OXID to Shopify migration

OXID eShop is a German shop system, and most OXID stores were built for the German-speaking market by German agencies. Teams outside that market often find a store whose behaviour is defined by modules nobody on the team wrote. An OXID to Shopify migration therefore starts with reading code. Modules overload the classes of the core and change cart, pricing and order flow wherever they need to.

That review produces a list of functions. Some are dropped because nobody uses them any more. Some are standard in Shopify, such as discount codes, quantity discounts or managing several languages. Some are covered by an app. The rest is built as a custom extension. The page on our work as a Shopify migration agency describes the method for every source system. If you want to know before the project which modules are critical, the migration audit comes first.

NICCOS has been a Shopify Plus Partner since April 2022 and holds 19 reviews with a 5.0 rating in the Shopify Partner Directory. Among our 13 published case studies, one is a move off OXID: Groundies, whose US store ran on OXID.

Groundies sells barefoot shoes and ran two separate systems: OXID for the US market and Shopware for its international markets. The result was duplicated operations, rising maintenance cost and long lead times for new storefronts and campaigns. In 6 months we merged both systems onto one shared Shopify Plus codebase. The theme was rebuilt, and Zendesk, Workato for warehouse and fulfilment, 8Returns for returns and Pathway Solutions for accounting were connected, along with Reviews.io for reviews and Klar for analytics.

The US store, which had run on OXID, went live first. 100+ orders came in within 3 days of the US launch, and the international launch followed 60 days later. The consolidation cut cost by 50%, and the time from briefing to live is about three times shorter than before. Caro Kampnick, E-Commerce Manager at Groundies, put it this way: “That was the calmest launch we’ve ever had.”

A staged launch is one of several routes. Starting with one market keeps the first cutover small and lets the team check order flow, returns and accounting with real orders before the other countries follow. The page on Shopify internationalisation covers what selling into several countries involves.

OXID holds variants as separate articles under a parent article and also has selection lists, which represent a choice without its own stock. Shopify has products with variants and options. Before the export we decide per article what becomes a variant with its own stock and what travels as a property of the order line. Attributes become metafields and filters, and categories become collections.

Prices are the second area where OXID projects need time. A, B and C prices, scale prices and discounts per customer group overlap. Before the import we record which price applies to which customer, and map the result to company profiles and catalogues on Shopify Plus. The page on Shopify B2B describes what that includes.

German law adds requirements that an international team may not expect. On price reductions, the lowest prior price has to be shown under the Price Indication Ordinance (PAngV). Our own app, Best Price Indicator (PAngV), in the Shopify App Store covers that. Unit prices, delivery information and legal texts move to the places where they have to appear in the purchase flow.

OXID builds SEO URLs from the category path and the article name, per language and usually with the .html suffix. The addresses sit in the database together with older entries that stay reachable after renaming. Shopify sets fixed paths for products, collections and pages. Almost every address changes in the move.

We extract the stored SEO URLs from the database and add addresses from Search Console, analytics and our own crawl. That surfaces addresses with parameters which come from older versions and are still linked. Articles assigned to several categories in OXID often have several addresses, and all of them point to the same product afterwards. Every address gets exactly one target through a 301, with the same content in the same language.

We test the list against staging before go-live. After launch we watch indexing and fix 404 errors. Nobody can seriously promise unchanged rankings in a platform change. The page on Shopify SEO describes the work on visibility afterwards.

Customer accounts, addresses and orders move with the original order number, so that customer service and accounting can find old transactions. Passwords cannot be transferred. Customers receive an invitation to activate their account, and newsletter consent moves as its own attribute. Many OXID stores exchange data with the ERP through files or custom modules. In Shopify that connection is rebuilt through a connector, middleware or a custom app, and it is signed off when test orders, cancellations and returns arrive in the ERP. The page on system integration explains the structure.

If your business depends on changes that can only be made in open code, we advise against the move. The comparison Shopify vs. OXID sets the two platforms side by side.