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Bulk Content Migration is the StagingPro screen you use when the destination environment is empty (or you intend to overwrite most of it) and you want to copy your full BigCommerce catalogue from one environment to another. It runs on a dedicated high-performance migration platform with parallel processing, checkpoint resumability, idempotent upserts, and automatic BigCommerce API rate-limit handling.

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When to use Bulk Content Migration

The bulk migration options are as follows:
How existing items are matched: products are matched by SKU first, then name (so editing a SKU on the source no longer creates a duplicate; products with no SKU match by name). Brands, categories, customer groups and similar entities match by name, case-insensitively. The one thing no strategy can do is link a product whose name and SKU were both changed on the source since the last run — that arrives as a new product.
The assumption underneath Bulk is “destination should look like source for the entities I selected”. If that is not your intent, switch to selective.

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The interface

The Bulk screen is a three-step flow:
  1. Configure Storefront environments — pick the source store and storefront, the destination store and storefront, and (for multi-storefront runs) review the channel mapping.
  2. Select Data Treatment Strategy — choose Add New Only, Update Existing, or Make Exact Copy (the table above).
  3. Select Entities to Migrate — tick the entity groups to move (Product Data, Design & Content, Commerce & Mktg, Store Settings, Order Data, and — when both stores are B2B Edition — B2B Edition), then use Get Entity Counts to preview totals and Check Forecast & ETA before clicking Start Migration.
Starting opens a confirmation dialog summarising source → destination, strategy, storefront scope and entity count. If the destination is your live production store, the dialog shows a red warning with a PRODUCTION chip and requires an explicit “I understand” confirmation. Once submitted, the run detail opens with live progress; you can also monitor it from the Home tab or the Migration History tab.
Storefront scoping: picking a specific source storefront scopes the run to that storefront’s data (products, categories, pages, theme & Page Builder, scripts); store-wide data (brands, customers, promotions) always migrates in full. Picking All Storefronts migrates everything and requires a saved channel mapping. Entity counts and the Forecast always show whole-store totals, so a storefront-scoped run’s actual migrated count can be lower than the forecast — that is expected.
Channel Mapping: You can map the source store channels with the destination store channels prior to the migration (when both the source and destination stores are multi-storefront enabled) so as to enable you to migrate the entities to corresponding destination channels/storefronts. To do this, click the source store’s channel drop down selector and select all storefronts option, map the channels and click Save mapping.
“Get Entity Counts” button → Optionally get entity counts to preview totals on the entities before you migrate.
Moreover, “Check Forecast & ETA” button gives you the calculated estimate time required to migrate the entities so that you can plan your migration accordingly.

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Product Bulk Migration

Product bulk migration processes each product through multiple component steps:
  1. Base product creation (name, description, price, SKU)
  2. Options and Modifiers setup
  3. Variants generation
  4. Images and Videos upload
  5. Reviews, Custom Fields, and Bulk Pricing Rules
  6. Complex Rules and Related Products associations
  7. Channel Assignments and Metafields (product and variant level)
  8. Content (widgets and template associations)
  9. Locale (multi-language product data via GraphQL)
Products can be migrated in bulk (all products) or selective (specific product IDs) mode. A failure in any step is logged but does not block subsequent steps for the same product. Failed components show up in the migration error summary with categorised errors and a CSV download.

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Category bulk migration

Category migration automatically includes parent categories, ensuring that the category hierarchy is preserved correctly. This helps eliminate the “parent category not found” errors that are commonly encountered with manual or custom-built BigCommerce category imports.

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Store & Storefront Settings

The Store Settings panel mirrors the BigCommerce control panel’s own Settings page: the ~25 individually-selectable setting groups are organised into the same sections you know from the admin (Setup, General, Orders, Products, Advanced, Domain, Storefront design), with a select-all master checkbox. Channel-scoped settings (email statuses, customer/order settings, web analytics, currency assignments, SEO, search, robots and so on) apply per storefront using your channel mapping, and each group is reported as copied, skipped, or failed.

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Order Data Migration

Under the Order Data Migration section, enable:
  • Anonymise Customer Data
This option scrambles customer data from the source environment before migrating it to the destination environment, ensuring data security for testing purposes. It is required whenever orders, customers, or gift certificates are selected — and it also unlocks the B2B entities that carry personal data (companies, together with their addresses, users, super admins, and sales staff assignments). Orders migrate with their statuses as-is, and you can restrict the run to specific order statuses. BigCommerce assigns new order numbers on the destination.

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B2B Edition Migration

When both the source and destination stores are on B2B Edition, a B2B Edition Migration panel appears with six entity families: Roles & Permissions, Companies (including status, payment configuration, parent/child hierarchy, and price-list links), Company Addresses, Company Users, Super Admins, and Sales Staff Assignments. No separate B2B credentials are needed — see B2B, coupons, and data dependencies for the prerequisites and details.
If you want a clean-slate destination instead, delete the destination catalogue first via the BigCommerce control panel, then run Bulk migration.

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Entity Dependencies

  • The info-circle icon on an entity shows a hint. For some entities (Products, Price Lists, Promotions, B2B Companies) the hint describes dependencies that ride along automatically.
    Example: Migrating Products also migrates the Brands and Categories they reference.
  • Entities without a dependency hint migrate independently.

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Monitoring Migration Progress

During bulk migration, you can monitor progress through:
  • Home tab for overall migration status per environment (live progress bars)
  • Migration History tab for the live run detail: phase-by-phase progress, ETA, the Breakdown by Phase table, and the itemised issue log