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.
Boston, MA
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Boston, MA
Magento, WooCommerce and inherited custom builds moved to Shopify without losing a semester of organic traffic.
Delivered remotely for brands across Boston and Massachusetts.
Build · Boston
Why Boston brands come to us for this
- Cutover scheduled outside move-in, commencement and peak nor'easter weeks, at your lowest-traffic hour
- URL inventory built from server logs and Search Console so long-tail seasonal collection pages survive
- Institutional accounts, price lists and open terms migrated into Shopify B2B, not rebuilt by hand
- Undocumented legacy builds reverse-engineered from the database when the original developer is long gone
- Sixty days of crawl and index monitoring after launch, covering a full seasonal cycle
Boston has an unusual amount of old commerce code, and there is a reason for it. Brands here have been trading online for a long time, the region is thick with technical talent, and a great many storefronts were originally built in-house or by a co-op student who has since graduated and taken the only working knowledge of the build with them. What is left is a Magento 1 install nobody will patch, a WooCommerce site whose plugin stack has quietly stopped updating, or a bespoke PHP storefront with a login page and no documentation. All three work until the day they do not.
The migration risks are the usual two, dirty data and dropped URLs, but in this market they carry extra weight. Long-lived stores accumulate long-lived URLs, and a Boston catalogue tends to have deep seasonal history: collection pages for winter accessories, holiday gift edits, campus-cycle landing pages that have been ranking since 2016. Those are exactly the URLs that get missed in a redirect map built from the sitemap alone, and their loss shows up in September when it costs the most.
The other thing that has to survive the move is the institutional relationship. A Boston brand carrying department accounts, net terms and purchase order history cannot lose that in a cutover. We map company records, price lists and open terms into Shopify B2B alongside consumer accounts and order history, then reconcile against the source before anyone approves the real run. Order history is what your support team uses to handle a returns question, and losing it is a slow, expensive kind of damage.
Local context
There are two months of the year we will not cut over
The cutover date is the highest-leverage decision in a Boston replatform and it is not negotiable with the calendar. We do not move DNS in the second half of August, we do not move it in the fortnight around commencement, and for perishable catalogues we avoid the storm-risk stretch from late December through February, when a fulfilment problem and a platform change happening in the same week become impossible to tell apart. That leaves a clean run from late September through November and a broad window from March into early summer. Redirect parity is signed off before any of it happens, the URL inventory is built from Search Console, a full crawl and your server logs rather than the sitemap, and we monitor index coverage daily for sixty days afterwards — through the season, not just through launch week.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Boston 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 Boston store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Boston 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 Boston — your questions
Yes, and it is a common starting point in this market. We work from the database and the live site rather than from documentation that does not exist: extract the schema, crawl every reachable URL, inventory the custom logic by observing behaviour, then rebuild it on Shopify natively. The audit phase is longer than for a stock Magento install, and we say so upfront rather than discovering it in week six.
Start the project in the winter or early spring and launch in the spring or the autumn shoulder. October and November are the strongest window for most brands here — the September pulse is over, holiday volume has not started, and you get a full sixty-day monitoring period before anything seasonal is at stake. Starting in June to launch in August is the plan we most often talk clients out of.
Company records, contacts, assigned price lists and historical orders migrate as records; open terms are re-established on the Shopify company profile. We reconcile every institutional account line by line before cutover because these are relationship customers, and a buyer who logs in after launch to find their pricing gone will call your rep, not your developer.
Blog and guide content, and any URL structure from a platform change you made years ago that is still redirecting. Old redirect chains from a previous migration frequently collapse in the new one because nobody documented them. We crawl for chains and loops during the audit and flatten them into single hops as part of the redirect map.
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 Boston 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.