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.
Columbus, OH
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Columbus, OH
Moving an apparel catalogue with thousands of size-and-colour variants onto Shopify without losing rankings or your measurement data.
Delivered remotely for brands across Columbus and Ohio.
Build · Columbus
Why Columbus brands come to us for this
- Size and colour normalised into proper variant dimensions before load — no more eleven spellings of the same size across a catalogue
- Garment measurements lifted out of legacy PDFs into queryable metafields, so fit data survives the move instead of being retyped later
- Full URL inventory from Search Console, crawl, backlink data and server logs, mapped one-to-one with a decision for every orphan
- B2B reconciliation on company accounts, price lists and terms, so no wholesale buyer logs in to the wrong price on day one
- Cutover windows planned around the August campus spike, the March strength season and the Q4 gifting run
Apparel and footwear catalogues are the hardest migrations in ecommerce, and Columbus produces them at volume. A single style in eight colours across a twelve-size run is ninety-six variants before you have added a width dimension, and legacy platforms encode that structure in ways that do not translate cleanly. We have seen size stored as a free-text attribute with eleven spellings of 'XX-Large', colour split across two fields, and measurements living only inside a PDF nobody can query. That has to be normalised before it is loaded, not after.
The other half of the job is URLs. Suppliers and long-established brands here often carry a decade of accumulated pages: discontinued styles, seasonal collections that still rank, retailer-facing spec pages, blog posts from three CMS generations. The inventory is assembled from Search Console, a crawl, backlink data and your server logs, then mapped one-to-one. Anything with no natural target gets an explicit decision — redirect to the closest live style, redirect to the collection, or return a 410 on purpose — rather than being swept to the homepage where it will lose whatever equity it had.
Then we rehearse. Two full dry runs into a staging store minimum, each with an automated delta report on record counts, prices, inventory by variant, customer tags and order history. For a wholesale supplier we add a reconciliation on company accounts and price lists, because a migrated B2B customer who cannot see their contracted price is a phone call from someone who has your CEO's mobile number. Only when the delta comes back clean does anyone touch DNS.
Local context
Cutover has to miss August, March and the receipt plan
Columbus timing is unusually constrained, and getting it wrong is expensive in a way a generic migration plan does not anticipate. Campus traffic and collegiate merchandise demand spike in August and hold through football season, strength and fitness sells into the Arnold Sports Festival every March, and beauty and candle brands are locked into a fourth-quarter gifting run they cannot afford to disturb. That leaves genuine windows in late spring and mid-January once the holiday returns wave has cleared, and we plan backwards from those rather than forwards from a kickoff date. We also sequence around your receipt plan: if new season inventory lands in the same fortnight as cutover, your team is being asked to QA a new platform and receive goods simultaneously, and one of the two will get done badly. We would rather push the launch a month than watch that happen.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Columbus 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 Columbus store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Columbus 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 Columbus — your questions
It breaks a badly structured Shopify store, not the platform. The usual failure is treating every size-colour combination as its own product, which destroys collection pages and inflates the SKU count. We restructure to one product per style with size and colour as real options, carry width or inseam as a third dimension where the category needs it, and use metafields for everything that is descriptive rather than orderable.
We map it before we migrate it. Which fields your ERP owns, which Shopify should own, and where the sync direction is. Typically the ERP stays the source of truth for cost, inventory and order export, and Shopify owns merchandising, content and customer-facing data. That boundary gets written down and tested against real orders in staging so nobody discovers the ambiguity in week one.
Discontinued products are where most apparel migrations leak. We identify which retired URLs still earn sessions or hold links, then decide case by case: redirect to the current-season equivalent where one genuinely exists, redirect to the collection where it does not, and keep a small number live as archive pages when the demand justifies it. A blanket homepage redirect on a thousand retired styles is the fastest way to lose organic revenue quietly.
You can, and sometimes the current platform makes it the lesser risk. When that is the case we shrink the blast radius: freeze catalogue changes for the cutover fortnight, run the launch on a Tuesday morning in Eastern Time rather than a Friday, keep the old environment warm for rollback, and staff the first forty-eight hours properly. What we will not do is cut over into the week your peak starts.
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 Columbus 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.