Adobe Commerce Shopify Migration: APAC Case Study Benchmarks

The most widely cited number in this space comes from Shopify's own published customer story on Malaysian home-improvement chain MR DIY: a 113% increase in daily orders after moving off Adobe Commerce onto Shopify Plus. That single figure is why "Adobe Commerce Shopify migration APAC case study" now shows up in board decks across Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong. But one headline number is a bad reason to replatform a regional retail business.

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I've sat on both sides of this conversation — as a former HSBC VP building the business case, and now building the systems that have to survive the cutover. What follows is the data behind the decision: what the published APAC case studies actually claim, what independent benchmarks support, and where the numbers get soft.

The headline finding: order growth, not cost savings, drives the published APAC results

Shopify's published case study on MR DIY — a retailer operating thousands of stores across Malaysia and Southeast Asia — reports a 113% lift in daily orders following migration from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus, alongside faster deployment of new market storefronts (Shopify Plus customer stories).

Note what that figure is not. It is not a controlled experiment. Migration coincided with catalogue rationalisation, new payment methods, and marketing investment. Anyone presenting a 113% order lift as a platform-attributable result is overselling it.

What is more defensible: the migration removed a category of operational drag. Adobe Commerce upgrade cycles, extension conflicts, and hosting management consumed engineering capacity that a mid-market APAC retailer typically does not have in-house.

Total cost of ownership differences cluster between 30% and 40%

Three independent claims land in a similar band:

• Shopify's enterprise TCO research, based on Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact methodology commissioned by Shopify, puts Shopify Plus total cost of ownership at roughly a third below comparable enterprise platforms (Shopify Enterprise).
• Build Grow Scale's replatforming analysis claims Adobe Commerce runs 41% more expensive than Shopify on a like-for-like basis.
• Agency-side reporting from Swanky on enterprise Adobe-to-Shopify moves cites licence-plus-hosting-plus-maintenance consolidation as the dominant savings line, not licence fees alone.

Vendor-commissioned research is vendor-commissioned research. Treat the 30–40% band as directional. The mechanism behind it is real and easy to verify against your own invoices: Adobe Commerce Cloud bills licence, cloud infrastructure, and a systems integrator retainer separately. Shopify Plus bundles hosting, PCI scope, CDN and checkout maintenance into the platform fee.

For an APAC retailer running three to six country storefronts, the line item that usually surprises the CFO is not licensing. It's the cost of maintaining six Adobe Commerce store views, each with its own payment extension version, across an annual upgrade cadence.

Performance gaps are measurable and independently verified

This is where third-party data is strongest.

The HTTP Archive Web Almanac's e-commerce analysis consistently shows Shopify-hosted sites passing Core Web Vitals at a meaningfully higher rate than Magento/Adobe Commerce sites — the gap has run roughly two to three times in favour of Shopify across recent editions (HTTP Archive Web Almanac). Build Grow Scale's comparison puts the load-time difference at 3.4× slower for Adobe Commerce in their sample.

Why this matters commercially: Deloitte's Milliseconds Make Millions study found a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed produced an 8.4% conversion lift for retail sites and a 9.2% increase in average order value.

And the baseline is unforgiving. Baymard Institute's aggregation of 49 studies puts average documented cart abandonment at 70.2%. In Southeast Asia, where a large share of sessions arrive on mid-tier Android devices over mobile networks, the speed-to-conversion relationship is stronger than in US or EU benchmarks.

APAC market structure changes the migration maths

APAC accounts for well over half of global retail e-commerce sales, with eMarketer and Statista both placing the region's share around 60%. That scale hides enormous fragmentation:

• Payments — GrabPay, Touch 'n Go and FPX in Malaysia; PayNow in Singapore; FPS and AlipayHK in Hong Kong; LINE Pay and convenience-store payment in Taiwan.
• Tax — Singapore GST at 9% since January 2024; Malaysia's SST regime; Australian GST on low-value imports.
• Logistics — regional 3PLs and country-specific last-mile providers with no unified API.

On Adobe Commerce, each of these is an extension or a custom module, multiplied per store view, re-tested at every upgrade. On Shopify Plus with Markets, currency, pricing and domain logic move into platform configuration, with payment gateways as installable apps.

The honest trade-off: Shopify's checkout is far less customisable. If your APAC business depends on B2B quote workflows, complex tiered dealer pricing, or an ERP-driven pricing engine, Adobe Commerce's flexibility is a real advantage — not legacy baggage. We've seen dealer-network manufacturers in Greater China where the B2B requirement genuinely argued against replatforming.

Migration timelines run 12 to 24 weeks for multi-market catalogues

Across published enterprise case studies and agency reporting, multi-store APAC migrations land in the three-to-six-month range. The variance is almost entirely driven by three things: catalogue complexity, integration count, and URL structure.

Data extraction from Adobe Commerce is straightforward. Run the export from the Magento CLI:

1bin/magento indexer:reindex
2bin/magento app:config:dump
3# Product export via REST for full attribute fidelity
4curl -X GET "https://store.example.com/rest/V1/products?searchCriteria[pageSize]=200" \
5  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MAGENTO_TOKEN"

The expensive part is attribute mapping. Adobe Commerce's EAV model supports arbitrary attribute sets; Shopify uses metafields and a 100-variant ceiling per product (3 options pre-2024, now expandable via metaobjects). A 40,000-SKU hardware catalogue with 60 custom attributes does not map cleanly.

For bulk load, Shopify's bulkOperationRunMutation is the only sane path at scale:

1mutation {
2  bulkOperationRunMutation(
3    mutation: "mutation call($input: ProductInput!) { productCreate(input: $input) { product { id } userErrors { field message } } }",
4    stagedUploadPath: "tmp/products.jsonl"
5  ) {
6    bulkOperation { id status }
7    userErrors { field message }
8  }
9}

SEO preservation is where migrations quietly fail. Magento's default .html product suffix and layered-navigation URLs generate thousands of indexed paths that have no Shopify equivalent. Map them explicitly:

1/power-tools/drills/cordless-drill-18v.html  →  /products/cordless-drill-18v
2/catalog/category/view/id/42                 →  /collections/drills

Organic traffic dips of 10–20% in the first four to six weeks post-migration are common even with clean redirects, per multiple agency post-mortems. Budget for it in the forecast rather than explaining it afterwards.

Platform roadmap risk now sits on both sides

Two deadlines reshaped this decision in the last two years.

Adobe has narrowed investment in Magento Open Source and pushed customers toward Adobe Commerce Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud integration (Adobe Experience League documentation). Retailers on heavily customised Open Source builds with PHP versions past end-of-life are carrying unpriced security risk.

Shopify, meanwhile, deprecated checkout.liquid for Plus merchants in favour of Checkout Extensibility — a forced rebuild of any customised checkout (Shopify developer documentation). Merchants who migrated in 2021 to get checkout control discovered that control was temporary.

The lesson for anyone building an Adobe Commerce Shopify migration APAC case study for internal approval: every SaaS platform relocates your customisations eventually. Price the second migration, not just the first.

What the Reddit and practitioner threads get right

Search interest in this topic includes a lot of "reddit" and "interview" qualifiers — people looking for unvarnished practitioner views or preparing for consulting-style case interviews. The recurring practitioner consensus in r/shopify and r/magento threads is consistent with the data above:

1. Cost savings are real but smaller than vendor marketing implies once app subscriptions are counted. Ten to fifteen paid Shopify apps at US$50–500/month each erodes the licence delta.
2. Performance gains are the most reliable outcome.
3. B2B and complex pricing are the most common reasons migrations get abandoned mid-scoping.
4. Transaction fees matter. Shopify Payments availability varies by APAC market; using an external gateway triggers additional platform fees.

That fourth point is frequently missing from published case studies and is the one I'd model first for a Malaysian, Vietnamese or Philippine operation.

The benchmark set worth taking to your CFO

Eight numbers, each with a source, for the business case:

• 113% daily order increase — Shopify published MR DIY case study
• ~33% lower TCO — Forrester TEI methodology, commissioned by Shopify
• 41% cost premium for Adobe Commerce — Build Grow Scale analysis
• 3.4× slower load times on Adobe Commerce — Build Grow Scale analysis
• 8.4% conversion lift per 0.1s mobile speed gain — Deloitte, Milliseconds Make Millions
• 70.2% average cart abandonment — Baymard Institute, 49-study aggregate
• ~60% of global retail e-commerce sales in APAC — eMarketer/Statista
• 2–3× higher Core Web Vitals pass rate for Shopify vs Magento — HTTP Archive Web Almanac

Apply your own discount to the vendor-sourced three. The independent four are the ones that hold up under scrutiny.

What to do Monday morning

1. Pull your true Adobe Commerce run cost. Licence, cloud hosting, SI retainer, extension renewals, and internal engineering hours spent on upgrades over the last 12 months. One number. Most retailers underestimate it by 30–50% because the engineering time is buried in payroll.

2. Run Core Web Vitals on your five highest-revenue URLs per market. Use PageSpeed Insights field data, not lab scores. Multiply any LCP improvement opportunity by Deloitte's 8.4%-per-100ms retail figure against your current conversion rate. That gives you a defensible revenue-upside range.

3. Inventory your customisations and classify them three ways — platform-native on Shopify, app-replaceable, or genuinely custom. If the third bucket contains your pricing engine or B2B quoting workflow, stop and cost a headless option instead. That classification exercise takes a week and prevents the most expensive category of mistake.

If you're weighing a replatform across multiple APAC markets and want the migration scoped against these benchmarks rather than a vendor pitch, talk to our commerce team — we'll tell you if the numbers don't support moving.

Sources

• Shopify — Plus customer stories
• Shopify — Enterprise commerce and TCO resources
• Shopify — Checkout Extensibility developer documentation
• Adobe — Adobe Commerce documentation (Experience League)
• Baymard Institute — Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics
• HTTP Archive — Web Almanac
• Deloitte — Digital research and insights
• Matrixify — Shopify bulk data migration