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.
London, UK
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in London
Moving a London store to Shopify without losing the organic revenue that took a decade to build.
Delivered remotely for brands across London and United Kingdom.
Build · London
Why London brands come to us for this
- Redirect map built from Search Console, Ahrefs and server logs before the catalogue moves — legacy UK category paths included
- Magento and WooCommerce tax tables rebuilt as Shopify VAT rules, checked against zero-rated and reduced-rate lines in your real catalogue
- IOSS, duty collection and DDP shipping configured in staging and tested with live orders to EU addresses
- Commodity codes and country of origin migrated into metafields so the customs claim survives the move
- Cutover scheduled away from Black Friday and the Christmas run — usually a January-to-March or late-summer window
London has more legacy ecommerce than almost anywhere in Europe, and the reason is chronology. A great many of these brands built on Magento 1 or WooCommerce between 2010 and 2016, bolted on a plugin every time the business changed, and then had to bolt on a completely different set again in 2021 when EU orders stopped being intra-community sales and became exports. The result is a store where nobody currently working there knows why half the tax logic exists, and the maintenance bill has quietly become a growth tax.
We treat that as a data and SEO project that ends in a storefront. The URL inventory comes first — Search Console, Ahrefs and server logs, not a sitemap — because a London retailer with fifteen years of history has legacy category paths, old campaign URLs and blog posts still earning links from publications that have since been through three redesigns. Every one of those gets a mapped target or a documented decision. No homepage catch-all.
The second half of the job is the part specific to selling from here now. Your Magento tax tables encode a pre-Brexit world; they do not survive the move and should not. So we rebuild it properly on the way across: UK VAT with the reduced and zero-rated categories checked against your actual catalogue rather than the default, IOSS for consignments under €150, duty collection at checkout, and product-level origin and commodity data carried into metafields. Migration is the cheapest moment you will ever get to fix that, because you are touching every product record anyway.
Local context
Fifteen years of URLs and a tax model built for a different country
A London replatform carries two risks a newer market does not. The first is depth of organic history: long-established UK retailers rank for commercial terms on pages built long before anyone thought about structure, and those pages are frequently the ones a project plan forgets. We crawl and log-analyse before scoping so nothing valuable is discovered after cutover. The second is that the commercial setup on the old platform was designed when the EU was a domestic market. Rather than porting that mess, we rebuild pricing, VAT and duty from first principles in staging and test it with real orders to real EU addresses. Cutover is scheduled well clear of Black Friday and the run into Christmas — for most UK retailers the safe windows are late January through March, or the second half of summer, and we would rather delay a launch than move DNS in the third week of November.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a London 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 London store
We do not work off a rate card. Every London 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 London — your questions
Late January to March, or roughly July to early September. Both sit clear of Black Friday, the Christmas peak and the January sale period, and both give you a full quarter of clean data before your next peak. We will not move DNS in November for any amount of pressure, because the cost of a bad week then dwarfs the cost of waiting.
It should not be. Most UK Magento tax configurations are archaeological layers — pre-Brexit intra-community rules, a distance-selling threshold that no longer applies, then patches added in 2021. We rebuild it in Shopify from your current obligations: UK VAT with product tax overrides for the categories that need them, IOSS for sub-€150 consignments and duty collection above that. It is more work than a port and considerably less than fixing it live.
Usually yes, and it is one of the better reasons to move. B2B on Shopify puts wholesale accounts, price lists and payment terms on the same catalogue and inventory as retail, which removes the reconciliation work of two stock pools. The migration question that actually matters is your trade customers' order history and account structure, so we map company records and buyer contacts explicitly rather than importing them as ordinary customers.
We inventory each domain separately, because they usually have different histories and different link profiles, then decide whether the destination is one Shopify store with Markets domain routing or a genuine consolidation. In most cases consolidation onto Markets wins, with country-specific domains retained and routed rather than retired. Redirects are mapped per domain and hreflang is verified after cutover, not assumed.
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 London 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.