Move To Shopify Without Losing What Already Works

A Shopify migration means moving your products, customers, order history, content and SEO data from your current platform onto Shopify. It typically covers a platform audit, mapping your data to Shopify's schema, building the new theme, setting up 301 redirects, running the old and new store in parallel to verify everything, then a scheduled cutover. The order matters: the audit exists so surprises appear on a spreadsheet rather than during cutover week, and the parallel run is what turns go-live into a decision you can postpone rather than a deadline you simply have to survive.

We regularly migrate stores from Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, Wix, Squarespace, OpenCart and custom or homegrown platforms with no standard export format. If your platform is not listed, tell us what you are on and we will scope the data mapping directly. What actually changes the effort is not the platform's name but how much logic lives outside the catalog: tiered pricing, quote workflows, bundles, subscriptions and anything your team built around a limitation. We inventory those first, because that list rather than the product count is what sets the timeline.

Not if the redirect mapping is done properly. We map every existing URL, meta title, meta description and image alt text to its Shopify equivalent and build 301 redirects before cutover, so search engines see a continuous site rather than a new one starting from zero. Expect some movement in the first weeks while pages are re-crawled at scale, and judge the outcome over a month rather than the first few days. What we do not accept is unexplained loss: rankings are baselined before cutover so any drop can be traced to a specific URL.

Every URL from your current site is cataloged and mapped to its new Shopify URL. We test the full redirect map during the parallel-run stage, before the DNS switch, so broken links and 404s are caught and fixed while the old site is still live as a reference. The map is built from real data rather than assumptions, combining your sitemap, analytics and Search Console exports, because the pages that matter most are often old URLs still earning links that nobody on the team remembers. Redirects go in as single hops, never chains.

No. We schedule the cutover for a low-traffic window and keep the old store accessible as a fallback until the new one is confirmed working end to end. Most merchants see no meaningful downtime, because the DNS switch itself takes minutes. The genuine risks at cutover are not downtime but the settings that only exist in production: live payment credentials, tax registrations, shipping accounts and transactional email. Each of those is walked in order from a checklist, with a test order placed and refunded on the live store before we call the migration done.

A straightforward migration with a few hundred products usually takes 3 to 6 weeks. Larger catalogs, B2B pricing rules, custom integrations or Shopify Plus builds typically run 6 to 12 weeks depending on how much custom logic needs rebuilding. The variable most likely to move that date is data quality on your side: inconsistent product attributes, duplicate customer records and half-finished categories all have to be resolved by somebody who knows the business. We surface those in the audit so cleaning happens in parallel rather than becoming a blocker in the final week.

Customer profiles and historical order data are imported into Shopify so support teams and repeat customers see continuity. Depending on your current platform, customers may need to reset their password once after the switch for security reasons, which we communicate in advance. That reset is not a shortcoming of the migration: passwords are stored hashed on every credible platform, so no migration can move them in readable form. We prepare the email copy with you, time it with the cutover, and keep the reset prominent for the first weeks to avoid a support spike.

Yes. ERP, CRM, payment gateway and marketing tool integrations are reviewed during the audit stage and rebuilt or reconnected on Shopify, either through existing Shopify apps or custom API work where no direct equivalent exists. The review usually shortens the list, since stores accumulate integrations that were switched off in practice long before anyone stopped paying for them. Anything that must be live at cutover, payments, tax, shipping rates and order sync, is tested against staging first, and we agree a fallback for each in case a vendor's own onboarding runs late.

Custom fields and complex variant structures are mapped to Shopify metafields and the variant system during the data-mapping stage. For very large catalogs we use bulk import tooling and AI-assisted comparison to flag mismatches before they reach the live store. Where a source platform allowed more option combinations than Shopify's model supports, that is raised as a decision rather than quietly truncated, because the fix is usually a product-structure change your merchandising team should own. The mapping document is signed off before import, so nothing is inferred at load time.

Most of what we need, a data export, admin access, or read access to your current platform, does not require ongoing cooperation from your previous developer. We can usually work from an export and public-facing site data if a clean handoff is not available. Where access is genuinely blocked, crawling the live storefront can reconstruct catalog and URL data, which is slower and less complete but workable. We will tell you plainly which records cannot be recovered that way rather than presenting a partial migration as a complete one.

Yes. For merchants with high order volume, multi-currency needs or complex B2B pricing, we plan the migration directly onto Shopify Plus, including Shopify Flow automation and Shopify Markets for multi-region selling. Migrating straight onto the right tier is cheaper than moving twice, so the decision is made during the audit against concrete requirements rather than ambition. If your volumes and requirements do not yet justify Plus, we will say so and plan a standard Shopify build that can move up later, since upgrading is a plan change rather than another migration.

We monitor traffic, rankings and redirect performance for a defined period after cutover and fix anything that surfaces: broken links, indexing issues or edge-case data problems. After that, ongoing Shopify maintenance and SEO retainers are available if you want continued support. The first two weeks are when real edge cases appear, because live customers use address formats, payment methods and discount combinations no test plan fully covers. You also get a written reconciliation of record counts and a list of anything deliberately not migrated, so nothing is discovered months later by accident.