What's the real implementation timeline for Skio on a $10M-$30M GMV Shopify Plus brand with an existing subscriber base to migrate?
A Skio implementation on a $10 million to $30 million GMV Shopify Plus brand with subscribers to migrate runs 60 to 90 days end to end, the community-reported envelope behind Deploi's migration decision page (July 2026 research). Skio's own store-to-store migration window is 1 to 3 weeks minimum and cannot be expedited (per Skio, September 2026). The rest is theme, data and billing work.
Where the 60 to 90 days actually goes
The vendor's number and the project's number are different numbers, and both are true. Skio's migration window is the data movement. The calendar below is the project.
| Phase | Elapsed | What blocks it |
|---|---|---|
| Vault discovery and the Shopify Payments data transfer request | Weeks 1 to 3, overlapping | Shopify Payments support lead time. Plan-gated: credit card data migration requires Plus or Enterprise (per Shopify's Help Center, September 2026) |
| Catalog and variant mapping CSV | Weeks 2 to 4 | A catalog that is still changing. Skio puts variant mapping on the merchant (per Skio, September 2026) |
| PDP purchase-option build and plan configuration | Weeks 2 to 6 | Theme work and design sign-off, not the app |
| Skio migration execution | 1 to 3 weeks inside weeks 5 to 8 | Skio's stated minimum, not expeditable (per Skio, September 2026) |
| Parallel billing run with de-duplication | 2 to 4 weeks | Two platforms live at once. Emails and billing dates need explicit de-duplication (Deploi Build vs. Buy analysis, September 2026) |
| Validation, comms, source-platform shutdown | Weeks 9 to 12 | The first post-migration charge date, which is fixed by the contracts, not by you |
At $10 million to $30 million GMV the phases overlap enough that 60 days is achievable and 90 is normal. The scripted-migration alternative, where you buy the destination and build the glue, runs 6 to 12 weeks with a 2 to 4 week parallel billing run (Deploi estimate, illustrative, September 2026).
What actually decides whether you land at 60 or at 90
- Where the cards are vaulted. A legacy Recharge base on Stripe, Braintree or Authorize.net can reconnect the same processor as a secondary gateway. A Shopify-vaulted base waits on a support request. That single fact is worth two to four weeks.
- Whether the catalog is frozen. Every SKU change during mapping is rework on a file a human built by hand.
- Whether the PDP is in scope. It usually is, and it usually is not in the plan.
- Your subscriber count's billing spread. If most contracts bill in the first week of the month, your parallel run has to straddle a charge date. Plan the cutover around the billing calendar.
Honest boundaries
This is a platform timeline, not a replatform timeline. If the storefront is also moving, the subscription project should start after the storefront is live and stable, which pushes the total past a single quarter. Prepaid gift subscriptions are not supported in Skio's store-to-store migration at all (per Skio, September 2026), so if you run gifting, that cohort is a manual project with its own calendar.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Plan for 90 days and treat 60 as the good outcome. The variance is not in the vendor's execution, it is in the Shopify Payments data transfer request and in whether anyone scoped the product page.
- What we’ve seen: Timelines slip at two points, and neither is the migration itself. The first is the vault discovery, because nobody on the merchant side knows where the cards are until someone asks the question formally. The second is the parallel billing run, which teams try to compress to a week and then extend anyway because the first charge cycle surfaces the anchor errors.
- What it takes: roughly 46 hours of scoped work for native subscription purchase options on the product page (directional Deploi estimate from a small sample of engagements, not a measured average).
- Where we disagree: Vendors quote the migration window as the implementation timeline. The migration window is one phase inside it, and in our experience it is not the phase that slips.
- What this page adds: the phase-by-phase calendar at a named GMV band, and which two phases carry the variance.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-13.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records