Wine Retail Migration & Store Consolidation

Our client is a wine retailer that sells a curated range of wines online and shares wine stories and guides through its blog. Many of their customers are loyal regulars who come back for new releases.

Over the years, the business had come to run two separate Shopify stores. Managing both meant duplicated work and a split view of each customer, so the client decided on a Shopify store merge. However, the customer data and order history they had built up had to stay complete and connected.

Because both stores held custom fields and structured content, a simple store copy would have left important data behind. For this reason, the client brought in LitExtension, drawing on our Shopify to Shopify migration experience and flexible approach to custom data.

The work ran in two phases, with the following requirements:

• Consolidate data from two Shopify stores into one target store.
• Preserve custom customer metafields alongside customer profiles and order history.
• Link historical orders to target products using product names and option values.
• For the later transfer to a new Shopify store, move the full catalog and blog content together with all custom metafields.
• Handle product metafields containing rich text and metaobject references.

Custom customer data was the first concern. Alongside the standard details, both source stores used customer metafields to hold extra information. Every one of these fields had to stay attached to the correct profile, even as records from two stores came together.

Historical orders posed a separate problem. When data moves between Shopify stores, products receive new IDs in the target store. This meant historical order items could not simply point to their original products and had to be matched with products already on the target store.

The later transfer added a third layer. Some product metafields used rich text, which Shopify stores as structured JSON. Others referenced metaobjects, which must already exist in the target store before any reference can point to them. Consequently, simply copying plain text values would not have worked for either structure.

Our work began with a customized customer metafield migration, which carried the custom fields over with each customer profile. We then supplied sample customer records for the client to review.

Order-to-product matching followed. Based on the criteria the client had approved, namely product names and option values, our team matched each historical order item to its product on the target store. Afterward, we shared sample orders so the client could verify the matches. Once everything was confirmed, we completed the order and customer metafield migration.

Later, when the client moved on to a new Shopify store, we reviewed the updated scope for this second transfer. During that review, our team identified the product metafields built with rich text and metaobjects, and proposed a focused customization of around three hours to transfer them correctly. The client approved the proposal and asked us to prioritize products.

With the go-ahead, our team completed the transfer to the new store, carrying over the rich text and metaobject-based metafields in their correct structure. Today, the client runs one consolidated Shopify store in which customer data and order history remain fully connected.