EPages → to Shopify

ePages to Shopify: moving a hosted German shop, its VAT pricing and its old links

Most ePages shops were never bought from ePages directly. They came as part of a hosting or telecom package, under the host’s own brand, and many have run for ten years or more. That history is what makes an ePages to Shopify migration more than a CSV job: two generations of shop software, long ObjectPath links still sitting in Google and in old backlinks, prices entered with VAT included, German legal texts, and a contract and domain that belong to the hosting company rather than to ePages. This guide explains how we move ePages Base and ePages Now shops to Shopify with the catalog, customers, orders and search rankings intact.

Why stores leave ePages

• Base is frozen. ePages has said that Base will stay technically supported for many years but receives no further development. Merchants on Base are offered an update to ePages Now, which means a new design and re-entered content anyway.
• Now dropped features some shops rely on. ePages’ own feature comparison lists multiple currencies, product bundles, downloadable products, customer attributes, product comparison and the blog as Base features that Now does not have. A shop that uses them faces a rebuild either way.
• A small app ecosystem. ePages runs an app store and a REST API, but the pool of apps, themes and developers is a fraction of Shopify’s.
• Growth beyond a starter shop. International selling, marketplaces, B2B and point of sale are areas where Shopify offers more depth without custom work.
• The host sits in the middle. Support, pricing and the timing of updates depend on the reseller, not on ePages, and moving between reseller packages is not straightforward.

To be fair to ePages, it is an established Hamburg company whose software ships with legally compliant defaults for the German market, including reference prices and legal pages, and it is still developing Now in 2025 and 2026 (automatic translation with DeepL, new reseller partners such as the Sparkassen). A small shop that is happy on Now may not need to move. Our audit is there to answer that question.

What migrates from ePages to Shopify

ePages gives you two routes for data. The CSV export under Settings, Export and Import covers products, product types, categories and pages, category assignments, cross-selling and customers, but not orders. The ePages REST API (the “Now API”, which also serves Base shops) exposes products and variations, categories, customers, orders and order documents, limited to 6,000 calls per hour. We use the CSV files for the catalog and the API for orders and as a cross-check.

Data	Source on ePages	Moves to Shopify?
Products with product numbers, names, descriptions, prices, tax class, weights, stock, images, EAN codes	Products CSV export, or the products endpoint of the REST API	Yes. The ePages product number becomes the SKU and is the join key for redirects and reviews.
Product types and variation products	Product types CSV; variations endpoint	Yes, as options and variants with their own SKU, price, stock and image. See the section below.
Reference prices (price per kilogram or liter)	Reference unit fields on the product	Yes, into Shopify’s unit price fields, so the base price still shows.
Categories and category assignments	Content, categories and pages export; category assignment export	Yes, as collections, with the tree rebuilt in the menus.
Cross-selling	Cross-selling export	Yes, as product metafields that drive a related products block in the theme.
Customers with billing and delivery addresses	Customers CSV export or API	Yes. Newsletter recipients are exported separately and their consent is carried exactly.
Customer groups, bulk prices and customer-specific prices	Customer group and price settings	Rebuilt as Shopify discounts or B2B catalogs with price lists and quantity rules. Not a one-click move.
Orders with line items, tax, shipping, payment method and status	REST API only (not in the CSV export)	Yes. Real Shopify orders with the original number and date, a payment record and fulfillments. Refunds and cancellations are recorded as such.
Passwords	Not usable outside ePages	No. Customers set a new password or use Shopify’s passwordless sign-in.
Legal texts (Impressum, AGB, Widerrufsbelehrung, Datenschutz)	Shop pages, often fed by a legal-text service	Recreated on Shopify, ideally through the legal-text provider’s Shopify interface. See below.
Bundles, downloadable products, customizable products (Base)	Base product types	Rebuilt with Shopify bundles, a digital downloads app and line item properties.
Design, blog, forum and guest book	ePages themes and Base content features	Design is rebuilt as a Shopify theme. Blog posts move to a Shopify blog; forum and guest book entries are archived or retired.

ObjectPath URLs and the 301 redirect map

This is where ePages shops lose the most traffic when a migration is rushed. Older ePages shops, and any Base shop without short URLs switched on, serve every page through one long dynamic address. A product looks like /epages/ShopID.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/ShopID/Products/ABC-123, a category like /epages/ShopID.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/ShopID/Categories/Gartenmoebel, and a variation adds a segment such as /Products/ABC-123/SubProducts/ABC-123-XL. The same page is often indexed several times: with the slashes encoded as %2F, with quoted and encoded category names like Categories/%22Aussenleuchten%20Edelstahl%22, with a different locale folder such as en_GB, or with session and view parameters in the path.

Base shops on their own domain could switch on short URLs, which turn pages into single readable paths such as /Schuhe, with a canonical tag pointing at the short form. ePages Now generates search-engine-friendly URLs from page titles. Many shops therefore carry two or three URL generations at once, and old backlinks usually point at the ObjectPath form.

Shopify uses /products/handle and /collections/handle, so every one of those forms needs a 301. Shopify’s redirects match the query string, which means each ObjectPath variant is its own entry. We build the list from a full crawl, the Search Console page report and the API’s storefront URL field, which returns the ObjectPath address for each product. The product number inside the ObjectPath is the join key to the new handle, and every redirect is requested against the live domain before cutover.

Tools

Cart2Cart lists ePages as a source platform, and LitExtension offers an ePages to Shopify migration covering products, categories, customers and orders. Cart2Cart is a partner of ours, and both tools are fine for a first pass on products and customers. Their limits show up where ePages shops are sensitive. Neither carries tracking numbers on shipped orders. Refunded orders tend to arrive as plain paid orders, which leaves a false balance on each one. Redirects are built from guessed slugs, not from the ObjectPath links that Google and old backlinks actually use. And neither tool sets up VAT-inclusive pricing, reference prices or German legal pages. ePages is a hosted platform, so everything has to come through the export screens and the API; we use both, and finish the orders, redirects and German-market settings ourselves through the Shopify Admin API.

How we run it

1. Audit. Edition check (Base or Now), export review, API access, product types and variations, customer groups, legal-text setup, payment methods, URL inventory, and who holds the hosting contract and domain. The output is a written, fixed-price scope.
2. Build in a free Shopify development store. As a Shopify Plus Partner we build in a development store, so you pay Shopify nothing until the store launches. Theme, markets, VAT, payments, shipping and legal pages are set up here.
3. Catalog. Products, variations, reference prices, collections and cross-selling, with Base-only product types redesigned with your sign-off.
4. Customers. Customers imported with addresses and newsletter consent; customer groups rebuilt as discounts, B2B catalogs or tagged segments.
5. Orders. Full order history from the API with original numbers, taxes, refunds and tracking where the shop recorded it.
6. Redirects for every ObjectPath variant, short URL and Now URL, tested individually.
7. Sample, then full import, with reconciliation. A sample of each entity, including awkward cases, is signed off before the full run, and the full run is reconciled count by count and total by total against ePages.
8. Cutover with a delta sync. Orders and customers created in ePages during the build are brought across at launch, then DNS moves.
9. Post-launch SEO evaluation. We watch 404s and redirects from launch day, and run the SEO evaluation once Google has re-crawled the store and the first real analytics exist, rather than on a fixed calendar.

Cost and timeline

Our migrations start from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores), which typically take six to eight weeks for smaller stores. B2B pricing, multiple storefronts and integrations such as an ERP or accounting connection are quoted as a fixed price after the audit, so you know the full cost before work begins. Terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures.

Which ePages edition you are on, and why it changes the export

ePages is sold by dozens of partners under their own names, so many merchants do not know which edition they run. The quickest signs: Base is the older edition, often shows ObjectPath URLs, and may use multiple currencies, bundles, the blog or customer attributes. Now has the drag-and-drop page editor, responsive design templates and an Export and Import screen under Settings.

• Base. The CSV export uses semicolons and either ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 encoding. We export in UTF-8, because German umlauts and the euro sign are where ISO files most often break. Variation products, bundles, downloads and customer attributes all need a mapping decision.
• Now. Up to 250 variations per product across up to three attributes, which fits Shopify’s three options and 2,048 variants without redesign. Import files are capped at 10,000 products, so large exports arrive split.
• Base shops mid-update. Some merchants were moved to Now with ePages’ semi-automatic tool and still have leftover Base URLs in Google. We redirect both generations.

In both cases orders do not appear in the CSV export, so API access is part of the audit. On a reseller package, API access may need to be requested through the host.

VAT-inclusive pricing and German legal pages on Shopify

ePages stores a tax class on every product and a gross or net tax type on the price. German shops usually enter gross prices, and the migration has to keep the displayed price identical, not recalculate it.

• Prices and tax. We set Shopify to include tax in prices, create the German market as the home market and turn on dynamic tax display for other EU markets, so a customer in Austria or France sees their own VAT rate. Reduced-rate products (books, food) get a tax override. VAT and OSS registration numbers go into the tax settings, and we check a sample of prices against ePages to the cent.
• Languages and currencies. Translations move into Shopify’s translation tools, and Base shops that used multiple currencies get local currencies through Shopify Markets.
• Legal pages. Shopify’s policy generator only produces English templates, so the Impressum, AGB, Widerrufsbelehrung and Datenschutzerklärung come from your lawyer or legal-text provider. Services German merchants commonly use with ePages, such as IT-Recht Kanzlei, also offer a Shopify interface that keeps the texts updated. The Impressum goes into Shopify’s legal notice policy and stays linked in the footer.
• Withdrawal. Since June 19, 2026, EU consumers must be able to withdraw through a visible electronic button or link. We configure Shopify’s return and cancellation rules for the EU market for that, and your legal adviser confirms the result.
• Cookies and GDPR. Shopify’s cookie banner and customer privacy settings replace the ePages cookie notice, and tracking tools are set to respect consent.
• Payments. PayPal, Klarna and Amazon Pay are available on Shopify, card payments run through Shopify Payments, and manual methods such as prepayment or invoice are recreated as manual payment methods.

Reseller-hosted shops: the host holds the contract and the domain

An ePages shop from STRATO, 1&1, a regional bank or a local host is a line item in that company’s contract. The domain was often registered through the same package, and the shop may run on a subdomain of the provider. That shapes the cutover more than any data question.

• Keep the domain first. Before anything is canceled, we confirm who is the domain holder, whether DNS can point elsewhere while the domain stays with the host, or whether it needs to transfer with an auth code. Canceling a shop package can take the domain with it, so the order of steps matters.
• Shops on a provider subdomain cannot redirect their old addresses, because the merchant does not control that hostname. We name those links in the audit, update the ones you control (Google Business Profile, marketplaces, social profiles) and ask the host whether the old address can forward.
• Timing. The ePages shop stays live until DNS moves, then remains available to the admin long enough for the delta sync and final order checks before the package ends.

What you get at handover

Every ePages migration ends with a reconciliation ledger from ePages export and API counts to live Shopify counts for products, variations, customers, newsletter subscribers and orders, with order totals checked and every exclusion named; the product type and variation mapping; a VAT and price check showing sample products matching to the cent; the redirect verification list with the status each ObjectPath and short URL returned; a legal pages and payment methods checklist; a domain and DNS record of what moved where; and a recorded walkthrough of the Shopify admin for your team.

Questions we settle in the survey

• Are you on ePages Base or ePages Now, and through which provider?
• Who holds the domain, and is the shop on your own domain or a provider subdomain?
• Can the provider enable REST API access for the order export?
• Do you use bundles, downloads, customer groups or multiple currencies?
• Which legal-text service supplies your Impressum and AGB?
• How much order history should come across?

Frequently asked questions

Start with the migration survey. For another German shop platform, see the Shopware to Shopify guide, and for every source platform we handle, the Shopify migration platforms page.