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.
San Francisco, CA
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in San Francisco, CA
Most San Francisco migrations are not from a competitor platform — they are away from something the company built itself and can no longer staff.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Francisco and California.
Build · San Francisco
Why San Francisco brands come to us for this
- Migration off founder-built custom storefronts, not just WooCommerce and Magento
- Payment-token migration for active subscribers, run in cohorts against the billing calendar
- Wine club member tenure, allocation history and shipping holds carried across intact
- Redirect map built from Search Console, crawl and server logs, with a decision for every URL
- A documented admin handed to a marketing team that has been waiting on engineering for years
The typical replatform brief in this city has an unusual origin. There is no legacy vendor to blame. There is a custom storefront an early engineer built because they could, running on a framework version two years behind, with an admin only two people understand and a deploy process that requires one of them to be awake. That engineer now works somewhere else. The marketing team cannot change a collection page without filing a ticket, and every quarter the business pays for the privilege of maintaining commerce infrastructure that is not its product.
That shape changes the migration work. There is often no clean export, because the data model was invented rather than adopted — variants encoded as separate products, options stored as free text, customer records split between the store database and a payments provider. So the first real deliverable is a field-by-field map from a schema nobody documented into a Shopify catalogue that will make sense to a merchandiser, plus a decision, in writing, for every field that has no Shopify equivalent.
The second complication is subscriptions, which in this market is usually the majority of revenue. Moving an active subscriber base is not a data export — it is a payment-token migration between processors, coordinated so that nobody is charged twice, nobody is charged early, and no card has to be re-entered. We schedule it around billing cycles, run it in cohorts, and keep the old system readable until the new one has cleanly billed a full cycle. Wine clubs add member tenure, allocation history and shipping-hold preferences that customers will notice immediately if they are lost.
Local context
Cutting over without spooking a subscriber base or a wine club
A San Francisco replatform is judged by the people who were already paying you. A first-time visitor sees a new site; a two-year subscriber sees whether their next delivery arrived on the date they expected, whether their pause is still a pause, and whether their card had to be re-entered. So we sequence around the billing calendar rather than the launch calendar: subscriber and wine club migration runs in cohorts, the first cohort is small enough to inspect by hand, and no marketing campaign goes out until a full cycle has billed cleanly on the new stack. On the acquisition side, the redirect map is built from Search Console, crawl data and server logs together — because the URLs a bespoke storefront generated are usually stranger than a crawler alone will find — and anything without a genuine one-to-one target gets a decision rather than a lazy redirect to the homepage. We also plan cutover well away from an allocation release or a holiday club shipment.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Francisco 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 San Francisco store
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Francisco 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 San Francisco — your questions
With a read-only audit of the database and the live site before anyone estimates anything. Undocumented custom stacks hide their real complexity in edge cases — a discount rule in application code, a tax exception hard-coded for one state, a fulfilment webhook nobody remembers. We inventory those first, decide what genuinely has to be recreated on Shopify and what was an accident, and only then scope. Skipping that step is how migrations run over.
They should not, and if a proposal tells you otherwise, ask more questions. Payment tokens can generally be migrated between processors under a documented process, which we run in cohorts so that any problem surfaces on a small batch. Where a token genuinely cannot move — an unusual processor, a closed gateway — we plan a proactive update campaign rather than letting customers discover it through a failed charge.
Yes, and tenure matters more than most migration plans assume, because tier eligibility and allocation priority are usually derived from it. We map member since dates, tier, allocation history, shipping-hold preferences and seasonal skip settings as first-class data rather than notes on a customer record. Then we test the next release against a sample of members before it goes to the full club.
Some short-term ranking movement is normal while search engines recrawl and consolidate signals, typically settling over a few weeks when redirects, canonicals and internal links are correct from day one. The losses that do not recover come from missing redirects, a changed URL pattern with no mapping, or thin replacement content on collection pages. We front-load all three, and we monitor Search Console daily through the first weeks rather than checking in monthly.
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 San Francisco 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.