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.
Berlin
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Berlin
Shopware, JTL, OXID or WooCommerce to Shopify, with your German URLs, invoice archive and warehouse integration intact.
Delivered remotely for brands across Berlin and Germany.
Build · Berlin
Why Berlin brands come to us for this
- Shopware, JTL-Shop, OXID, plentymarkets and WooCommerce sources mapped field by field, including attribute sets with no Shopify equivalent
- URL inventory that catches umlaut and transliterated duplicates before they turn into 404s in German organic search
- Invoice and order-record retention agreed with your Steuerberater in writing before cutover, not after the first month-end
- JTL-Wawi, Xentral and DATEV pipelines rebuilt as monitored integrations with daily reconciliation instead of nightly CSVs
- Cutover rehearsed and staffed for the early-morning CET window, which is late evening in Albuquerque and covered on purpose
German replatforms start from a different place than American ones. The store you are leaving is usually Shopware, JTL-Shop, OXID or a heavily-plugged WooCommerce, it has been running for years, and it is wired into an ERP or warehouse system that the finance and logistics teams depend on daily. The catalogue has accumulated attribute sets nobody remembers configuring. The URL structure carries umlauts, transliterations and both, sometimes for the same product. This is not a design project with a data step attached — it is a data project that ends in a storefront.
The two things that reliably go wrong are the same everywhere and worse here. Dropped URLs kill organic revenue quietly, and a German catalogue makes them harder to inventory because the same product may be indexed at a Muesli and a Müsli variant, under a legacy category path and under a Shopware SEO URL that was rewritten in 2019. The complete URL inventory comes out of Search Console, a crawl and server logs; we map it one-to-one and get the redirect file signed off before anyone touches DNS.
The second is record-keeping. German commercial and tax law requires invoices and order documentation to be retained for years, so an order history that migrates as a decorative list of past purchases is not enough — the finance team needs the underlying records to remain accessible and unaltered. We agree with your Steuerberater what stays in an archive of the old system versus what needs to be live in Shopify, and we write that decision down before the cutover rather than discovering it in the first month-end close.
Local context
The ERP is the real dependency, not the theme
Berlin brands that outgrew a hosted German platform almost always did so with an operational system attached — JTL-Wawi in the warehouse, a plentymarkets or Xentral setup running multichannel, a DATEV pipeline feeding the accountant. Those integrations are the actual scope of the migration; the storefront is the visible part. We map every flow first: how orders reach the warehouse, how stock returns, how invoices are generated and numbered, how returns and credit notes are posted, how the marketplace channels are fed. Then we rebuild each one against Shopify with retry logic, alerting and a daily reconciliation, and we test them against real order shapes in staging — including the awkward ones, like a partially-shipped order with a return on one line. Cutover happens on a rehearsed runbook in your quietest hour, which in Berlin is early morning European time and therefore late evening ours, and we staff that window deliberately rather than pretending the time difference does not exist.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Berlin 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 Berlin store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Berlin 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 Berlin — your questions
Three things, in order of pain. Attribute and property sets rarely map cleanly onto Shopify options and metafields, so the catalogue needs restructuring rather than copying. Shopware's SEO URL rewrites mean the indexed URL is often not the one in your database, so the redirect map has to be built from real crawl and Search Console data. And plugin logic — pricing rules, B2B tiers, custom shipping — has to be rebuilt as native settings or Functions rather than ported.
Orders migrate as historical records with line items, fulfilment status and notes. The statutory retention question is separate and belongs to your accountant: often the cleanest answer is a read-only archive of the legacy system or an exported document store, with Shopify carrying the live record from cutover forward. We ask that question in week one because it changes the migration scope, and we put the answer in the plan in writing.
They get inventoried as their own class of risk. German catalogues frequently accumulate several encodings of the same word across years of platform changes, and each may hold links or rankings. We crawl, pull Search Console and check server logs to find what is genuinely receiving traffic, then map each one to a single canonical Shopify handle. Nothing gets sent to the homepage because it looked awkward.
No, and usually you should not. The warehouse system is doing a job Shopify does not do, and ripping it out during a replatform doubles the risk of the project. We connect it through a documented integration layer with idempotent syncs, retry handling and alerting into your team's channel, and we validate stock, order and return flows against real order shapes in staging before anything goes live.
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 Berlin 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.