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.
Minneapolis, MN
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Minneapolis, MN
Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce moves for Minnesota brands who cannot afford to be mid-migration when the first freeze arrives.
Delivered remotely for brands across Minneapolis and Minnesota.
Build · Minneapolis
Why Minneapolis brands come to us for this
- Fitment and compatibility URLs inventoried from Search Console, crawl and server logs, then mapped one-to-one before cutover
- Dealer accounts, price tiers, terms and tax-exempt status migrated into Shopify B2B alongside the retail catalog
- Order history imported as historical records so support keeps warranty and returns context on legacy purchases
- Case-pack, sample and internal SKUs left behind from the wholesale era identified and retired rather than carried over
- Cutover scheduled for a spring or early-summer low-traffic window, never inside the openers or the Q4 gifting run
Replatforms in this market carry an extra passenger. Alongside the catalog and the URLs there is a wholesale side — dealer logins, account-specific pricing, open POs, terms, tax exemption status and years of order history that a customer service rep opens six times a day to answer a warranty question. Migrating the storefront and leaving the trade side on a legacy portal is how brands end up running two systems for a year. We map both in the same data plan.
The URL problem is also shaped differently here. A parts, powersports or marine brand often has an enormous long tail of fitment and compatibility pages, and those pages are frequently the highest-intent organic entry points in the entire site. They are also the ones a migration silently drops, because they were generated by a plugin nobody documented. Every URL gets gathered from Search Console, a crawl and the server logs, and every fitment URL gets a one-to-one target or a written decision — never a homepage redirect.
The third thing that decides these projects is timing, and this is where Minnesota is unusually unforgiving. There is a genuine window: cut over in spring or early summer, run a full quarter of real orders, then let the store go into the openers and the Q4 gifting run already stable. A cutover in October is a cutover being stress-tested by the only weeks that pay for the year, and no rehearsal plan makes that a good trade.
Local context
Cut over in spring so the store is boring by the first freeze
We plan Twin Cities migrations backwards from the first hard freeze rather than forwards from a kickoff date. That usually puts the audit and data cleanup in late winter, dry runs through spring, and a cutover in a low-traffic window before the summer, leaving a full quarter to stabilise, fix what the real order flow exposes and get the redirect map verified in Search Console before demand arrives. It also means the catalog cleanup phase lands when your team has the capacity to answer questions about it, which matters more than people expect — the person who knows which of your four thousand SKUs are genuinely discontinued is the same person who is unreachable in November. Legacy data here is often heavier than average because a wholesale-first history leaves behind pricing tiers, customer groups and case-pack SKUs that were never meant for a storefront, and a good chunk of the project is deciding what genuinely comes across.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis — your questions
It should, and doing both at once is usually cheaper than doing them a year apart. Company records, price lists, terms, contacts and order history move into Shopify B2B while the retail catalog moves into the same store, which means one inventory position and one place to change a price. Where the legacy portal has genuinely custom quoting logic, we scope that separately rather than pretend a native feature covers it.
First they get inventoried, because most brands do not know how many there are. Then each one gets classified: rebuild as a real fitment page, consolidate into a parent page, or retire with a redirect to the closest meaningful target. Consolidation is often the right answer — a plugin that spawned pages per model-year variant is usually diluting rankings rather than earning them — but it has to be a decision with traffic data behind it, not a default.
Less than clients expect, and that is a good outcome. Wholesale-first catalogs accumulate case-pack duplicates, sample SKUs, retailer-exclusive variants and discontinued models that were never removed. Most brands we migrate here cut a meaningful share of SKU count and lose no sellable revenue. We produce the retire list with twelve months of sales data attached so the calls are made on evidence, not memory.
Yes, but the first step is documenting what those features actually do, because that knowledge usually left with the developer. We inventory the custom logic, sort it into native Shopify capability, Shopify Functions, app, or genuinely custom code, and attach a maintenance cost to each. It is common to find that two or three of the custom features nobody wanted to lose are now standard platform behaviour.
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 Minneapolis 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.