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.
Dubai, UAE
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Dubai
Moving a UAE store to Shopify with the Arabic URLs, the trade pricing, the VAT treatment and the courier integration all intact.
Delivered remotely for brands across Dubai and United Arab Emirates.
Build · Dubai
Why Dubai brands come to us for this
- URL inventory assembled from Search Console, a crawler and server logs so the Arabic tree is never the branch that gets missed
- Redirect map covering both language paths, including percent-encoded Arabic slugs and their transliterated duplicates
- COD order lifecycle carried across — attempted, refused, returned, reconciled — so finance keeps its history
- Courier and last-mile integrations rebuilt and tested with real order shapes before cutover, not on launch night
- 5% VAT rebuilt against your registration and entity, then audited order by order for the first fortnight live
The stores we migrate out of in Dubai fall into three groups. There is the WooCommerce or Magento install a local agency built five or six years ago and stopped maintaining. There is the fully custom PHP storefront a single developer wrote for a trading company and then left the country. And there is the regional SaaS platform that made a fast start easy and now cannot support the market routing, the app ecosystem or the checkout work the brand needs. All three share the same risk profile: the documentation is thin and the person who knows why something works is unreachable.
The Arabic side is where migrations here go wrong quietly. Legacy stores usually have two URL trees, and the Arabic one is frequently built on a path structure or a slug convention nobody remembers deciding — sometimes percent-encoded Arabic script, sometimes transliterated Latin, sometimes both for the same product. If the crawl export misses that tree it will not appear in the redirect map, and you will lose the Arabic rankings first and only notice in the month-two revenue report. We assemble the URL inventory from Search Console, a third-party crawler and raw server logs precisely so the branch nobody remembers still shows up.
Then the operational layer, which in the UAE is heavier than in most markets. Cash-on-delivery orders carry a lifecycle a card order does not — attempted, refused, rescheduled, returned to sender, cash reconciled — and that state has to survive the move or your finance team loses the ability to reconcile. Courier integrations to Aramex, Emirates Post or a local last-mile provider need rebuilding and testing with real order shapes. And the 5% VAT treatment has to be reconstructed against your actual registration and entity, then checked against real orders rather than assumed correct because the setting looks right.
Local context
Cutover timing against Ramadan, the season and a narrow overlap
Dubai's retail year does not offer many safe windows. The season runs October through April, Ramadan compresses a disproportionate share of annual demand into a few weeks, and the Dubai Shopping Festival and Eid periods are the last moments anyone should be moving DNS. That leaves late spring and the quieter summer, when residents travel and traffic genuinely dips, as the sane cutover window for most brands. On top of that there is the eleven-hour gap between Dubai and Albuquerque, which we plan around rather than pretend away: cutover runbooks are written in full and agreed in advance, the sequence is rehearsed twice in staging, and we schedule the switch so the risky hour lands where both your team and ours are awake — your late evening, our morning. A migration is the one project where a question that waits a day costs real money, so the handover discipline is part of the scope, not a courtesy.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Dubai 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 Dubai store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Dubai 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 Dubai — your questions
They can, and the decision needs making deliberately rather than by accident. Percent-encoded Arabic slugs work and can rank, but they are awkward in analytics and in link sharing, so some brands choose to move to transliterated slugs at migration. Either way every old URL needs a redirect, and if both variants existed historically then both have to be in the map.
It changes the export, not the method. Regional SaaS platforms usually give you a decent product and customer export but a poor order-history export, and almost never a clean URL inventory. We take the data we can get through the API or CSV, reconstruct the URL list from crawl and log data instead of trusting the platform, and reconcile counts against your own reporting before anyone signs off.
They get treated as their own workstream. We agree a freeze window with your fulfilment and courier partners, complete or explicitly carry over every in-flight COD order, and make sure the states that matter to reconciliation — refused, rescheduled, returned to sender — exist in the new store before the first order lands there. Migrating a COD business without that mapping leaves your finance team unable to close the month.
Anywhere inside the October to April season, and absolutely not near Ramadan, Eid or the Dubai Shopping Festival. Those weeks carry too much of the year's revenue to spend on a platform change. Late spring and summer are the realistic windows — traffic is lower because a lot of residents are travelling, which is exactly what you want when you are watching index recovery and reconciling orders.
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 Dubai 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.