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.
Cincinnati, OH
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Cincinnati, OH
Moving Cincinnati merchants off aging Magento and WooCommerce builds without losing rankings, subscribers or trade accounts.
Delivered remotely for brands across Cincinnati and Ohio.
Build · Cincinnati
Why Cincinnati brands come to us for this
- Full URL inventory and one-to-one redirect map, including part-number and SKU-based legacy paths
- Legacy wholesale customer groups rebuilt as Shopify company profiles with their negotiated pricing intact
- Subscriber and payment-token migration tested on a small cohort before the full transfer
- Recipe, blog and technical content moved with structure preserved, because that is where the organic traffic sits
- Cutover scheduled around co-packer production locks, festival season and Midwest winter shipping risk
There is a specific vintage of site in this metro: built somewhere between 2013 and 2018, often by a packaging printer, a marketing shop or an internal IT team, on Magento 1 or WooCommerce, and extended over the years with plugins nobody documented. It still takes orders. It also can no longer be updated, the developer who wrote the pricing module has moved on, and every peak season carries a real chance of downtime. That is the migration we run most often here.
The risk in these projects is almost never the design. It is the data. Industrial catalogues with part numbers embedded in URLs, CPG stores with fifteen years of blog content and recipe pages that carry the organic traffic, subscription programmes with active payment tokens, and wholesale accounts with negotiated pricing that exists only in a legacy customer group. Each of those needs its own mapping decision, and getting them wrong is what causes the horror stories people have heard about.
So we work backwards from the URL inventory and the data map before anyone opens a design file. Every indexed address gets a destination. Every customer group becomes a company profile or a tag with a documented rule. Every subscription gets a tested transfer path with the payment processor, run first on a small cohort. Then we do it twice more as dry runs into a staging store so that the real cutover is boring — which, on a migration, is the only outcome worth having.
Local context
Migrate around the calendar this city actually runs on
Cincinnati merchants have a lumpier year than most, and the cutover date matters more than any single technical decision. Food and beverage brands here ramp into a fourth quarter that starts earlier than the coasts because gift and holiday pack production is locked with a co-packer months ahead. Anything alcohol-adjacent has an Oktoberfest and festival peak in the early autumn. Industrial sellers slow through late December when their distributor customers close for the year, which makes that window genuinely useful. Winter weather is also an operational factor: a January cutover that coincides with a snow event and a warehouse closure means two problems arriving on the same day. We pick the window against your production and shipping calendar, freeze the legacy store's content well before it, and schedule DNS changes for a low-traffic hour in Eastern time rather than in ours.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Cincinnati 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 Cincinnati store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Cincinnati 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 Cincinnati — your questions
There is no switch-off date, but there is no security patching either, and payment providers and card scheme requirements keep moving underneath you. The practical deadline is usually set by your processor or your insurer rather than by the platform. The cost of staying is also hidden in developer scarcity — the pool of people who will touch Magento 1 shrinks every year and prices accordingly.
Usually yes, but it depends on your payment gateway and whether tokens can be transferred to the new processor. That conversation happens in week one, not week eight, because the answer changes the whole plan. Where transfer is not possible, we run a staged re-authorisation campaign with a clear incentive rather than silently cancelling people, and we migrate the cohorts with the highest lifetime value first.
They get preserved where possible and redirected precisely where not. Shopify's URL structure is fixed in places, so some legacy paths cannot be reproduced literally, but every one gets a permanent redirect to the exact matching product. We also flag the change to your distributors before cutover, because a bookmark that redirects cleanly is a non-event and a broken one becomes a phone call.
Yes. Campaigns, email and paid media keep running on the legacy store right up to cutover; what we freeze is structural change — new URLs, new templates, new taxonomy — because that invalidates the redirect map we are building. We give you a content cutoff date rather than a marketing blackout, usually two to three weeks out.
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 Cincinnati 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.