Shopify migration agency

A migration moves a store that is already selling. Customers have accounts, orders are open, and pages rank in several countries. A Shopify migration agency is responsible for four things during that move: which system owns which data afterwards, where every old URL points, how ERP, shipping and payment are connected, and what the sign-off is measured against. The theme is the smaller part of the work.

We start with an inventory of the legacy system. It covers products with variants and attributes, customers, order history, discount codes, content, extensions and every address that search engines or other sites link to, in each language. From that list we derive the target model in Shopify with variants, metafields, collections and markets. The data then runs into a staging environment several times and is counted against the old system. If you want to know before the project which data and functions 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. Eight of our 12 published case studies describe a move from another shop system: Shopware, Magento, OXID, PrestaShop and Plentymarkets. The page on our work as a Shopify Plus agency covers what Shopify Plus carries beyond the move.

Replatforming fits when your team spends its time on updates, hosting and extension compatibility while the business itself fits a standard. Rebuilding, or staying on the current system, is right when pricing logic, configuration or order processing form the core of the business and no platform can represent them.

Your backlog is the test. If last year's tasks were mostly patches, server issues and repairs after updates, the architecture works against you. If they were functions customers find only in your store, the custom build is an asset. The common case sits between the two: the store moves to Shopify and the few special functions are built as a custom app. At Sirocco that was the club logic with login and loyalty discount, at Gusti Leder the engraving configurator. The page on Shopify app development describes how such extensions are built.

A move without a goal becomes a relaunch with higher risk. Before the start we agree what should change afterwards: the time it takes to publish a campaign page, the number of systems in operation, or the launch in a new country. If it is open whether Shopify is the right platform, the platform comparison helps. If we advise against the move, we say so before the quote.

We migrate from Shopware, Magento and Adobe Commerce, OXID, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Plentymarkets and custom builds. The method stays the same and the pitfalls differ by platform, so each of the four most common source systems has its own page.

OXID to Shopify covers modules, customer groups and language-specific SEO URLs. Groundies ran OXID for the US and Shopware internationally, and merged both onto one Shopify Plus codebase in 6 months, which cut cost by 50%. Shopware to Shopify deals with Shopping Experiences, properties and plugins. Magento to Shopify centres on attribute sets, store views and extensions. Sirocco brought 40,000+ customer records with their order history from Magento. WooCommerce to Shopify covers plugins, WordPress content and permalinks.

Not every migration replaces the legacy system completely. Hairshop Pro moved from Plentymarkets to Shopify Plus and kept Plentymarkets as its PIM. An interface synchronises product data, stock, prices and orders between the two. The store was live after 3 months, with a 35% higher conversion rate and a 20% higher average order value from bundles and cart upsells. The page on system integration describes how such connections are built.

A migration is signed off after four checks. The data matches the legacy system. Every old URL reaches a target with matching content. Test orders arrive in ERP and shipping. Tracking measures the same events as before. We run these checks in staging before the cutover date is fixed.

Kanela shows what that means for a large, multilingual catalogue. The Swiss online pharmacy ran PrestaShop with more than 40,000 products, an ERP and three marketplaces. We reconciled and transferred products, categories, stock, customers, bonus balances, orders and reviews, analysed 337,891 product-category relationships, and set up and read back 147,753 legacy URL mappings from four language versions. The live integrations stayed in place until each replacement was verified. Today Shopify Plus connects the catalogue with the ERP and the marketplaces Zur Rose, Galaxus and Manor.

The cutover follows a plan with a content freeze, a final data extract, the DNS switch and a way back. It does not have to be one date for all countries. Groundies launched in stages, the US first and international 60 days later. BlumeIdeal moved without a hard cutover, and the DNS switch took about 5 minutes. Gusti Leder went live after 8 weeks with Shopify Markets for DACH, France and the UK.

Nobody can promise unchanged rankings in a platform change. Search engines have to assign the new addresses first, and positions move during that time. We are responsible for a complete redirect list and for fixing the 404 errors that appear after launch. The page on Shopify SEO describes the work on visibility afterwards, and the page on tracking setups the measurement.