Pet Supplies Store: Lightspeed to Shopify

Our client is a US-based pet retailer specializing in natural food, treats, and everyday supplies for dogs and cats. With two physical stores and an online shop, the business combines a carefully selected product range with personal advice to help customers care for their pets.

The client chose Shopify to bring online sales and in-store operations together through Shopify and Shopify POS. Moving away from separate Lightspeed Retail and eCom systems would make it easier to manage products, customer records, and inventory in one place. For a business operating across two locations, this meant less work maintaining overlapping catalogs and better visibility into stock at each store.

The client chose LitExtension for our experience in Shopify migrations, supported by our official Shopify Partner status and positive customer reviews. These credentials gave them confidence in trusting our team with a complex migration involving two source systems, an existing Shopify store, and location-specific inventory. Shopify Partners Directory

The client needed to move from Lightspeed Retail and eCom to Shopify and Shopify POS, with several requirements shaping the project:

• Only products meeting the client’s brand criteria should be included, requiring a selective transfer.
• Order history should cover approximately three years, requiring a defined cutoff for older records.
• Product categories and collections needed to carry over to support catalog organization.
• The existing Gift Card product and navigation collections had to remain intact, limiting which Shopify records we could remove during cleanup.

The client’s data was spread across two Lightspeed systems and an existing Shopify store. Some products appeared in both Lightspeed Retail and eCom, and some customers already had Shopify accounts. This created a risk of duplicate records. Products also had different sales settings: some were sold only in-store, and others were published online or kept as drafts.

Keeping inventory accurate was also challenging because the migration involved two stores with separate stock levels, both changing as sales continued through Lightspeed. A one-time inventory transfer could become outdated before the Shopify POS switch. We therefore needed to account for both the location of each item and changes in its available quantity during the transition.

Another issue involved the codes staff used to scan and find products. Lightspeed stored UPC, Custom SKU, and System ID values differently from Shopify, and some online products had no UPC at all. These gaps made it difficult to carry over usable barcodes without matching records across the two Lightspeed systems. An incorrect match could cause staff to scan the wrong item at checkout.

To begin, our team checked overlapping product records across both Lightspeed systems and Shopify to prevent duplicates, then applied the client’s brand filters and sales channel settings. Matching customers by email allowed us to link their records to existing Shopify accounts. The cleanup also covered legacy products and duplicate URL suffixes, keeping the Gift Card product and navigation collections intact.

Next, we paired each Lightspeed location with its Shopify equivalent so stock quantities went to the correct store. After updating quantities using current Lightspeed data, our team planned a final refresh before the POS switch to account for ongoing sales.

With location mapping in place, our focus shifted to product identifiers. UPC values went into Shopify’s Barcode fields, and Custom SKU values went into its SKU fields where applicable. To keep the original identifiers accessible, we created dedicated metafields, or additional Shopify fields, for Lightspeed System ID, UPC, and Custom SKU.

Finally, we addressed missing barcodes by cross-checking eCom products against their Lightspeed Retail records. This allowed us to recover UPC values where reliable matches existed. Any unmatched products went into a separate list for the client to review, avoiding potentially incorrect barcode assignments.