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.
Detroit, MI
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Detroit, MI
Moving a Detroit parts or tooling catalog to Shopify without losing the fitment data or the URLs your part numbers rank for.
Delivered remotely for brands across Detroit and Michigan.
Build · Detroit
Why Detroit brands come to us for this
- Fitment, interchange and supersession data mapped from legacy tables into Shopify metaobjects and reconciled by count
- Every indexed part-number and category URL mapped one to one — no bulk homepage redirects
- Catalog cleanup that collapses duplicate SKUs and rebuilds variant structures before design starts
- Order and customer history preserved, including Canadian accounts and their reorder patterns
- Cutover scheduled for the post-holiday lull, ahead of spring demand and the show calendar
The typical Detroit replatform is not a fashion brand on a modern stack. It is a supplier site built in 2012 or 2013 — Magento 1, an early WooCommerce, sometimes a custom catalog written by a developer who has long since left — carrying fifteen years of part numbers, a homemade fitment table and a URL structure that Google has been indexing since before responsive design. The catalog is the asset. Everything else is replaceable.
So the migration is planned around data first. We map vehicle applications, interchange and supersession records out of whatever shape they are in — a database table, a plugin's custom schema, a stack of CSVs — and into Shopify metaobjects, then reconcile counts by product before anyone talks about design. Variant structures get restructured properly, duplicate SKUs collapse, and images stop being named a string of digits. Most catalogs of this age lose a meaningful chunk of their SKU count in cleanup and lose nothing real.
URLs are the second front. A part-number URL that has quietly ranked for a decade is worth more to a supplier here than the homepage, and legacy platforms produced a lot of them: query-string category pages, .html suffixes, uppercase SKUs, and three paths to the same product. Every indexed URL gets pulled from Search Console, crawl data and server logs, then mapped one to one, with a decision attached to anything that has no natural target. Nothing gets swept into a homepage redirect.
Local context
Migrate in the quiet weeks, not into salt season
Detroit gives you a genuine window and wasting it is expensive. Replacement demand climbs once the salt goes down in November and stays elevated through March, then the discretionary market lifts through spring toward Autorama and the Woodward Dream Cruise in August. That leaves the stretch after the holidays as the sane time to cut over, and we plan backward from it: audit and data mapping in the autumn, dry runs before Christmas, launch when the phone is quietest. The other Detroit factor is who is upstream of your website. A lot of these businesses run job-shop ERP or an accounting system that has been the source of truth for inventory since the nineties, and the migration has to decide which system wins on price and stock before go-live, not during. We also carry Canadian order history and Ontario customer records across intact, because a Windsor account that loses ten years of reorder history will notice within a week.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Detroit 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 Detroit store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Detroit 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 Detroit — your questions
The one with the links and the history, which is not always the one your team assumes. We check inbound links, impressions and crawl frequency per variant, pick the canonical, and redirect the other two into it. Consolidating that duplication is usually one of the quiet wins of the move, because ranking signal that was split three ways lands on a single page.
Passwords cannot migrate — they are hashed with a scheme Shopify does not accept, and any tool claiming otherwise should worry you. Accounts, addresses, order history and tags all come across, and we run a planned reactivation sequence at launch so customers reset once, in a message they were expecting, rather than discovering it mid-order.
It gets rebuilt, usually better. Legacy sites often matched part numbers literally, which is why a dash or a leading zero broke them. On Shopify we index normalised forms of your numbers plus interchange and superseded values, so a buyer typing any known variant reaches the right product. We test that with a list of real failed searches pulled from your existing logs.
It disrupts them if nobody plans for it, because those channels feed off the same product data and identifiers you are about to restructure. We freeze identifier changes during the cutover window, verify GTIN and MPN values survive the mapping, and reconnect channels in a controlled order after the storefront is stable rather than everything landing on the same afternoon.
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 Detroit 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.