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.
Pittsburgh, PA
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Pittsburgh, PA
Moving decades of part numbers onto Shopify without losing the long-tail search traffic that quietly feeds your sales desk.
Delivered remotely for brands across Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania.
Build · Pittsburgh
Why Pittsburgh brands come to us for this
- Every legacy part-number and cross-reference URL inventoried and mapped one-to-one before DNS moves
- Query-string URLs from ASP.NET and Magento catalogues rewritten to clean Shopify handles with redirects that hold
- Attribute normalisation across generations of part numbering, turning description text into filterable metafields
- Customer accounts, net-terms company records and order history carried across so the sales desk keeps its context
- Cutover scheduled around plant shutdown weeks, the merchandise season and December wholesale — never a Friday
Replatforming is our oldest service and Pittsburgh is where it gets used hardest. The stores we inherit here run on Magento 1 that should have been retired years ago, a homegrown ASP.NET catalogue maintained by a contractor who has moved on, an old BigCommerce account, or a WooCommerce site straining under twelve thousand products on shared hosting. All of them share a symptom: the catalogue works well enough that nobody wants to touch it, and badly enough that nobody can grow it.
The risk in a Pittsburgh migration is concentrated in an unusual place. Consumer brands worry about brand-term rankings. An industrial catalogue's organic value is thousands of low-volume part-number and cross-reference URLs, each one worth almost nothing on its own and collectively worth a large share of inbound demand. Those are exactly the URLs that get skipped when someone maps the top five hundred pages and redirects the rest to a category. We pull the full URL inventory from Search Console, a crawl and server logs, and every legacy address gets a decision rather than a homepage redirect.
The second risk is data. Forty years of part numbering means three naming conventions, duplicate SKUs created when someone changed a suffix, attributes stored as free text in a description field, and stock levels that only the ERP truly knows. The migration itself is rarely the hard part. Deciding which attributes become filterable metafields, normalising the naming, and defining what stays authoritative in the ERP afterwards is the work that decides whether the new store is better or just newer.
Local context
Cutover timing in a city with real seasons
We plan Pittsburgh cutovers around the calendar the business actually runs on, and it varies more here than in most metros. Fan and collegiate merchandise brands have a hard window: nothing structural happens between September and January, so migrations get built in late winter and spring and go live well before the season opens. Manufacturers frequently have a summer shutdown week when order volume falls to near nothing, which is the safest cutover slot they will get all year. Wholesale food businesses in the Strip District are unavailable through December and generally fine in February. On top of that we avoid winter storm weeks where we can, because the last thing a support team needs is a migration question landing the same morning as a weather-related shipping backlog. The cutover itself runs as a rehearsed runbook with named owners, a freeze window and a documented rollback, executed at your lowest-traffic hour — which, from Mountain Time, is comfortably inside our working evening.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Pittsburgh 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 Pittsburgh store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Pittsburgh 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 Pittsburgh — your questions
Yes. When there is no usable export we pull data from three directions: a direct database extract where we can get access, a full crawl of the live site for anything only rendered on the page, and the ERP for pricing, stock and product hierarchy. The reconciliation between those three is the real project, and it typically surfaces products that have not been orderable for years.
By treating them as the primary asset rather than the long tail. Each legacy URL is inventoried and mapped individually, and where a part has been superseded the redirect goes to the replacement product with cross-reference content on the page rather than to a category. We then watch index coverage daily for sixty days, because part-number pages recrawl slowly and a problem there is invisible in a headline sessions chart.
No, and we would rather you did not do it in isolation. Cleanup happens inside the migration because the decisions are interlinked: which duplicates merge, which attributes become filters, which discontinued items get a redirect versus a stays-live page with a replacement. Most industrial catalogues we move lose a meaningful share of their SKU count in this phase and lose no revenue at all.
It gets rebuilt and tested against real orders in staging well before cutover, never reconnected on launch night. We run the new integration in parallel against the legacy system for a period so discrepancies show up while the old store is still live and still authoritative. The first post-launch stock and pricing sync is the one we watch hardest.
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 Pittsburgh 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.