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.
Washington, DC
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Washington, DC
Washington's institutional stores are usually the oldest software in the building — and the URLs they sit on have been earning links since before anyone measured them.
Delivered remotely for brands across Washington and District of Columbia.
Build · Washington
Why Washington brands come to us for this
- Member and donor identity reconciled between the legacy AMS or CRM and Shopify before any records move
- Decades of .org URLs — retired exhibitions, old reports, dead conference microsites — mapped one to one, not to the homepage
- Order history retained to the depth your audit, grant or membership reporting actually requires
- Cutover scheduled around annual meetings, exhibition openings and the 30 September fiscal close
- Legacy integrations rebuilt and tested against real staging orders rather than reconnected on launch night
The typical Washington migration is not a fashionable DTC brand outgrowing its theme. It is a store bolted onto an association management system in 2014, or a WooCommerce shop a contractor built for a museum and never touched again, or a publisher's catalogue running on software whose vendor stopped answering email. Nobody wants to touch it because nobody remembers how it was configured, and the person who did left for another organisation two reorganisations ago.
That makes discovery the real work. Where does member identity actually live — in the AMS, in the store, or in both, disagreeing? Which prices are contractual and which were typed in once? Are order records needed for grant reporting or an audit trail, and for how many years back? We answer those before mapping a single field, because an institutional migration that loses a member's purchase history creates a problem your membership team hears about for a year.
Then URLs. Organisations in this city have been publishing since the early web, and their domains carry links from universities, federal agencies and news archives that no outreach programme could buy today. We pull the full indexed inventory from Search Console, third-party crawlers and server logs, map it one to one, and make a decision on everything without a target. Old exhibition pages, retired report landing pages and long-dead conference microsites are exactly the URLs that carry the strongest links, so they get a destination rather than a homepage redirect.
Local context
Cutting over between an annual meeting and a fiscal year close
There is no quiet quarter for a Washington institution, but there are windows, and they are governed by the event and budget calendar rather than by retail seasons. You do not cut over in the fortnight before an annual meeting, during a major exhibition opening, or in September while finance is closing a fiscal year on the thirtieth. We schedule dry runs so the delta report comes back clean well ahead of a window, then flip DNS in a genuinely dead period — often mid-winter or high summer, when Congress is out and the association calendar goes quiet. The other local factor is the legacy integration: most institutional stores here have a link to a membership or donor system, and we rebuild and test that against real records in staging rather than reconnecting it on launch night.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Washington 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 Washington store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Washington 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 Washington — your questions
Almost always, and usually it should be. The AMS should remain the system of record for membership status and dues; Shopify becomes the system of record for commerce. We connect them so entitlements flow one way and purchase data flows back, rather than letting two systems both believe they own the customer. The discovery step is establishing which fields each side has been quietly overwriting.
The URLs do, whether or not the pages do. Some old content deserves a rewrite, some deserves consolidation into a stronger page, and some should simply redirect to its closest living equivalent. What must not happen is a silent 404 on a page a university library or a federal site has linked to since 2011 — that is an asset, and once the link target is gone you do not get it back.
Yes. The legacy store stays live and taking orders while the Shopify build happens in parallel, and we run rehearsal migrations against it repeatedly. The only genuine interruption is a short window during the final data sync and DNS change, which we schedule for a low-traffic period and communicate to your team in advance with a rollback plan written down.
We build slack into the schedule around known risk dates rather than pretending it will not happen. If a shutdown or a weather event pauses your stakeholders' availability, the parallel-build model means the legacy store keeps trading and nothing is stranded half-migrated. What we protect above all is the cutover window — we would rather move it than run it with reviewers unavailable.
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 Washington 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.