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.
Chicago, IL
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Chicago
Chicago companies do not replatform often — which is exactly why the one you do has to carry fifteen years of URLs, order history and account pricing without a gap.
Delivered remotely for brands across Chicago and Illinois.
Build · Chicago
Why Chicago brands come to us for this
- Server-log URL discovery to catch part-number and cross-reference pages no crawler finds
- Negotiated account pricing migrated into Shopify B2B price lists, not left in a spreadsheet
- Decades of order history imported so customer service keeps its warranty and returns context
- Two rehearsed dry runs with automated delta reports before anyone approves the real one
- Cutover timed to a quiet Central-time window, never a Friday and never in Q4
The replatform conversation here usually starts with a licence renewal or a security notice. Magento 1 went end-of-life and somebody has been paying for extended patches. A custom .NET store built in 2011 has one developer left who understands it, and he is retiring. A WooCommerce site has grown to a point where the hosting bill and the plugin conflicts cost more attention than the channel earns.
What makes a Chicago migration different is the age of the data. A distributor that has been trading since the 1970s has part numbers with slashes in them, superseded SKUs that still get searched, customer accounts with negotiated pricing attached, and a decade of order history that customer service uses daily to answer warranty questions. None of that is glamorous, and all of it decides whether the project is judged a success in month three.
So the project plan looks far more like a data migration than a rebuild. The search side is table stakes — every indexed URL accounted for, each one given a decided destination, signed off in writing before DNS moves. The part that consumes the real effort in Chicago is integration. Your ERP, WMS or 3PL is the system of record and it has been talking to the old platform for years, so we rehearse the entire cutover at least twice into staging with an automated report on record counts, price lists and customer tags, and prove inventory and order flow in both directions before go-live. Then we cut over at a Central-time hour when your phones are quiet.
Local context
Old catalogs, old URLs, real rankings
Chicago's industrial and housewares sellers tend to rank for things nobody would ever plan for: obsolete part numbers, cross-reference pages, spec sheets published in 2009, PDF catalogs linked from a trade association. Those pages are frequently the highest-intent traffic on the site, because a maintenance buyer at a plant in Cicero or a facilities manager in Schaumburg searches the number stamped on the failed part. Standard migration tooling ignores them and the traffic evaporates quietly. We pull server logs precisely to find them, map cross-reference and superseded-SKU URLs to live products, and keep the PDFs addressable. That single decision has saved more organic revenue on Midwest B2B migrations than every theme improvement combined.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Chicago 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 Chicago store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Chicago 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 Chicago — your questions
They should, and they are usually the reason to be careful. We inventory them from server logs rather than a crawler, because many are only reachable from old PDFs or external links. Each gets mapped to a live product, a cross-reference page or a documented alternative — never a blanket homepage redirect, which is how Midwest B2B sellers lose their best organic traffic.
Manageable, but the integration is the long pole, not the catalog. We rebuild the ERP connection through documented middleware rather than porting a brittle point-to-point sync, and we test it against real orders in staging. Magento to Shopify Plus with data cleanup and ERP work typically runs sixteen to twenty-four weeks.
There is a change, and it is worth managing deliberately. Accounts, assigned price lists, order history and saved lists carry across, but passwords cannot transfer between platforms for security reasons, so buyers set a new one. We run a pre-launch email sequence and a short walkthrough for your top accounts before cutover so the first login is expected rather than a support ticket.
Anywhere near your peak. For food and gift brands that is the holiday run-up; for grill, patio and outdoor categories it is the March-to-June demand ramp; for housewares it is the spring show cycle. We plan cutovers into the trough, which for most brands here means January-February or late summer.
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 Chicago 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.