E-Commerce Migration — Legacy Stack to Shopify
A migration case study focused on lowering infrastructure cost, protecting search visibility, and moving a live commerce operation without downtime.
Back to projects- 60%annual infrastructure saving
- $12kyearly cost reduction
- 0downtime during cutover
A costly platform with fragile operational workflows
The legacy commerce stack was expensive to host and hard to maintain. Infrastructure, deployment, and support overhead were pulling attention away from product improvement.
The core architectural risk was migration complexity: product data, URLs, checkout behaviour, and SEO signals all had to survive the move without interrupting live customers.
A migration plan built around stable contracts
I separated the migration into data, routing, storefront, and launch workstreams. Each workstream had clear validation checkpoints so the project was not coupled to one risky final release.
Product, collection, customer-facing URL, and redirect mapping were treated as explicit contracts. That made the Shopify build easier to test and reduced ambiguity during stakeholder review.
Zero-downtime launch with SEO continuity
The cutover used a staged Shopify setup with pre-launch data validation, storefront QA, payment checks, DNS readiness, and post-launch monitoring.
Legacy URLs were preserved through 301 redirects so returning customers and search engines landed on the right Shopify pages after launch.
Project outcomes
Reduced annual infrastructure cost from $20,000 to $8,000.
Moved the business onto a managed commerce platform with lower operational maintenance.
Protected search visibility with mapped redirects and URL-preservation planning.