Move the store. Keep the rankings.

An inventory and written plan, the data migration itself with reconciliation, the URL and redirect strategy that protects your rankings, the storefront build, every integration rebuilt and tested, and a rehearsed launch with monitoring afterwards. The parts people forget are the expensive ones: order and subscription history, tax and shipping logic, reviews reattached to the right products, and the redirect map. We quote all of it up front so there is no mid-project discovery that the history was out of scope.

There is usually a short dip while Google reprocesses the site, and with the right preparation it is small and brief. The damage happens when redirects are missing or lazy: Search Engine Journal's study of 171 migrations found an average 229 days to return to pre-migration traffic, with 42% not recovering. We prevent that by crawling everything first, mapping one to one rather than sending stragglers to the homepage, keeping titles, headings, structured data and internal links intact, and monitoring index coverage daily for the first fortnight so anything odd is fixed within hours.

Six to twelve weeks is typical: a small catalogue with few integrations can be done in weeks, while a large catalogue with ERP, subscriptions and multi-market selling takes longer. Shopify's research with EY reports implementations averaging 20% faster and 66% more likely to launch on time than competing platforms, which matches our experience when the scope is honest at the start. The two things that stretch a timeline are custom functionality discovered late and data that turns out to be dirtier than anyone believed, which is exactly why the inventory comes first.

Yes, and we treat it as essential rather than optional. Order history, customer records, lifetime value, subscription status, loyalty balances and saved addresses come across so your retention marketing, support team and finance reporting keep working from day one. Payment tokens can sometimes be migrated depending on your gateways, and where they cannot we plan the re-authorisation flow in advance rather than letting subscribers fail silently. Everything is reconciled against source totals, month by month, before we call it done.

Each one is assessed: replaced by native Shopify functionality, matched to a Shopify app, rebuilt as custom work, or retired because nobody uses it. That review usually reduces the stack, which lowers both cost and fragility. ERP, 3PL, accounting, tax, subscriptions, reviews, loyalty, help desk and product feeds are rebuilt and tested end to end — place an order, pay, fulfil, refund, exchange — with your finance team reconciling test orders before launch rather than after the first month-end.

For most mid-market and many enterprise merchants it is a strong fit: hosting, security, checkout, payments and a large app ecosystem come as standard, so your team spends its time on merchandising rather than maintenance. Shopify merchants processed $378.4 billion in GMV in 2025, up around 29%, so the ecosystem is deep. It is less suited to highly unusual B2B pricing logic or products that need bespoke configuration, and we will say so during the audit rather than sell you a migration you would regret.

By modelling the catalogue properly before importing anything. We normalise product data, decide how options map to Shopify variants, use metafields for attributes that drive filtering and merchandising, and set consistent naming so search, collections and feeds work immediately rather than being patched later. Inventory is mapped per location so warehouses and stores report accurately from launch. Where the legacy structure was inconsistent, we clean it deliberately and document the change so nobody wonders later why a field looks different.

The drivers are catalogue size, how much history moves, the number and complexity of integrations, and how much custom functionality has to be rebuilt rather than replaced. We scope from the inventory and quote a fixed project price with the phases listed separately, so you can see what each part buys and defer anything that is not needed for launch. Shopify's EY research puts budgeted implementation costs around 23% lower than competing platforms, and a tighter app stack usually reduces monthly running costs too.

Practically speaking, yes: the storefront is built and tested in parallel, the final data delta is small, and the cutover itself is a DNS change measured in minutes. We schedule it in your quietest trading window, freeze changes briefly, deploy redirects with the launch, verify payments and tax with live test orders, and keep the team on watch afterwards. Every step of the runbook has a documented rollback, so if something unexpected appears we can return to a known-good state rather than improvise under pressure.

The first fortnight is monitored daily: crawl and index coverage, redirect health, rankings, conversion rate, revenue by landing page and any error logged in the order flow. After that we hand over documentation and train your team, and most clients keep us on a light retainer for maintenance, technical SEO and conversion work — though it is entirely reasonable to take it in-house. Either way the store, the code and the documentation are yours.