Why You're Holding This

I walked past a Borders that closed in 2011 and saw a book in the window. It was a Shopify migration guide. Hardcover, dust-jacketed, embossed title—The Enterprise Architect’s Complete Roadmap to Salesforce-to-Shopify Replatforming, or some such. I knew it wasn’t there. The store wasn’t there either. The whole strip mall had been a Tesla dealership for years, and the dealership was now a Sweetgreen. The book was in my memory, the way certain books are: you’ve never opened them but you can describe the table of contents.

I grabbed the book, then stood and looked at the now-empty window for a long time.

I went home and opened it. Forty-eight pages. A foreword. Six chapters. A 10-point checklist on page 41 that I am fairly sure was written by a chatbot, because three of the points were the same point, and one of them ended mid-sentence. The foreword was warm. The foreword promised that the journey ahead would be challenging but rewarding. The foreword used the word cutting-edge twice.

I put the book down. I went outside.

Reader—and here I want to be specific about which reader, because there are several of you on this page right now—

Project Manager with the Gantt Chart from Hell, you have replanned this thing four times now. You stopped color-coding the dependencies because the colors started lying to you. You have a status update due in the morning, and the date the CEO is expecting is not the date you would like to give them. This book will not give you a date to put in the status update. But this book will tell you why the date keeps moving—and which conversations, if you have them now, might make it stop.

Senior Engineer Reading This Late at Night, your migration is six months in, and you have just discovered that the promos the marketing team asked for cannot be expressed with Shopify’s native discounts. You do not know yet whether to write five custom Functions or rewrite the promo calendar, and you are looking for a book that will tell you. This book will not tell you. But this book will tell you who needs to be in the room when you decide. (The requirement you inherited, you may already suspect, is not the requirement you have. We’ll get there.)

E-Commerce Director Who Skipped Lunch, you have seventeen tabs open and a list of landing pages that you may or may not want to migrate and a search & merchandising vendor whose demo looks nothing like the search & merchandising you actually got. We see you. It is not supposed to be this hard. It is still this, in this day and age, this hard. This book will not reconcile the demo with what you got. But this book will tell you what the vendor was hiding, and how to have that conversation before it costs you six months.

You opened this book, presumably, because you are about to migrate a large brand to Shopify Plus, or you are in the middle of one, or you have just finished one and are trying to figure out what to do with the wreckage. In any of those cases, you have likely already read several other books that look very much like the one in the Borders window. They were written by chatbots, mostly. The chatbots were trained on other migration guides. The other migration guides were written by other chatbots. You can see where this ends.

We made this book to break the cycle.

You will find that it does not move in a straight line. You will find that it has characters—Greycott & Co., a brand that does not exist; Owen, their Head of E-Commerce, Andrew, their CFO, and many others. You will find that it tells you about things that didn’t work, and occasionally about things that didn’t work for us, because we have screwed up more times than we’d be comfortable admitting (even though we are, in fact, admitting it in this very book).

You will also find, folded into the back of every chapter the way some people fold dollar bills into birthday cards, an invoice.

It’s for $187,000.

It’s from a long time ago.

I’m not going to explain it just yet.

You’ll have to stick with me if you want to find out.