A platform move is mostly not about the platform. Products, customers, order history and years of search visibility have to arrive intact on the other side, and the people buying from the store should barely notice. This is how we approach a move from Lightspeed to Shopify, and what we check at each stage.
Both platforms run serious stores. The reasons to move are usually specific: an integration, a way of working, a plan for the next few years. Be clear about yours first, because it decides what the new store has to do on its first day.
Start with an inventory
Before anything moves, write down what exists:
- Products, variants and options, including the ones that are hidden or out of stock.
- Categories and filters, and how they will map to Shopify collections.
- Customers, with their marketing consent recorded.
- Orders, gift cards, discount codes and reviews.
- Content pages, blog posts and their images.
- Every app and every connection with other systems: accounting, stock, shipping and payments.
The last group is often where most of the work is. Each connection needs an answer on Shopify: an existing app, an integration built for you, or a decision to stop using it. We wrote separately about connecting a store to an ERP system.
Exports need cleaning
Exported data rarely goes straight in. Variants are often structured differently, the same option is written three ways, and descriptions carry old formatting with them. We map every field to its place in Shopify, clean the data, and import a test set before importing everything.
Two things catch people out. Passwords don't move between platforms: depending on how customer accounts are set up in Shopify, customers sign in with a one-time code or set a new password, so tell them before they try. And Shopify's admin doesn't import past orders from a spreadsheet. Order history comes in through the API or a migration app, so decide how much of it you actually need.
Keep every address working
This is where search visibility is kept or lost. Shopify uses fixed address patterns for products, collections and pages, so most of your URLs will change. Every old address that matters needs a redirect to its closest new equivalent: a product to the same product, a category to its collection, not everything to the homepage. We build the list from the old sitemap, the pages that bring in visitors and the pages other sites link to, and test it before launch.
Before go-live
- A test order with every payment method and every shipping option.
- Taxes, invoices and order emails checked for every country you sell to.
- Every redirect tested against the full list.
- Integrations running on real data, not only on test data.
- Tracking and cookie consent in place before the first visitor arrives.
- A new sitemap ready to submit in Google Search Console.
After go-live
Watch the first days closely: crawl errors in Search Console, missing pages the redirect list didn't cover, and orders that don't reach the systems behind the store. Fix those first. Improvements come after. Keep a full export of the old store, too; sooner or later someone will need to look something up.
A move like this is part of how we approach web development: the inventory, the data, the redirects and the go-live checks are planned as one project, not left for the last week.