Migrate your web shop to Shopify

Migrating a web shop to Shopify without losing revenue is possible, provided you treat the migration as a relocation of your findability and not just of your products. Moving product data is the easy part; the real work sits in the URLs, redirects and content that carry your current Google positions.

Zalm Partners migrates stores from WooCommerce, Magento and Lightspeed to Shopify, with the redirect plan at the heart of every project. We build the new store to the same standard as any new Shopify build, with one extra assignment: everything you have built up online has to come along.

The stories we hear rhyme. The WooCommerce store runs on a stack of plugins where every update feels like a gamble. The Magento environment demands maintenance that a store this size cannot justify. Or the current platform simply drags: slow pages, a dated checkout, features that never arrive.

Shopify takes most of that maintenance off your plate: hosting, security and checkout are the platform's responsibility. Whether that trade fits you depends on your situation; we weigh it honestly, just as we do in our comparison of Shopify versus WooCommerce. Sometimes staying and cleaning up is the better call, and then that is what we advise.

Every migration follows the same route, with checkpoints where you review before anything becomes final.

• Inventory: all URLs, rankings, products, customers and integrations mapped
• Data export and import: products, collections, customers and order history
• Build of the new store in a shielded environment
• Redirect plan: every old URL gets a destination, tested in advance
• Go-live at a quiet moment, with the old store as the safety net
• Post-launch measurement: rankings, traffic and revenue against the measurement taken before the switch

That final measurement is not a formality. In the weeks after go-live we track rankings page by page, so a wobble is spotted while it is still small.

Nearly every migration that fails, fails on redirects. A pattern we see in inventory after inventory: the oldest URLs of a store still attract links and visits years later, and precisely those appear in no current export. Redirect only the live catalogue and you cut the threads your domain's authority hangs from.

So we start with data rather than with the store: crawl data, analytics and the domain's link profile shape the redirect list, including pages that left the menu long ago. Shopify also enforces its own URL structure with /products/ and /collections/, so virtually every URL changes in a migration. That is fine, as long as each old URL lands on the right new one with a 301.

A migration without any risk does not exist, and an agency claiming otherwise deserves suspicion. These are the points we walk through with you beforehand. Customer passwords cannot move: they are stored encrypted, so after the switch your customers set a new password once. Some plugins or custom features have no one-to-one equivalent in Shopify; we inventory those up front, with a solution per feature or an honest "this one goes".

Google may also need a few weeks to process the new URLs, which can cause temporary movement in rankings. With a complete redirect plan that movement normally stays small and recovers. We tell you in advance what to expect, and the post-launch measurement shows whether we were right.

Four things set the scope: the volume of products, customers and orders that must move, the number of integrations with systems such as point of sale, accounting or fulfilment, how much custom functionality from the old store needs rebuilding, and the number of URLs the redirect plan has to cover. A store with five hundred products and one integration is a different project than a Magento environment with ten years of history. For the subscription itself, Shopify charges a monthly fee per plan.

After the inventory you receive a proposal with a fixed price and a risk overview per component. You decide on the switch with the full picture on the table, not with a napkin estimate.