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.
St. Louis, MO
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in St. Louis, MO
Moving a twenty-year-old catalog and its rankings onto Shopify without losing the part-number pages that bring in your inbound.
Delivered remotely for brands across St. Louis and Missouri.
Build · St. Louis
Why St. Louis brands come to us for this
- Full URL inventory including every part-number and spec page that has ever earned an impression
- Dealer accounts, negotiated pricing, order history and exemption status migrated and spot-checked by your sales team
- Magento 1 and legacy WooCommerce variation structures remapped to Shopify variants and metafields, not flattened
- ERP, EDI and 3PL connections rebuilt and tested against the staging store before any DNS change
- Cutover scheduled around month-end billing and your seasonal peak, with Central time cover on launch day
A lot of the sites we replace in this metro were built between 2009 and 2016 by a local shop that has since closed, on Magento 1, an early WooCommerce stack or a cart nobody outside the region has heard of. They still work, mostly. What they cannot do is integrate cleanly, load quickly on a phone, or be edited by anyone inside the company without a support ticket and a two-week wait.
The asset at risk in these migrations is unusual. It is not brand pages — it is thousands of part-number and spec pages that have accumulated organic authority for fifteen years and quietly feed the sales team its inbound. A migration that treats those as low-value long tail and collapses them into a single collection destroys the pipeline. We inventory every URL that has ever earned an impression, map it one to one, and keep the redirect chain flat.
We have done this move enough times to know where the bodies are buried, largely because we spent years building on WordPress and WooCommerce before moving our own practice to Shopify. We know what a WooCommerce variation table does when it hits Shopify's variant limits, what happens to attribute-based URLs, and how a legacy cart stores customer records it never intended anyone to export.
Local context
The dealer relationship is the migration risk nobody scopes
For a St. Louis manufacturer or industrial distributor, the highest-risk asset in a replatform is not the theme or even the SEO — it is the set of accounts that have been ordering the same items on the same terms for years. Migrating those means moving customer records, negotiated pricing, historical orders that buyers reorder from, tax exemption status and, in many cases, credit terms. If a long-standing account logs in after cutover and cannot find last year's order or sees list price instead of their own, you will hear about it from the owner before lunch. We migrate accounts and pricing in a dry run, have your sales team spot-check their own top accounts on the staging store, and schedule cutover well away from month-end and your seasonal peak. Central time coverage on launch day is a scheduling decision we make deliberately, not an afterthought.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a St. Louis 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 St. Louis store
We do not work off a rate card. Every St. Louis 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 St. Louis — your questions
No, and blanket-redirecting them is its own problem. We split the list into URLs with real search visibility, URLs with backlinks, and machine-generated filter combinations that only ever existed for crawlers. The first two get individual redirects, the third gets a clean 410 or a redirect to the parent collection. Sending four thousand junk URLs to specific pages just teaches Google your new site is full of near-duplicates.
Occasionally, for a short overlap, but it is more expensive than it looks. Two systems means two inventory truths, two price lists to keep in sync and a support team answering questions about both. Where a phased approach is genuinely needed we prefer launching the Shopify B2B portal first and retiring the old site entirely, rather than running them in parallel for months.
They move to Shopify Files and get attached to products through metafields, so a document is linked rather than pasted into a description. That also means the document URLs change, which matters because some of those PDFs rank and get linked to by contractors and engineers. We inventory and redirect them the same way we do product pages, which is a step most migration checklists skip entirely.
By not launching into it. For regional food, gifting and consumer brands here that means going live no later than early autumn or waiting until January, and for industrial firms it usually means avoiding quarter-end and any distributor buying period. We would rather push a launch by five weeks than cut over during the eight weeks that produce a third of your year.
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 St. Louis 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.