This client had two websites that needed to be migrated from a dated custom platform over to Shopify. We had 6 people split into 3 teams working on these two websites It was perhaps one of the most challenging migrations we have done in a long while. The client sells non-slip flooring solutions such as slip-resistant mats for schools, gyms, universities car showrooms etc. They focused mainly B2B but were also expanding out their B2C offering. They have been going strong for several years but now needed to move over to a more robust platform that offers them longevity and grows as the business grows.

As the client had been going strong for so many years they built up a wealth of valuable data which their business depended on. One of these data points was their Google transaction ID’s. Google transaction ID’s are identification markers that you get when you run any form of Google ad. Each product on their website (and there were well over 4000 products on each site with variations) has these identification markers which gather data on each individual product. This data is essential in creating effective and profitable marketing campaigns. When migrating a website from one platform over to Shopify it is absolutely critical that these transaction ID’s get migrated over as well. If they are not then you effectively reset the ads to zero and all that valuable data which was collected over a period of years is lost. This could cost a business hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost revenue. No pressure then.

Normally a product SKU is the transaction ID, but this was not the case with the client’s websites as they had a set of random characters at the end of the SKU which were the transaction ID. So, we had to apply an extensive amount of custom coding and extract the day and then match it all up to each product and each product variant. The team have never been so deep in spreadsheets before.

Once this was in hand we had to make sure all the products and the product variations were migrated accurately. This involved a lot of quality control on our end. If we missed even product or product variation not only will the product be affected but it could also impact the transaction ID data migration.

Just to make it a little bit more challenging the old custom websites had no data export feature which meant we had to build a tool to do the job of migrating this data. Fun times.

We then set about migrating all customer data over and also applied additional coding so that customers can calculate the length in meters.

With a project as technical and complicated as this, there were bound to be a few glitches. Luckily we only had one. But a big one. When migrating the data the VAT did not transition over to the new Shopify website, which then meant that the Google feed kept rejecting the products as it showed a mismatch of prices. So we had then to implement a new system to apply the VAT and then match the prices up with the Google feed.

The last thing we had to do was then integrate Worldpay into the new Shopify websites. Once all the tasks were completed we then went through a detailed quality check to make sure everything was working before we completed the website migration. After this was done the team were treated to a well-deserved long weekend off.