SAP Commerce Cloud, which most people still call Hybris, does things Shopify does not. That is the whole difficulty of the move. Products and customers copy across in an afternoon. The rules engine does not copy across at all.
Here is the honest map, so you can plan the work rather than discover it. If you are still deciding whether to move at all, start withSAP Hybris vs Shopify.
The map
What moves cleanly
These are data problems. They are tedious at large volumes, but nothing about them is uncertain.
- Products, variants and media. Even with deep variant trees, this is a mapping exercise.
- Customer records. Names, addresses and email addresses move. Passwords do not, see below.
- Order history. Import it read-only so your support team can still answer "where was my order in 2024".
- URLs. Every old address gets a redirect to its new one. Do this properly and you keep your search rankings. Skip it and you lose years of them in a weekend.
- Stock, per location. Shopify handles multi-location stock natively.
What changes shape
These exist on both platforms, but they are not the same object. Budget for rebuilding, not copying.
- Price rules become price lists. Hybris lets you write a rule for almost any condition. Shopify uses catalogues and price lists per company or market. Most rules survive. Some do not, and you need to know which before you start.
- B2B accounts become companies. Shopify B2B has companies, locations and payment terms. The concepts line up. The structure underneath does not, so the mapping needs a decision per account type.
- Promotions are rebuilt as Shopify Functions. Anything beyond a simple discount is code on Shopify. That is usually a gain, because you can read what it does.
- Catalogues become collections and markets. A single Hybris catalogue often splits into several Shopify concepts.
- Approval flows. Shopify B2B covers the common cases. Anything unusual is an app you build.
What stays behind
This is the part people discover late, so read it first.
- The rules engine. Drools has no equivalent. Every rule has to be read, understood and rewritten as a Function or an app. Nobody enjoys this, and it is usually the largest single job in the project.
- WCMS templates. The content model rebuilds in the theme or a headless front end. Content moves. The templates do not.
- Custom Java extensions. Anything your team wrote inside Hybris becomes a Shopify app, or goes away. This is the right moment to ask which of them anyone still uses.
- ImpEx scripts. No equivalent. Whatever they automated becomes an import job or an integration.
- Passwords. They are hashed, and you cannot move them. Shoppers set a new one on first sign in. Send that email before launch, not after, or your support queue will explain it for you.
The three questions that decide the timeline
Before anyone estimates the work, answer these. They matter more than the size of the catalogue.
- How many live promotion rules do you actually run?Count them, then ask how many were last changed this year. The answer is often a fraction of the total, and the rest can be retired rather than rebuilt.
- What talks to Hybris today? ERP, warehouse, tax, pricing, punchout. Each integration is its own piece of work, and some are harder than the storefront.
- Do you need B2B and B2C in one store, or two? This changes the architecture, so decide it before anything is built.
How to sequence it
Move in this order. Each step is testable before the next begins.
- Products, then customers, then orders. Prove the data before touching anything else.
- Rebuild the storefront against the imported data.
- Reconnect integrations one at a time, ERP first.
- Rewrite the promotion rules you decided to keep.
- Map redirects, then test them against a crawl of the old site.
- Run both platforms in parallel for a period if your traffic justifies it.
- Cut over. Send the password reset email the same hour.
The part worth saying plainly
A Hybris migration is not a theme project. The storefront is the visible part and rarely the hard part. The hard part is the decade of business rules living inside the old platform, some of which nobody remembers writing.
Anyone who quotes this work without reading your rules and your integrations is guessing. If you are weighing the move, ask us. We will read what you have and tell you what is genuinely involved, including when the answer is that you should stay where you are.