Shape
A merchant sitting on a legacy storefront with a catalogue in the hundreds-of-thousands range, weighing a re-platform to Shopify Plus. The team had an internal sense of “we need to migrate” but no written-down view of what that actually meant for cost, downtime, and data fidelity.
What the engagement looked at
- Source-system audit at a high level — what entities exist (products, variants, media, customer history, orders, redirects), what shape they’re in, and which ones the brief had already named vs. which ones were assumed.
- Mapping decisions — for each major entity, what the trade-off would be between the obvious migration path and the more careful one. Product vs metaobject. Variant vs related product. Where custom fields belong.
- Cutover strategy — what “no frozen catalogue” actually requires architecturally, what a realistic downtime budget looks like, what the rollback criteria should be.
- Reconciliation approach — how the team (or their agency) should think about verifying data fidelity end-to-end before declaring the migration done.
What was handed over
A written advisory document covering the platform-fit read, an honest sizing band for the migration, and the spine of what the merchant’s scope document should ask the agency to commit to. Build (if it happened) was the merchant’s chosen delivery partner.