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.
Toronto, ON
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Toronto, ON
Moving a GTA store to Shopify with the .ca rankings, the wholesale price book and the provincial tax logic all intact.
Delivered remotely for brands across Toronto and Canada.
Build · Toronto
Why Toronto brands come to us for this
- Redirect maps built across .ca and .com trees together, plus French paths, so no country or language branch drops silently
- Wholesale pricing untangled from product records and rebuilt as B2B company price lists rather than legacy discount rules
- GST, HST and PST rebuilt against your actual registrations, then reconciled order by order for the first two weeks live
- Order-to-3PL flow rehearsed with your Mississauga or Brampton fulfilment partner before cutover, not on launch night
- Cutover scheduled overnight Eastern Time and kept clear of the Black Friday to Boxing Day window
Toronto ecommerce is frequently older than Toronto DTC. Behind a modern-looking storefront there is frequently a Magento or WooCommerce install that started life as a wholesale catalogue for a family import business, grew a consumer front end around 2016, and has been patched by four different developers since. That history is what makes a GTA migration different: the data is not just messy, it is two businesses' worth of data in one schema, with dealer pricing, case packs and account-specific discounts tangled into product records.
The second complication is that most Toronto brands have a URL footprint on two domains. A .ca that carries the Canadian organic rankings and a .com that catches US search, or a single domain with a /ca/ and /us/ split, plus in some cases French paths on top. Every one of those trees has to appear in the redirect map, and the language and country signals have to survive the move, or you lose the Quebec pages and the US pages first and only notice in the month-two revenue report.
Then there is tax. Legacy Canadian stores almost always have provincial tax handled by a plugin, a hard-coded table, or an accountant's manual correction after the fact. Shopify calculates GST, HST and PST natively once your registrations are entered correctly, but nothing carries over automatically and nothing warns you if the new store starts charging Ontario's rate to a buyer in Saskatchewan. We reconcile the first two weeks of post-launch orders against what the old store would have charged, line by line, before anyone signs off on the migration.
Local context
Cutover timing when your fulfilment sits on the 401
Almost every GTA brand's inventory is in the warehouse belt running along the 401 through Mississauga and Brampton, at a 3PL whose systems are as much part of the migration as your catalogue. That means the cutover runbook has a party in it who does not work for you and does not care about your launch date. We rehearse order-to-3PL flow in staging with real order shapes, agree an inventory freeze window with your fulfilment partner in writing, and schedule the DNS change for a low-traffic overnight slot in Eastern Time — never in the second half of November, and never in the week either side of Boxing Day, when a broken feed to your warehouse costs a quarter of your year. We also keep a documented rollback that your 3PL has actually read, because a rollback plan nobody outside the agency has seen is a document, not a plan.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Toronto 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 Toronto store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Toronto 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 Toronto — your questions
Often yes, and it is usually the right call — one Shopify store with market-level domains gives you cleaner authority and one catalogue to maintain. It has to be planned as a consolidation with its own redirect map and hreflang set, not treated as a side effect. If both domains carry real link equity we stage it: migrate one, confirm index recovery, then fold in the second.
It gets extracted from the product records where a legacy platform buried it and rebuilt as B2B company profiles and price lists. This is normally the longest phase in a GTA migration, because dealer pricing in an old Magento or Woo install has usually accumulated exceptions nobody documented. We produce a reconciliation sheet per account so your sales team can verify their own customers before go-live.
If they are in the redirect map and the hreflang is right, yes. French URLs are the single most commonly forgotten branch in a Canadian migration, usually because they live under a path structure the crawl export missed. We pull the URL inventory from Search Console, Ahrefs and server logs specifically so language paths that nobody remembers building still show up in the list.
By reconciling rather than assuming. Shopify calculates correctly once your registrations are entered, but nobody validates that the entry matches reality. We run a sample of orders across Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Quebec through the new checkout in staging, compare each against expected treatment, then audit real orders for the first fortnight. Which provinces you must register in is your accountant's call, not ours.
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 Toronto 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.