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.
Istanbul
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Istanbul
Migrations for Istanbul brands leaving a Turkish-market platform for a store that has to sell in dollars and euros.
Delivered remotely for brands across Istanbul and Türkiye.
Build · Istanbul
Why Istanbul brands come to us for this
- Redirect maps built from a full crawl of the Turkish site, including inconsistently transliterated slugs the old platform generated
- Product data remodelled on the way over: options as options, spec into metafields, style codes into SKUs, titles rewritten for search abroad
- Domestic and export launched as two Shopify Markets so Turkish traffic is not sacrificed to reach the new buyer
- Payment gateway route decided before design, since Shopify Payments is unavailable to Turkiye-domiciled merchants
- Order history, customer accounts and Turkish-format addresses migrated so support can still answer on legacy orders
Most Istanbul replatforms start from the same place. The store was built on a Turkish platform, or on WooCommerce by a developer who has since disappeared, and it works acceptably for domestic orders and cash on delivery. Then export becomes the plan, and everything the old build assumed turns out to be wrong: one currency, Turkish-only content, a shipping module that knows domestic couriers and nothing about DDP, and no clean way to publish a second market. The migration is not a platform preference. It is the moment the business changes who it sells to.
The data is where these projects are won or lost. Product data on Turkish platforms tends to be free text where it should be structured, with size, fabric, colour and composition living inside a description field, style codes used as product titles, and variants modelled as separate products. Moving that as-is gives you the same mess on a better platform. We remodel it on the way across: options as real options, specification into metafields, style codes into SKUs, and a product title a foreign buyer would actually search for.
Then the URLs. A Turkish storefront's ranking pages carry Turkish slugs, often with characters that were transliterated inconsistently by the old system, and a migration that ignores them throws away years of accumulated domestic authority even if English is now the priority. We crawl the live site, map every ranking and linked URL to a destination, and stage the redirects before cutover rather than firefighting 404s in the first week.
Local context
You are changing markets, not just platforms
A migration out of Ticimax, IdeaSoft, T-Soft, ikas, WooCommerce or Magento in Istanbul almost always coincides with a decision to sell abroad, and that makes the sequencing different from a straight like-for-like move. The domestic store may need to keep running while the export store is built, so we usually cut over as two markets on one Shopify instance rather than replacing one site with another and hoping the Turkish traffic survives. Payments are settled before design starts, because Shopify Payments is not available to merchants domiciled in Turkiye and the third-party gateway you choose changes what the checkout looks like to a US buyer. Domestic order history, addresses in Turkish address format and cash-on-delivery order records all have to land somewhere sensible so your customer service team can still answer a question about an order placed two years ago. And cutover is scheduled outside your production and shipping peak, not into the week the container is loading.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Istanbul 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 Istanbul store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Istanbul 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 Istanbul — your questions
In practice yes, though rarely in a shape Shopify wants. Expect product exports where variants are separate rows or separate products, specification trapped in HTML description fields, and images referenced by paths that need re-hosting. We take the export, normalise it against a defined target schema, and review a sample of a few hundred products with you before the full load. The transformation work is the migration; the upload is the easy hour at the end.
Usually you keep both and give them different jobs. A .com.tr signals a Turkish company to a Turkish buyer and does nothing helpful for an American one, while a .com reads as neutral and international. The common answer is the .com as the primary export storefront and the .com.tr redirected or kept as the domestic market domain, with hreflang making the relationship explicit. Whatever you choose, it should be settled before redirects are written, not after.
Yes, for two reasons. Those pages carry links and authority that pass to the new domain and market structure if the mapping is right and evaporate if it is not. And the domestic traffic is often still a real revenue line while the export channel is being built, so losing it to save a week of mapping work is a bad trade. We treat Turkish rankings as an asset to preserve even when English is the growth priority.
Yes, because the storefront cutover and your operations are separable if the sequencing is right. We build and populate on a staging store, run the ERP and stock integration in read-only against real data first, and schedule DNS cutover for a low-order window well outside your shipping peak. The one thing we will not do is cut over during a period when your team cannot look at anything for two days, since the first 48 hours is when redirect and stock exceptions surface.
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 Istanbul 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.