Migrations · US & UK

Shopify migration services USA and UK merchants judge on one thing: the redirects.

Moving products, customers and orders is routine work with a known shape. Mapping every old URL to its new home is the part that decides whether you keep the search visibility you spent years accumulating — and it is the part most quotes bury at the bottom.

Get a free migration teardownFree teardown
1
Deliverable that matters most
48 hrs
Teardown turnaround
0
URLs left unmapped
4
Commerce platforms shipped

What actually goes wrong

The store launches fine. The traffic does not come back.

Replatforming failures are rarely visible on launch day, which is what makes them expensive. Three of them account for nearly all the damage, and all three are decided before anyone touches a theme.

The redirects nobody mapped

Every platform builds URLs differently, so a migration changes the address of every product and every category by default. If those old addresses return a 404, the ranking, the accumulated links and the traffic attached to them are gone — and unlike most launch problems, this one does not recover on its own once someone notices. The fix is a complete map from every old URL to its closest new equivalent, produced from a crawl of the existing store rather than from a spreadsheet somebody typed.

The data that quietly does not fit

Products carry the parts that break: variants, option sets, bundles, subscriptions, tiered or customer-specific pricing, and B2B rules. Shopify models some of these differently and a couple not at all below Plus. Discovering that in week three means redesigning your catalogue under deadline. It is knowable in an afternoon by reading an export of what you actually have, which is why that is the first thing we ask for.

The order history that gets left behind

Customers, order history and — where it exists — subscription billing are the ones that get deferred and then abandoned. The consequence is a support team that has to look up anything older than launch day in a system nobody maintains, and repeat customers who arrive to find their account empty. Decide deliberately what comes across and what is archived. Do not let it be decided by the calendar.

How we run a replatform

The order matters more than the tooling, and it is close to the same order every time.

Read what you have before quoting

A crawl of the live store and an export of the catalogue. That produces two things: the complete URL inventory the redirect map will be built from, and an honest read on which of your product structures Shopify expresses natively, which need rethinking and which need an app. Anyone quoting Shopify migration services USA or UK merchants ask for without doing this first is quoting a guess, and the guess is always lower than the number.

Build alongside the live store

Your existing shop keeps trading throughout. The new one is assembled on a development store you can open at any point, catalogue imported and checked against the export rather than eyeballed, templates built, and the redirect map produced as a reviewable document rather than a config file nobody reads.

Launch, then watch the right numbers

Cut over, redirects live from the first minute, then watch Search Console for crawl errors and coverage rather than watching the sales dashboard and hoping. A migration that has gone wrong shows up in crawl errors days before it shows up in revenue, which is the window in which it is still cheap to fix.

The market-specific part, which is small

The engineering is identical on both sides of the Atlantic. What differs is presentational and settled in configuration: prices displayed inclusive of tax for British shoppers and exclusive for American ones, the delivery and returns language each market expects, and the payment methods people recognise. Worth naming at scoping so nobody assumes the other market's defaults, and genuinely not worth a separate project.

Platform work

Stores we have built on both sides of a migration.

Team Concept Sports — Shopify Development · Build
3 weeks

Team Concept Sports

design → launch

Calesce — WordPress Development · Build
32

Calesce

products, client-managed

Organic Origin — Shopify Development · Build
4.9★

Organic Origin

1,000+ reviews

DK Lighting — Custom Web Development · Build
2 weeks

DK Lighting

concept to launch

How it runs

Crawl, quote, build, cut over.

01

Free migration teardown

We crawl your store and read your catalogue export, then tell you what will and will not move cleanly.

02

Scope and fixed price

The URL count, the product structures that need rethinking, and the redirect map as a named deliverable.

03

Build on a development store

Your live shop keeps trading. Catalogue imported and reconciled against the export, not spot-checked.

04

Cut over and watch

Redirects live from minute one, then Search Console coverage monitored through the weeks that matter.

Money

How a migration is quoted.

Fixed-scope migration

Quoted after the crawl, never before. Catalogue, customers, orders, templates and the redirect map, with what is being archived stated explicitly.

  • ✓Redirect map as a deliverable
  • ✓Reconciled against your export
  • ✓Live store keeps trading

Redirects only

For merchants who have already migrated and lost traffic. We reconstruct the old URL inventory and build the map that should have existed.

  • ✓Recovers what is recoverable
  • ✓Fixed scope
  • ✓Honest about what is not

Migration teardown

Free, written, 48 hours. What moves cleanly, what does not, and the realistic size of the job. Yours to take to another agency.

  • ✓No cost
  • ✓Based on a real crawl
  • ✓Yours to keep

No figures on this site, in any currency. A migration price is driven by URL count and how unusual your product structures are, and both are knowable only from the crawl — which is free, and which you keep regardless of who does the work.

FAQ

Straight answers.

How do Shopify migration services UK merchants need differ from American ones?
Barely at all in engineering terms, which is why this page serves both. The differences are presentational and set in configuration: tax-inclusive pricing for British shoppers against tax-exclusive for American ones, different delivery and returns conventions, and locally recognised payment methods. What is identical is the part that actually carries risk — the redirect map, the catalogue reconciliation and the order history decision.
Will we lose our search rankings?
Some short-term movement is normal while search engines re-crawl and re-associate the new URLs, and that settles. What is not normal, and not recoverable, is losing rankings because old URLs return 404s. That is the difference between a migration done properly and one done fast, and it is entirely within your control at quoting time — ask for the redirect map to be named as a deliverable with a sign-off, from us or anyone else.
Can you migrate from WooCommerce, Magento or a custom build?
Those three are the common origins and each has a characteristic difficulty. WooCommerce migrations usually stumble on variable products and years of plugin-generated URLs. Magento tends to carry complex B2B and tiered pricing that Shopify models differently below Plus. Custom builds are the least predictable and the most likely to hold data with nowhere obvious to go. The teardown tells you which of those you are facing before you commit.
What happens to our existing customers and their orders?
It is a decision rather than a default, and it should be made deliberately. Customer records move straightforwardly, though passwords cannot — everyone will need to reset, and planning the email that tells them so is part of the job. Order history can move or be archived somewhere your support team can still search. Subscriptions are the genuinely hard case and need their own conversation early, because the billing relationship has to be re-established rather than copied.
How long does a migration take?
Driven by catalogue size and structural complexity rather than by design. A few hundred conventional products is weeks; several thousand with heavy variation, B2B pricing or subscriptions runs considerably longer. The crawl gives a real number before you commit, and we would rather give you a longer honest figure than a shorter one that becomes a change request in week five.
We already migrated and our traffic collapsed. Can it be fixed?
Partly, and it is worth acting quickly. The old URL inventory can usually be reconstructed from archived crawls, Search Console's historical data and inbound links, and a redirect map built retrospectively. What comes back depends on how long the 404s have been served — search engines eventually drop URLs entirely. We will tell you honestly what is recoverable rather than selling you a full recovery.

Have us crawl your store first.

A free written migration teardown inside 48 hours, built from a real crawl: what moves cleanly, what does not, and how large the job actually is.

Get my free migration teardownSee the Shopify page

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