BHL: 177,000+ products moved from Magento 2 to Shopify

1. Large catalogue migration

We moved the full catalogue into Shopify and built a structure customers can navigate.

• More than 177,000 active products live at launch
• 1,658 collections: 239 categories, 1,389 brand collections and 8 express departments
• A delivery lead time on every product, used by the order integration
• Shipping rates matched to the old store, and order numbers continuing the existing sequence

2. Product data cleaning

Supplier data is rarely shop-ready. We cleaned it in controlled batches, testing each change on a single product before rolling it out.

• 42,336 product titles rewritten in BHL's preferred style
• 1,993 new descriptions for products whose text was empty, thin or generic
• 933 missing product images recovered and small images sharpened
• Real category imagery across 1,552 of 1,553 categories

3. SEO preservation

Rankings are the asset most often lost in a migration, so we treated them as a launch blocker.

• Around 98,000 legacy Magento URLs mapped to their new Shopify pages with 301 redirects
• Extra redirects for withdrawn products and for URLs found in Search Console data
• A Search Console baseline of the top pages taken before launch
• Product and breadcrumb structured data in the theme; robots.txt, sitemap and noindex checked live on launch day

4. Automated supplier price and stock sync

We replaced the legacy update process with an automated daily sync built for this store.

• Supplier files collected every morning, prices updated at 06:00 and stock at 06:30, with a retry and a watchdog check
• Any price move over 25% held for a person to approve
• The run stops itself if a move exceeds 100% or if more than 5% of prices would change in one day
• Fields staff lock by hand are never overwritten

5. Sage integration via Zynk

Shopify orders pass into Sage through Zynk, so the accounts team keeps working the way it always has. The connector was switched over on launch morning and orders were reaching Sage the same day. A written manual fallback was prepared in case the connector ever paused.

6. Klaviyo email automation

Ten automated flows went live with the new store: welcome, welcome offer, browse recovery, basket recovery, checkout recovery, post-purchase, win-back, VIP, back-in-stock and a boiler interest flow. The existing subscriber list is being warmed up in batches of around 2,000 to protect sender reputation. More on our approach to Klaviyo email marketing.

7. Customers and consent

7,405 customer accounts active in the last five years were migrated. Marketing consent was carried over only where it had been given, and no passwords were moved: customers now sign in with a one-time code sent to their email, as BHL explains in its welcome guide to the new website. A UK and EEA cookie banner and an updated privacy policy went live with the store.

Launch day: a rehearsed DNS cut-over

The switch ran to a minute-by-minute runbook with a go/no-go call and a rollback rule. Magento checkout was paused briefly for the final order and customer extract, the domain was pointed at Shopify, and the DNS check passed at 08:39. HTTPS was live, email records were untouched and no rollback was needed.