Case study collection
Migrations & Catalogue Data
Work where the hard part of moving to Shopify was the data rather than the design — catalogues too large to correct by hand, media that does not fit in a product record, and source systems that never agreed on a column layout.
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Case studies
A migration is easy to underestimate because the first hundred products always import cleanly. The problems start at the scale where nobody can read the output: a supplier catalogue of roughly twenty-eight thousand items, an audiobook library where every product also carries hours of audio, a configurator catalogue whose pricing logic had to survive the move intact. At that size a migration stops being an upload and becomes a pipeline — something with validation, batching, stable identifiers and a way to isolate the records that failed without invalidating the ones that did not.
The recurring lesson across all three is that the cleanup you skip before the import is the cleanup you do afterwards, by hand, at several times the cost.
The engineering behind this work is Shopify migration services.
Written up
What this work taught us, in detail.
Migration
Shopify variant option normalisation: reconciling multi-supplier option schemas in large catalogue migrations
Architecture
Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy: mapping legacy categories to category metafields
Migration
Shopify migration cutover: running incremental delta syncs on large product catalogues
Architecture
Migrating unstructured product attributes into typed metafield definitions
Architecture
Large catalogue migrations break on options, not files
Architecture
A sample is a product nobody should find
Engineering
Plus doesn’t move a big catalogue faster. It fixes it faster
Architecture
Your source system sent you a string, not an author
Migration
Shopify protects renames, not deletions
Migration
The 15 MB limit is not your problem
Your store next
Most engagements start with the same question.
What is actually slowing this store down, and is it worth fixing? Send us the URL and we will answer it honestly.