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.
Charlotte, NC
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Charlotte, NC
Migrations for Charlotte companies carrying twenty years of part numbers, application data and indexed URLs they cannot afford to drop.
Delivered remotely for brands across Charlotte and North Carolina.
Build · Charlotte
Why Charlotte brands come to us for this
- Application and fitment data rebuilt as structured metafields, not flattened into description text during the export
- Supersession chains mapped so discontinued part numbers redirect to their replacements instead of 404ing
- Every indexed URL pulled from Search Console, a full crawl and server logs, then mapped one-to-one before cutover
- Fabric grade, colourway and pack size restructured from separate products into variants, cutting SKU bloat from legacy systems
- Cutover scheduled clear of High Point Market, PRI and race-season peaks, with two rehearsed dry runs beforehand
We started building stores in 2012 on WordPress and then WooCommerce, moved to Shopify as it matured, and now work only on Shopify — which is why replatforming is a flagship service rather than something we tolerate. In Charlotte it is also the single most common first project, because a lot of the catalogues in this metro were built on platforms that were sensible in 2009 and are now a maintenance tax: Magento 1 that nobody will patch, a custom ASP.NET catalogue written by a developer who left, an aftermarket storefront glued to a supplier data feed, or a mill still running an order form that emails a PDF.
The danger in these migrations is not the storefront. It is the two things that quietly cost revenue: data and URLs. A performance catalogue carries application rows, supersession chains, kit contents and off-road flags that have no obvious Shopify equivalent until you design one. A furniture catalogue carries fabric grades, dimensional data and freight classes. And both carry thousands of indexed pages — every application page, every spec sheet, every legacy category — that a lazy migration points at the homepage, which is how organic revenue drops forty percent while everyone congratulates each other on the new design.
So we run it as a data and search project that happens to end in a launch. Every indexed URL pulled from Search Console, a crawler and your server logs. A redirect map built one-to-one and signed off before anyone touches DNS. At least two dry runs into a staging store, each producing an automated delta on record counts, prices and inventory. Integrations reconnected and tested in staging against real orders, never on launch night. Then sixty days of crawl monitoring afterwards, because the mistakes that hurt show up in week three.
Local context
Aftermarket and mill data are the two migrations that go wrong here
Two Charlotte-specific data shapes cause most of the pain. The first is aftermarket application data. If your old system consumed an industry feed with ACES-style application records and PIES-style product attributes, that structure has to be rebuilt deliberately on Shopify as metafields and metaobjects rather than flattened into a text field, or your compatibility search dies at cutover and takes your long-tail organic traffic with it. Supersessions matter just as much: a discontinued part number that still ranks needs a redirect to its replacement, not a 404 and not the homepage. The second is the mill and furniture catalogue, where colour, yarn or fabric grade, and pack size were often modelled as separate products in the old system and belong as variants and metafields on Shopify. Getting that wrong doubles the SKU count and makes every filter useless. We do that mapping on paper with your product people before any records move, and we always schedule cutover clear of High Point Market and the December PRI window, because losing a week of catalogue availability in front of buyers is worse than waiting a month.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Charlotte 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 Charlotte store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Charlotte 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 Charlotte — your questions
You decide, before we build, which parts of that catalogue you actually want to own. Feed-fed catalogues are usually enormous and mostly dead, so we look at which SKUs have ever sold or ever earned a session and cut hard on the rest. What remains gets imported properly with its own application data, and the ongoing feed is rebuilt as a scheduled sync into Shopify with mapping rules rather than a black box you cannot correct.
A few things do not carry across as-is, and we would rather name them early: custom price rules written as Magento modules, complex tier structures, and anything a previous developer put in a database table with no admin screen. Those become Shopify Functions, metafields or B2B price lists — usually simpler than what they replace. Orders, customers, products and content all move, and we run a delta report so you can see exactly what arrived.
By treating the account side as its own workstream with its own go-live. Company records, negotiated pricing and terms get loaded and verified against the ERP in staging, and we run a pilot group of friendly accounts through real reorders before switching everyone. If your line-opening calendar makes that risky, we launch the DTC storefront first and bring wholesale over in the following quarter.
Three conditions, all of them yes. The delta report from the final dry run comes back clean, every integration has processed a real test order in staging, and the redirect map has been reviewed by whoever knows the old catalogue best. Then we pick a genuinely quiet window — for most Charlotte catalogues that is a weekday morning outside a race weekend or market week — and we monitor crawl and 404s hourly for the first day.
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 Charlotte 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.