A migration is the riskiest project most growing brands ever take on. You’re moving the thing that makes all your money while it’s still making money.
When it goes well, nobody notices. Customers keep ordering, subscribers keep getting their boxes, and search traffic holds. When it goes badly, you find out a week later from a dip in revenue, a pile of support tickets and pages that used to rank now showing errors.
I’m Carson Cobb. I run Shopify stores for growing DTC brands on monthly retainers. Over 6+ years and 50+ Shopify stores, I’ve rebuilt themes and moved stores onto Shopify, and the projects that go smoothly all have one thing in common: the boring details were planned before launch day.
Moving to Shopify from another platform
If you’re moving from another platform, the work is mostly about mapping. Every product, variant, collection, customer, order history and page on the old store needs a home on the new one.
I start with an audit of what you have, what’s worth keeping, and what’s only there because nobody cleaned it up. Then I plan the new structure in Shopify: products and variants, collections, metafields and metaobjects for structured content, and the apps you actually need.
This is also a chance to fix things. Product data that lived in random text blocks can move into structured fields. Apps you were paying for out of habit can stay behind.
Rebuilding your Shopify theme
Sometimes you’re already on Shopify and the theme is the problem. Years of edits, apps that left code behind, sections nobody can change without a developer.
Before I recommend a rebuild, I check whether fixes would do the job. Often the biggest gains come from the product page, the cart and mobile speed, which I cover on my conversion optimization page. When a rebuild is the right call, I build the new theme on a copy, move content over, and test every template on real phones before anything goes live.
Rebuilt pages across my work average a 2.1x conversion lift, so a rebuild done well isn’t just a cleanup. It’s a chance to raise revenue.
Subscription contract migration with Recharge or Skio
This is the part that scares founders most, and it should get the most care.
Subscribers have active contracts: what they get, how often, at what price, and when the next charge runs. Moving those between platforms, or between subscription apps, means every one of those details has to come across correctly. A mistake here means missed charges, double charges or customers getting the wrong product.
Here’s how I handle it:
- Map every subscription product, variant and selling plan from the old setup to the new one.
- Plan the cutover around your billing calendar, so you aren’t moving contracts on your busiest charge day.
- Work with the subscription app’s migration team where they offer one.
- Test real subscriptions on the new setup before go live.
- Update the customer portal, the subscriber emails in Klaviyo and the product page widget so everything matches.
- Watch the first full billing cycle closely and fix anything odd right away.
If you’re also deciding which app to move to, my Recharge vs Skio vs Loop comparison covers how I’d choose. My Shopify subscriptions page covers the setup after the move.
Keeping your product reviews
Reviews are some of the most valuable content on your store. Losing them, or attaching them to the wrong product, hurts conversion right away.
I export reviews from the old system, match each one to the right product and variant on the new store, and confirm they display before launch. If your product structure is changing, for example several old products merging into one product with variants, I map that first so reviews land in the right place.
Redirects and SEO safety
Search traffic is usually the thing founders worry about most, and most losses here are preventable.
I build a redirect map for every old URL that matters: products, collections, pages, blog posts and anything with links pointing to it. Shopify lets you import redirects in bulk from a CSV file, which makes large maps manageable. One detail people miss: a Shopify redirect only works from a URL that’s broken, so if the old URL still loads a page, the redirect won’t fire. I check for that.
Beyond redirects, I keep the content that ranks, carry over page titles and descriptions, fix internal links so they point straight to the new URLs, and update the sitemap. After launch I check the most important old URLs one by one and watch for errors.
How I run a launch
Launch day should be uneventful. I aim for that with a simple routine:
- Launch on a quiet day, never in the middle of a promo.
- Run test orders, including subscriptions and discount codes, on the live store.
- Check tracking so the numbers after launch can be trusted.
- Watch orders, errors and support tickets closely for the first week.
How the work is packaged
Store Sprint, $1,500 one time. One week. I audit the current store and build the migration plan: structure, redirects, reviews and subscriptions. If you move to a retainer, the $1,500 is credited toward it.
Operator, $3,000/mo or Head of Ecommerce, $5,500/mo. The migration or rebuild runs as part of the retainer, and I keep running the store after launch so nothing gets dropped in a handoff. Extra work beyond a plan is $125/hr. More on the deeper plan on my fractional head of ecommerce page.
See all plans on the pricing section.
Book a 20 minute intro call
If you’re planning a migration or a rebuild, talk to me before you pick a launch date. Book a 20 minute intro call, tell me where you’re moving from and what you’re worried about, and I’ll tell you what I’d plan for first.