quite cheap first 3 months. I’m just not sure if thats enough time for me. Is there any option to get a “longer” running demo store? If not, I assume I could start with the smallest basic tarife, maybe monthly paid to set things up, “play” with it and once we decide it is for us we can switch to a yearly paid, let’s say grow tarife?

P.S.: We are currently not interested in using Shopify POS. Our offline store sells more goods (also from farmers small companies near us), than available online (only our own products) and we really do not want to have the team having to operate 2 different POS systems.

I’m sorry for the long wall of text. And thank you in advance for reading and possibly answering :slight_smile:

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I would recommend buying a premium theme. There are a gazillion themes out there. Also look in the Shopify App Store, tons of developers make apps to integrate your needs. There’s practically an app for everything nowadays.

But to be a realist, even paid themes are going to require your attention to detail. And Shopify itself has annoying limitations. Like having 2,048 variants allowed but only 3 variant options.

You’ll have to either get an app or mess with the code for the beer qty. Not that hard though.

Shopify has an AI assistant that can pretty much help with anything. It is very good with Javascript and css and can come out with some pretty cool customizations.

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Shopify Development Store created VIA Partner Account lasts forever. Although they are limiting but you might be able to test almost everything. And later, you can transfer it to a paid plan for testing things which cannot be tested on the Dev Store.

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Hey, as a Shopify partner who’s helped a few businesses migrate from self-hosted platforms, I can speak to your specific use cases.

For the event ticketing (use case 1 & 2), Shopify doesn’t handle that natively but there are solid ticketing apps in the app store that generate QR codes and manage capacity. The shared inventory between adult/children ticket variants is doable with Shopify’s built-in variant system since they can draw from the same inventory pool.

The beer mix-and-match (use case 3) is probably your trickiest one. You’ll need a bundle app that ties into your bottle-level inventory. A few good ones exist, but definitely test this on a dev store first because the inventory sync between individual bottles and pre-made packs needs to work both ways.

Gift cards (use case 4) across Shopify and an external POS that doesn’t integrate with Shopify is going to be your biggest challenge honestly. Shopify’s Gift Card API exists and you could build a small middleware to sync balances, but it’s custom dev work. If your current mobile app already handles this well through Magento’s API, you’d need to rebuild that integration against Shopify’s GraphQL API.

For testing, definitely set up a Shopify Partner account (free). You get unlimited dev stores that never expire, which gives you way more time than the 3-day free trial. You can test all your use cases without paying anything.

What’s your timeline looking like for the migration? That might change the approach.

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For a family business with brick-and-mortar, events, and online operations, Shopify actually handles multi-channel pretty well out of the box. A few things that specifically might help your brewery situation:

Inventory sync between in-store POS and online is solid on Shopify POS + Online combined plans. Events can be managed through apps like Evey or Eventbrite integration.

Coming from Magento, the biggest shift is thinking in terms of apps rather than custom code. Things that required 200 lines of custom PHP in Magento often have a solid Shopify app for $10-30/month. The trade-off is you lose deep customization but gain reliability and zero server maintenance.

For your restaurant side, check whether you need a separate booking/reservation system integrated or if Shopify’s built-in gift cards and events cover what you need. Many small restaurant/retail combos use a third-party reservation tool (OpenTable, Resy) and just handle the retail/online side in Shopify.

The free trial period is generous enough to actually build your store and test POS before committing.

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Try MigrateGo team they will help you migration and store design and development i have good experience with them

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Any prospective use of gift card apis, WITHOUT a shopify Plus plan, should be discussed with shopify support advisor DIRECTLY because the docs about access are hot unreliable garbage.

Ask a singular SCOPED question.

Hi @Avexis :waving_hand:
None of your questions are dumb but it’s too many it’s literaly work.
These are peer-to-peer forums not personal paid support.
Respect others time as you do your own:
One topic ONE issue don’t gloms things together not just because it’s the rules it’s how YOU avoid burning even MORE time than you already don’t have.
A big list just makes everything muddy, increases the chances you’ll omit some critical point that will undermine everything.
And just plain encourages vague bot responses that will mislead you to get a sale or social points.
If you need actual discovery then actually delegate.
At minimum break things apart to separate research posts THEN bring it together in one post to show your work for question about making so much work together.

Yes shopify partners like myself can make free dev stores with mild limits to prevent abuse.
You can reach out to me to get a test store if you also need a proper consulting/discovery-session to go over all these matters.

Every thing I glanced over is possible yet unlikely to be quick and not have their own lists of caveats.
Shopify isn’t magic.
A tad easier if you already have tech experience , good existing dev workflows, and then know some middle ground tools for shopify, etc.
The time burden may not go way it can INCREASE.

:foot::gun: , Soft NO? (in uppercase)
If events are the primary business don’t use shopify just because you heard of it, especially if in a rush.
Time based products are not a native feature, and if you do overly specific inperson things like reserved seating there will be migraines and likely constant yak shaving.
Caveat being if your magento system is a hodgepodge already then at least shopify might bring better foundational structure to untangle parts of the business.

Most such requests that are tl;dr will always require third party apps or building out custom apps/middleware (which can be a good thing in if you got the money to make money to buy the time)
You will have a burn a HUGE chunk of time just stepping through all this , THEN get to implementations.
Be sure this wont turn into trading having to do maintenance/security your doing now efficiently for possibly having to deal with constant limitations and maintenance of kludge for systems you don’t own.

The actual business issue

I am currently running from CVE to CVE and try to patch things up as much as I can.

Take as many hats off as you can. Do you really want to be the maintainer for a side gig?
Moving it to shopify doesn’t guarantee time, money guarantees time.
If there’s not enough money to justify bringing someone to fix critical vulnerabilities that’s not a good sign for moving to ANY platform.
If there’s not enough time to justify you doing regular maintenance or putting a better process in place to make the money needed to fix that meta problem that’s not a good sign for moving to ANY platform.

Be 300% sure that magento isn’t the actual problem with the lack of time and it’s not a symptom being pointed at because it’s the easiest to notice out a bunch of compounding business processes.
e.g. do you work IN the business or do you work ON the business.

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Thank you everyone, taking the time reading and responding to my question, I’m deeply greatful and it encourages me to take a deeper look into shopify.

I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t catch a 1 topic / 1 post rule, when I checked the rules before posting but will definitly keep it in mind for future posting.

@PaulNewton especially thank you for the professional reply and reality check.
Maybe a few background information: We have a few people in the backoffice who do the store management and logistics. I’m basically a interim solution who jumped in for my passed father-in-law, and try to care about the technical aspects like theme changes, custom code maintenance and sometimes jump in sickness cases and do basic store management tasks.

But I am very aware, that we would be moving to a SaaS, which potentially does not offer all the possbilities we currently have with fully customizable code. But honestly, thats part of transformations, that also processes have to adapt / evelove and not only the tool. Over the past years I’ve been migrating customers from onprem solutions to cloud / saas applications / solutions (none e-commerce) and its basically the same. You trade off caring for the onprem world for different challenges :wink:

But what I’d like to achieve is, that we get shop up and running, which suits our needs (or where we can adapt our needs to it) and then start off from there evolving at straightforward pace. I’m sorry if my comment about time was a maybe a bit expressed in the wrong direction. Let’s just add, it makes a huge difference to me, if I can work on plannable stuff like a new seasonal theme, or a new feature in “a usual pace” or having to invest 7 hours through the night after a cyberattack. Like stated before, our current shop is heavily customized and basically every patch / update requires a huge load of testing due to it. Thats what I want to get rid off in future.

Small side notes:
The onliest connection to restaurant really is the gift card topic, no need for things like table booking. Also the main selling point is usually our products as in beer and other stuff around hops and brewery. Events make around 1/3 of our “products”, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the season. I guess we would a small shop. We talk about something like 30-40 indivdual products, 10ish bundle products and usually like 3-7 event booking products up in our shop, depending on the season.

Again, thank you everyone for the answers, it really helps a lot!

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The BUSINESS could move to a SaaS, saying your interim means there is no “we”.
That and other smells makes this lines up more with someone needing an exit plan than the additional burdens of a platform migration.

If money’s gonna burn either way I’d talk to local agencies in regards to a path where the company stays on magento but someone else is handling maintenance or at least emergencies.
THEN you have the opportunity cost for exploring migration.
All this assumes if you don’t outright own the thing then you have enough say for any of this so the real stakeholders don’t cut off an in progress migration.

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@PaulNewton Can’t really say you are wrong here. I talk in “we” in terms of family here (might be wrong from a business perspective). But actually it’s me who wants an exit plan. I’m not the final stakeholder, but I am asked for and can make suggestions. And I really want to get rid of the dependency to me (been in too many one-man-show-situations in the past centuries). IMHO, moving to a more or less standardized SaaS application (either by me, or a local agency) is a better investment, than having something (heavily) customized again and makes it easier to select / switch partners / agencies.

As tech enthusiast, I am really trying to learn and get my own view on topics before making any suggestions. And please understand, due to the history it really has some sentimental value to support finding a stable, supportable (by whoever) and realiable solution. Please don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate your sober opinion on this one :slight_smile: