I moved 2 shops from Wix to Shopify on 16 October, a few hours apart. One is a UK natural-health shop selling herbal teas and supplements. The other is a supplements brand in the US. Both took orders on the new store on the first day.
The new design is the part you see on launch day. Whether the move worked depends on what came across underneath it.
What came across
The UK shop brought 96 products and 33,456 customer records with it, including every one of the 33,329 people who’d signed up to hear from it. 674 of those customers had gone missing in an earlier import, and I only found them by comparing a full export against what had actually arrived.
The stock was the bigger surprise. When I checked Wix’s figures against the warehouse that ships the orders, 75 of 79 products didn’t match, and 7 showed as sold out while the warehouse had them on the shelf. So the new store doesn’t start from Wix’s numbers. It starts from the warehouse’s.
The US brand brought 32 products, 70 reviews and 3,226 customer records, and it had 73 reviews by the end of its first day. Wix said some of those customers had subscribed when they never had, so I set every record to not subscribed and switched back on only the 794 who’d actually said yes.
I didn’t bring its old orders across, and that was on purpose. Its shipping software picks up new orders from the store, and the owner didn’t want it flooded with 10,000 old ones.
What Google already knew
Every page on your old site has an address Google has learned, and some of those addresses bring in customers. The UK shop’s own name brought it 4,403 clicks from Google in the 90 days before the move. If the address those clicks land on disappears, the clicks go with it.
So I gave every old address a new home before the switch: 136 on the UK shop and 71 on the US one. Since launch, I’ve re-tested every one of them each morning against the live store. On Sunday’s check the US store had 0 broken, and the UK store had 1, a single product page.
Shopify had one surprise of its own. It keeps the address /shop for itself, so a redirect from an old /shop page never fires. On the US store, the owner is building that fix into the theme instead.
The thing I hadn’t checked
The day after launch, the UK shop’s browser tab showed a blank page where its logo should have been. It had no favicon, the little icon on the tab. Nothing was broken, but it looked unfinished, and a customer notices that without knowing what they’ve noticed.
I fixed it that day with the shop’s own mark. Then I added the check to all 53 sites I look after, and it found 1 more.
If your shop is moving
Before anybody moves your shop, ask them 4 things. How will you prove every customer came across? Whose stock figures will the new store start from? Where does every old address go, and who checks it after launch? And who’s watching the store in the week after?
If the answer to the last one is “let us know if anything looks wrong”, then you’re the one doing the watching. I wrote up the rest of what a move involves in migrating from Wix to Shopify, and the search side in website migration SEO.
If I’ve done it right, the customers of both shops noticed one thing on 16 October, and it was the new store.
PS. In my last letter I said I’d know in a fortnight whether one changed link had told Google which of my pages answers “website design telford”. It hasn’t: Google’s showing my homepage for that search less than it did, not more.
