Migration Audit & Data Map
Field-by-field mapping of products, variants, customers, orders, blogs and metafields from source to Shopify, with a documented plan for everything that has no equivalent.
Baltimore, MD
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Baltimore, MD
Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or a dealer catalogue system nobody has updated since the last owner — moved to Shopify without losing a URL.
Delivered remotely for brands across Baltimore and Maryland.
Build · Baltimore
Why Baltimore brands come to us for this
- Every indexed URL inventoried and mapped one-to-one, including the decade of crab, oyster and how-to content earning your organic traffic
- Part-number and model data deduplicated and normalised — most dealer exports we receive carry the same SKU under three legacy codes
- Ship-day, cutoff and blackout rules rebuilt as enforced configuration, not carried over as a manual process on a new platform
- Cutover scheduled around the April-to-December season, with the build window planned backwards from your opening date
- Wholesale accounts migrated in cohorts with a parallel period, so no trade buyer loses their reorder history overnight
Baltimore has an unusual density of old ecommerce. Businesses here went online early because they were already shipping nationally — crab and oyster shippers were mail-order operations decades before DTC was a word, and equipment dealers built parts catalogues on whatever their dealer management system exported. So the migrations we take on in this region are rarely a clean Shopify-to-Shopify move. They are a Magento 1 store held together by a developer who has retired, a WooCommerce site on hosting that falls over the week crab season opens, or a bespoke PHP catalogue whose product data lives half in the database and half in a PDF.
Which makes this a data project first. The catalogue arrives with the same fitting listed four times under four part numbers, seasonal products that were never retired, and a decade of blog posts about crab-picking technique that quietly earn more organic traffic than the homepage. We inventory every indexed URL from Search Console, Ahrefs and your server logs, map each one to a target, and force a decision on anything that has no home. The redirect map is signed off before anyone books a cutover date.
The other half is the operational logic that never lived in the old platform at all. Ship-day rules, heat-embargo blackouts and cold-pack rates were being applied by a person, not a system, and that person is not part of the export. We treat those as migration scope, not as a phase two. A store that moves to Shopify with perfect data and no ship-day enforcement has moved a manual process onto a faster server.
Local context
You do not cut over during crab season
The single most important scheduling decision in a Baltimore migration is when. A seafood or specialty-food business does a disproportionate share of its year between the April season opening and the December gifting peak, and no rational team touches DNS inside that window — which leaves a January-to-March build window that we plan backwards from. Industrial and trade suppliers have a different constraint: their traffic is flat but their accounts are irreplaceable, so the risk is not seasonality, it is a wholesale buyer who logs in on Monday and cannot find the reorder list they have used for six years. For those we migrate accounts in cohorts with a parallel-running period rather than a hard switch. And in both cases we build the disruption playbook during migration rather than after, because this region learned in 2024 exactly how fast a supply route can close and how badly it goes when nobody can update customers within the hour.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Baltimore brand’s realities.
Full service detailFull URL Inventory & Redirect Map
Every indexed URL pulled from Search Console, Ahrefs and server logs, then mapped one-to-one. Anything without a target gets a decision, not a homepage redirect.
Catalogue Cleanup
Deduplication, variant restructuring, image renaming and metafield normalisation. Most brands cut 15-30% of their SKU count in this step and lose nothing.
Dry-Run Migrations
At least two full rehearsals into a staging store with an automated delta report on record counts, prices, inventory and customer tags before anyone approves the real one.
Integration Rebuild
ERP, 3PL, ESP, reviews, loyalty, subscriptions and tax reconnected and tested against real orders in staging. Nothing gets reconnected on launch night.
Post-Launch SEO Watch
Sixty days of daily crawl monitoring, index coverage tracking and 404 alerting, with a weekly report comparing organic sessions and revenue against the pre-migration baseline.
Scoped and quoted for your Baltimore store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Baltimore engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Audit & Feasibility
We inventory your data, integrations, custom logic and organic footprint, then quantify the risk in each. You get a fixed scope and a timeline before committing.
Data Mapping & Cleanup
Source-to-target mapping for every field, plus catalogue hygiene work. This is the least glamorous phase and the one that decides whether the project succeeds.
Build & Rehearse
Theme build runs in parallel with repeated dry-run migrations. Each rehearsal produces a delta report and a shorter list of exceptions than the last.
Cutover
A rehearsed runbook with named owners, timed steps, a freeze window and a documented rollback. Executed at your lowest-traffic hour, not on a Friday.
Stabilise & Monitor
Sixty days of crawl monitoring, redirect verification and revenue comparison. We stay until organic is at or above where it started.
Proof
Migrate to Shopify results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Premium Skincare (DTC)
8-figure DTC brand, ~140 SKUs, US + CA · Shopify Plus (migrated from Magento 2)
Magento 2 cost $9k a month in hosting, extensions and emergency dev before a single feature shipped. Mobile LCP sat at 5.4 seconds and mobile converted at less than half the desktop rate across 68% of sessions. The named constraint: 11,412 indexed URLs and a top-3 organic position on their hero category, so a migration that lost rankings would cost more than the platform ever saved.
+41%mobile conversion rate1.62% to 2.28% over the first 90 days post-launch
5.4s → 1.8smobile LCP75th-percentile CrUX field data, not lab
+27%organic sessionssix months post-migration vs. pre-migration baseline, branded queries excluded
$108k/yrplatform cost removedhosting, extension licences and the standing emergency dev retainer
B2B Wholesale (Janitorial & Packaging Supply)
~$18M/yr wholesale, 6,400 SKUs, 900 trade accounts, US · Shopify Plus with B2B on Shopify (migrated from a custom .NET portal)
Ninety-one percent of orders arrived by phone, email or fax and were rekeyed into the ERP by four full-time staff. Order-entry errors ran at 3.8%, and every one of them meant a redelivery and a credit note. The named constraint: 900 accounts on 47 negotiated price lists with net-30 and net-60 terms. No account could ever see another's pricing, and nothing could break during the fiscal year-end freeze.
+4.1%average order valuemodest on purpose. Trade buyers order what they need, so AOV was never the target
9% → 63%of orders placed self-servewithin 10 months of launch
3.8% → 0.4%order-entry error rateroughly $240k/yr of redelivery and credit-note cost removed
+$620kannual gross profit impactfour order-entry roles redeployed into account management, which opened 71 new trade accounts
In their words
Clients on this work
Organic back to level in 5 weeks
“Magento to Shopify Plus with 14,000 SKUs and a subscription base we could not afford to break. We took the usual dip for about three weeks and organic was back level by week five — that was the entire ballgame for me. One honest gripe: discovery ran three weeks past the SOW and I had to push to get the revised timeline in writing. Once the build actually started they hit every single date.”
VP eCommerceSupplements DTC brand, ~$28M/yr · Miami, FL
Verified via Shopify Partner referralFAQ
Migrate to Shopify in Baltimore — your questions
Yes, and in Baltimore it is often the most valuable asset in the migration. Articles, images, authors, tags and internal links are migrated with their URLs mapped one-to-one, because that content is usually what ranks for the informational queries feeding your seasonal sales. Blog URLs are the most commonly forgotten group in a replatform and the most expensive to lose.
Usually, though rarely through a clean button. Most dealer and distribution systems will produce a scheduled flat-file or ODBC extract, and where they will not, we build a middleware pull against whatever interface exists. The harder question is which system stays the master record for pricing and stock after launch — we settle that in the audit, because a two-master setup is how catalogues drift apart within a month.
We run a documented freeze with named owners and timed steps, executed at your lowest-traffic hour. Orders placed in the final hours on the old platform are exported and reconciled against the new store before the freeze lifts, and fulfilment works from a single reconciled list rather than two systems. For perishables we also hold the first shipping day open so a packing error cannot follow a cutover error.
By naming what actually failed last time and scoping against it. In this region the usual culprits are unmapped legacy URLs, price and stock drift between systems, and operational rules that only existed in a person's head. We audit for all three specifically, rehearse the migration at least twice with an automated delta report, and monitor index coverage daily for sixty days after.
Not if the redirect work is done properly. We map every indexed URL one-to-one before cutover and monitor index coverage daily for sixty days after. Expect a two to four week dip while Google recrawls, then recovery. Brands that skip the URL inventory are the ones that lose rankings permanently.
Ten to sixteen weeks for a mid-market catalogue. Magento 2 with heavy customisation, B2B pricing or an ERP dependency runs sixteen to twenty-four. The catalogue cleanup phase drives the timeline far more than the theme build does.
Order history, yes, imported as historical records with line items, fulfilment status and notes intact. Password hashes cannot transfer between platforms for security reasons, so customers set a new password on first login. We handle that with a pre-launch email sequence so it lands as expected.
Next step
Migrate to Shopify for your Baltimore brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.