The Reluctant Guide to Shopify Migrations
The guide we wish we could have read when we started moving large, messy brands to Shopify Plus—mental models instead of checklists, failure modes instead of feature tours.
If you’re a large brand, you’ll find most Shopify migration guides very shallow: they will give you a general understanding of the platform’s capabilities, explain how they map to your current e-commerce platform, and send you on your merry way with a 10-point checklist made by ChatGPT and the uncomfortable feeling of having wasted your time. After all, this is info you can get from the Shopify documentation, without having to sell your soul and opt into three different mailing lists.
The real complexity of a large-scale Shopify migration lies in what we affectionately call “the messy middle”—the space between what you know after doing your homework but before having on-the-ground experience: the places where the best practices stop working, and you have to start improvising; the uncomfortable human dynamics you’ll have to deal with as you wrestle with an ever-expanding migration scope; the gap between what a vendor promises in their marketing material and what they deliver once push comes to shove… This stuff is much more likely to kill your migration than setting the wrong TTL on your DNS records, and yet no Shopify agency has taken the time (or has had the courage) to talk about it.
That is, no Shopify agency until now.
The Reluctant Guide to Shopify Migrations is our humble attempt at helping you bridge that gap. Rather than unleashing our marketing team to convince you that Shopify is the be-all-end-all or that your migration will be flawless if only you give us your money, we’ve decided to take a different approach: we’ve interviewed our strategists, designers, and engineers and asked them for the brutal, honest truth about what it takes to migrate large, complex, messy brands to Shopify.
Our original idea was to turn these interviews into a series of blog posts, but eventually we realized we had enough material to write an actual book—the very one you’re reading.
As you start scrolling through these pages, you’ll notice it is unlike any other migration guide you’ve ever read. Whereas other guides give you checklists to follow, we give you mental models to adopt. Whereas other guides give you feature walkthroughs, we give you failure modes. And whereas other guides go straight to the point and give you quick answers, we often meander—but never more than necessary—and help you come up with the right questions.
The Reluctant Guide is a labor of love. It’s the guide we wish we could have read when we started out on our Shopify journey, working with eight- and nine-figure brands as they adopted and scaled on the platform, taking us along for the ride. It’s messy, opinionated, and pragmatic, just like a good Shopify migration. And just like a good Shopify migration, once you’re on the other side, you’ll be much better off—as a person, as a team, and as a brand.
To paraphrase a famous saying, there are many guides out there, but this one is yours—so we hope you’ll dog-ear the pages, scribble on them frantically, and come back often.
But above all, we hope you’ll find it useful.