Shopify has become one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms for brands that want to sell online professionally. Its ease of use means many migrations are treated as a simple move: export products from the old platform and import them into the new one. But an online store isn't just a catalogue. It is a structure that determines how customers navigate, how Google finds you and how the store will connect with the rest of your operations. In this article we go through the decisions worth making before you migrate.
The temptation to copy and paste
Copying the catalogue as-is from one platform to another is the fastest option in the short term and the most expensive in the medium term. The result is usually a new store with a more modern design, but with the same problems as the old one: collections nobody understands, badly grouped variants, incomplete product pages and navigation that has been patched for years.
A migration is an opportunity that doesn't come around often. It is the moment to review how the catalogue is structured, how products are organised and what information each one needs. If that review isn't done at the start, doing it later costs much more, because the store is already live, ranking in search engines and connected to other systems.
Taxonomy: how the catalogue is organised
Before importing a single product you need to decide the taxonomy: what a product is, what a variant is, which collections exist and how they relate to each other. It looks like a technical question, but it directly affects the business. The taxonomy determines navigation, filters, the mobile experience and the URLs Google will index.
A good taxonomy also simplifies day-to-day management. Adding a new model, size or season shouldn't force you to rebuild collections or menus. If every new product means touching half the store, the structure hasn't been thought through. These are the questions worth answering before you migrate:
- Which attributes distinguish a product from a variant?
- Which collections does the customer need to find what they're looking for?
- Which filters are genuinely useful in each category?
- How will SKUs be named so they are unique and stable?
Products and variants: the SEALS case
SEALS is a footwear and rainwear brand based in Prague that sells SEALS Boots and SealFlex Rainwear. Its catalogue had seven core products. At first glance it looks like a simple catalogue, but those seven products translated into around 90 size and colour variants, each with its own SKU, stock and information.
Structuring those variants properly in Shopify was key for three reasons. So customers could quickly find their size and colour. So stock was managed correctly per variant. And so the store was ready to grow with new products without rebuilding the architecture. We approached it as a structure and operations project, not a simple visual build.
Multilingual stores: languages from the start
At SEALS, product information had to be available in 9 languages and website content in 7. A catalogue like that isn't solved by translating at the end of the project. The content structure has to be designed from the start so each language can be maintained without duplicating work: which fields are translated, which are common to all markets and how a product page is updated when a detail changes.
Multilingual stores also have technical implications. You need to decide how each language's URLs are structured and how search engines are told which version belongs to each market, using hreflang tags. A good multilingual structure isn't just a user-experience question: it is the foundation of the store's international SEO.
Technical SEO in a Shopify migration
A badly planned migration can lose, within weeks, organic rankings that took years to build. It is one of the most serious risks of changing platform, and also one of the easiest to avoid if it is tackled from the start.
Technical SEO work in a migration includes mapping every old URL and redirecting it to the new one with 301 redirects, keeping titles and descriptions that already perform, reviewing product structured data and making sure new collections and product pages don't create duplicate content. At SEALS, the technical SEO setup was part of the project scope, not an add-on after launch.
Think about the ERP early
Even if the ERP integration comes in a later phase, the store's architecture must be ready for it from day one. Unique, consistent SKUs, well-defined variants and clean product data are the foundation of any integration between Shopify and a business system such as Odoo.
At SEALS, the store was designed with that future connection to the ERP and to accounting automation in mind, which remain as next phases of the project. It is a decision that saves a lot of work: changing a catalogue's structure once it is connected to stock, invoicing and logistics is far more complex than getting it right before launch.
A buying journey designed for each market
An international store isn't designed for one language only. The buying journey must work equally well on mobile and desktop, and adapt to what customers in each country expect: how prices are shown, what information they need before buying and which payment and shipping methods feel familiar.
At SEALS we worked on navigation, collections and responsive design with that goal: that a customer in any market finds their product, size and colour in a few steps. A good buying journey depends less on visual design than on the clarity of the structure behind it.
Before you migrate your store
A well-planned Shopify migration isn't a web design project, it is an operations project. Before you start, it is worth being clear on a few points: the taxonomy and variant model, the state of your SKUs and product pages, the languages and markets to be covered, the URL and redirect map, and the systems that will connect to the store over the next two years.
If you have an answer for all of that, the migration will be much simpler. If not, the first step is an assessment of your catalogue and your operations. That is exactly what we analyse in a Marketplace Readiness Assessment when a business wants to open new channels or markets without multiplying its complexity.