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.
Houston, TX
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Houston
Legacy catalogues, part-number URLs and account pricing moved onto Shopify with redirect parity signed off before anyone touches DNS.
Delivered remotely for brands across Houston and Texas.
Build · Houston
Why Houston brands come to us for this
- Part-number and spec URLs treated as the highest-value pages in the redirect map, not an afterthought
- Legacy cross-reference tables lifted out of PDFs and into structured metafields during migration
- Deployment freeze whenever a named storm enters the Gulf forecast cone
- Cutover scheduled outside Ship Channel turnaround windows and away from Rodeo weeks
- Account pricing, terms and order history carried across so your inside sales team loses nothing
Houston has more decade-old ecommerce systems per capita than almost anywhere, and for a specific reason: distributors here went online early, bolted a webstore onto an ERP, and then never had a quiet enough quarter to replace it. What is left is a Magento 1 install nobody will patch, or a custom cart written by a developer who moved to Austin in 2019.
Those migrations fail on two things, and neither is design. The first is catalogue hygiene — a decade of duplicate part records, superseded SKUs, cross-references stored in PDFs and inventory that only the ERP knows the truth about. The second is URLs. Industrial catalogues rank on thousands of long-tail part and spec queries, and those pages are worth more per visit than any category page. Drop them and organic revenue quietly halves while everyone congratulates each other on the new homepage.
We plan it around the catalogue, because in a technical catalogue the catalogue is the risk. Tens of thousands of part-number pages, each one a long-tail entry point a professional buyer reaches directly, means the redirect work is not a tidy list of two hundred collection URLs — it is a generated map that has to be verified in bulk and spot-checked by somebody who actually knows the parts. We rebuild the indexed footprint from Search Console and server logs, review that map before cutover, and rehearse the move until record counts, contract pricing and customer tags reconcile exactly. DNS changes last, and never in the middle of hurricane season if your category spikes on storm demand.
Local context
Cutover planning in a Gulf Coast city
Two things dictate the launch calendar in Houston that would never come up in Denver or Chicago. First, weather: from June through November, a system in the Gulf can turn a normal Tuesday into your biggest revenue day of the quarter if you sell generators, pumps, tarps, water, fuel containers or anything a household stocks before landfall. We freeze deployments the moment a named storm enters the forecast cone. Second, the industrial calendar: spring and fall turnaround windows along the Ship Channel are when plants place their heaviest MRO orders, and a migration that lands mid-turnaround will be remembered for years by the wrong people. We schedule cutover to a low-traffic hour, in a week your operations lead confirms is quiet, and we rehearse it with named owners before it happens.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Houston 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 Houston store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Houston 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 Houston — your questions
Yes, and it is the most common Houston starting point we see. The complexity is not the storefront, it is the integration surface: which system holds pricing, which holds inventory, and what your ERP does when Shopify sends an order it does not expect. We map that in the audit and give you a fixed scope before you commit.
Not if the URL inventory is done properly. Those pages are long-tail and low-competition, which means they recover fast when redirected correctly and disappear permanently when they are not. Expect two to four weeks of recrawl noise, then recovery. Brands that lose rankings in a replatform are the ones that skipped the inventory.
We insist on it. For industrial sellers that means avoiding spring and fall turnaround. For consumer and hardware categories it means staying clear of the June to November storm window, when a single forecast can produce your best week of the year. We also avoid Friday launches for the obvious reason.
Quotes convert to Shopify draft orders, account terms are rebuilt as B2B payment terms per company, and order history imports as historical records with line items intact so your team keeps returns and warranty context. We reconcile the first post-launch billing and order cycle line by line rather than assuming it worked.
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 Houston 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.