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.
Milan
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Milan
Moving a Milan store off PrestaShop, Magento or WooCommerce with its Italian and export rankings, its invoicing integration and its wholesale history intact.
Delivered remotely for brands across Milan and Italy.
Build · Milan
Why Milan brands come to us for this
- PrestaShop, Magento and WooCommerce exports mapped field by field, including the metafields your finish and lead-time data lives in
- Redirect map covering Italian, English and any German or French URLs, with hreflang rebuilt rather than abandoned
- Electronic invoicing, courier and gestionale integrations rebuilt and tested on real orders before cutover, not after
- Order and customer history migrated so returns, warranty and made-to-order context survive the move
- Cutover scheduled clear of Salone, fashion week and the saldi, and timed to the Milan morning so the first live day is watched
Italy replatforms differently from the US. The store you are leaving is far more likely to be PrestaShop or Magento than Shopify's usual competitors, it is probably running a stack of modules a single developer installed years ago, and at least one of those modules is doing something load-bearing — fattura elettronica, a courier label integration with BRT or GLS, a link to the gestionale. Nobody wants to open it. That is precisely why it should move.
The risk in the move is not the products. It is the URLs. An established Milan brand has organic equity in three places at once: Italian queries on google.it, English queries from export markets, and often German or French pages built by whoever ran the last SEO project. Legacy platforms generate URL patterns Shopify has no equivalent for — category paths several levels deep, ID-suffixed product URLs, language prefixes that were configured inconsistently. Every one of those needs a destination before DNS changes, and hreflang has to survive the move or your German page starts competing with your Italian one.
So it runs as a data and search exercise that happens to finish with a new storefront. Every indexed URL pulled from Search Console, your server logs and a fresh crawl. A one-to-one redirect map reviewed and signed off before cutover. Dry-run migrations repeated until the delta report is clean on products, variants, customers, order history and the metafields your product data actually lives in. Then the integrations get rebuilt and tested against real orders — invoicing, courier, accounting — before anyone celebrates.
Local context
Cutover is a calendar decision before it is a technical one
There are weeks in the Milan year when a store simply cannot afford to wobble, and they are not the ones a generic project plan would flag. April belongs to Salone and the Fuorisalone; February and September belong to fashion week; early January and early July belong to the saldi, whose start dates are set regionally rather than by you, which means your discounting window has a legal edge and a great deal of traffic attached to it. August is the opposite problem — quiet, but with your suppliers, your courier depots and often your own team on holiday, so a launch nobody can support is a bad idea even when nobody is buying. We plan cutover into the shoulder weeks either side of those, run the dry runs while the old store keeps trading, and hold a rollback path open for the first week. And because our office is eight hours behind you, we schedule the switch for the Milan morning so a full Italian business day is watched live rather than discovered the next day.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Milan 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 Milan store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Milan 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 Milan — your questions
Each one gets classified before anything moves: replaced by native Shopify behaviour, replaced by an app, rebuilt as custom code, or dropped because nobody has used it in two years. The ones that matter in Italy are usually invoicing, courier labelling and the accounting link, and those get rebuilt and tested on real order data during the dry run. The audit is often the most valuable part of the project, because it is the first honest inventory of what your store actually does.
You should not lose them, but you should expect a short unsettled period while Google recrawls. The controllable part is redirect coverage and internal linking, both of which we finish before cutover, and structural parity on your best pages so a collection that ranks keeps its title, copy and links. Where things go wrong is nearly always uninventoried URLs — old blog posts, filter pages that earned links, PDF catalogues — which is why the crawl includes your server logs and not just Search Console.
Yes, and it is usually the right moment to do it, because you are already cleaning data. Retailer accounts become company profiles with their own price lists and terms in Shopify B2B, and past orders can be brought across so reorder history is not lost. What does not migrate automatically is anything that lived in email — agreed exceptions, verbal terms, one-off discounts — so we ask for that list explicitly rather than discovering it when a buyer complains.
For a typical Milan SMB catalogue it is a matter of weeks rather than months, and the time difference changes the rhythm more than the duration. We overlap live roughly 16:00 to 19:00 your time for decisions and reviews, and the rest runs as written handover: you leave feedback at the end of your day, the work happens overnight, and it is waiting when you open your laptop. Cutover day is the exception, where we start at the Milan morning and stay on it.
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.
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.
Subscription contracts migrate to Recharge or Shopify Subscriptions with billing dates, cadence and discounts preserved. We time the cutover between billing cycles and run a reconciliation on the first post-launch charge run. Churn in the first cycle is the metric we watch hardest.
Next step
Migrate to Shopify for your Milan 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.