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.
Zurich
Replatforming & Migration to Shopify in Zurich
Moving a Swiss store off WooCommerce, Magento or a local host, with the German and French URL trees mapped one to one before anything is switched.
Delivered remotely for brands across Zurich and Switzerland.
Build · Zurich
Why Zurich brands come to us for this
- Full URL inventory pulled per language, so German and French redirect maps are reviewed separately before cutover
- Domain and subfolder strategy decided up front: .ch primary with market routing, or existing country domains kept
- Invoice, instalment and TWINT payment reconnected and tested against real orders in staging, not on launch night
- Catalogue clean-up across a decade of seasonal ranges, with attributes restructured as metafields in every language
- Cutover scheduled against your own season — never November for gifting, never autumn for alpine equipment
The typical Zurich replatform is not a startup upgrading. It is a fifteen-year-old company on WooCommerce or Magento 1 sitting with a Swiss hosting provider, where an external developer left three years ago and nobody has dared touch the payment module since. It works. It is also the reason the marketing team cannot ship a landing page without a quotation, and the reason your invoice payment integration breaks every time PHP updates.
What makes a Swiss migration different is that the risk doubles with every language. A store publishing German and French has two full URL trees, two sets of ranked collection pages and often two blogs written by different people at different times. Sloppy redirect work does not cost you a slice of organic traffic — it costs you a year of rankings in both languages at once, in a market where you cannot make the shortfall up with volume. So we pull every indexed URL per language from Search Console, Ahrefs and server logs, map them one to one, and review the map with you before a cutover date is even proposed.
The second half is the things that only exist here. Invoice and instalment payment usually runs through a provider that has to be reconnected and tested against real orders, not switched on at launch. TWINT needs a Swiss acquirer relationship. Export documentation, HS codes and any ERP link into a Swiss accounting system need rehearsing in staging. And the catalogue itself is normally overdue a clean: duplicate SKUs from a decade of seasonal ranges, translated fields half-populated, product attributes that were never structured as metafields.
Local context
Two language trees, one redirect map, and a quiet trading week
Cutover timing in Zurich is a commercial decision, not an IT one. A chocolate or gifting brand does not move platforms in November, an alpine equipment brand does not move in October, and a watch brand does not want its store unfamiliar in the weeks around the spring fair season. We look at your own revenue curve and pick the quietest fortnight in it, then rehearse the migration into staging at least twice with an automated delta report on record counts, prices, inventory and customer tags. The language dimension shapes the staging work too: German and French product data has to be verified separately, because a delta report that passes on the German catalogue will happily pass while every French long description is empty. Domain strategy gets decided in the same conversation — whether the .ch domain stays primary with market subfolders, or whether an existing country domain has enough equity to keep. That choice is very hard to reverse later, which is why it belongs at the start.
Scope
What Migrate to Shopify includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Zurich 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 Zurich store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Zurich 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 Zurich — your questions
It changes where data sits and therefore what your privacy documentation has to say, which under the revised Swiss data protection law means an accurate record of processing and transparent disclosure. It is a documentation and contracting exercise rather than a blocker, and most Swiss merchants complete it without difficulty. If you hold a specific regulatory obligation to keep data in-country, tell us at the audit stage and we will scope around it honestly rather than discover it late.
By treating them as a separate migration. The French URL inventory is exported, mapped and reviewed on its own, hreflang between the language versions is rebuilt to match the new structure rather than copied from the old one, and post-launch monitoring reports index coverage per language. Most rankings damage we see in bilingual migrations comes from one language being spot-checked and the other assumed.
Order and customer history migrates, but open invoice balances live with your payment provider, not in the store, so those relationships have to be re-established rather than imported. We map which provider handles what before cutover and test a real invoice order end to end in staging, including the failure path. Buy-on-invoice is normal enough in Switzerland that breaking it for a week is not an acceptable launch cost.
Content and catalogue work happens in stages; the domain switch does not. A phased DNS cut creates duplicate live storefronts, split analytics and conflicting canonicals, which is worse than a single well-rehearsed switch. What we do phase is scope: launch with the German and French storefronts and the core catalogue, then add B2B, additional markets or Italian once the platform is stable and measured.
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 Zurich 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.