Checklist to Set Up Shopify Store after A Platform Migration

If you have just moved your eCommerce store to Shopify, the data transfer is only half the job. You'll need to set up Shopify store after migration to ensure everything works perfectly before publishing your site to customers. In this guide, we'll walk you through everything that needs attention once migration is done, including:

1. Step 1. Verify your migrated data
2. Step 2. Design your new Shopify store
3. Step 3. Protect your SEO effort
4. Step 4. Switch your domain
5. Step 5. Configure essential Shopify store settings
6. Step 6. Install apps and set up analytics
7. Step 7. Reactivate your customer accounts
8. Step 8. Try placing some orders

Whether you transfer data manually or migrate to Shopify with LitExtension, this will be a valuable checklist to help you set up Shopify store after migration.

What To Do Before You Set Up Shopify Store After Migration

Before diving into the checklist, a few quick preparations will save you rework later.

• Keep the store in password-protected or “under construction” mode: A half-configured store should not be indexed by search engines or seen by customers before setup is complete. Leaving password protection on until you are ready to launch prevents both problems at once.
• Confirm you have admin access to everything you will need: This includes your Shopify admin, your domain registrar or DNS panel, your payment provider's dashboard, and Google Search Console.
• Set realistic expectations on the timeline: A small catalog with minimal customization can be fully set up in a few hours, while a large or highly customized store can take a couple of weeks. Rushing through SEO-critical steps to hit an arbitrary deadline is one of the most common causes of a rocky launch.

With access confirmed and the store safely out of public view, you are ready to set up Shopify store after migration, starting with verifying your migrated data.

Step 1. Check If Your Data Has Been Migrated Correctly

Before you touch design, navigation, or SEO, confirm that everything actually made it over. This is the first real task when you set up Shopify store after migration, and building on top of incomplete or inaccurate data only means redoing that work later, so verification comes before anything else.

Work through your migrated data by type:

• Products and variants. Open your Products page and spot-check variant counts, prices, SKUs, and images against your source store. Pay particular attention to product variants with multiple options (size, color) since these are the most common source of migration discrepancies.

• Collections and tags. Confirm your collections carry over with the correct products assigned, and that tags used for filtering or automation rules are intact.
• Customers. Check that customer records imported with the right names, emails, and order history attached.
• Orders. Verify historical order data is present and readable, even if older orders show as archived rather than active.
• Blog content and pages. Confirm blog posts, static pages, and their images transferred with formatting intact.

If anything looks off in any of these areas, flag and correct it now. Catching a data issue after you have already rebuilt navigation or set up redirects around it means retracing steps you have already finished.

In case you have not migrated yet and want to see how your data will look on Shopify before committing, a free Demo Migration with LitExtension lets you preview the process on a working copy of your store first.

Shopify Migration Made Easy With LitExtension!

LitExtension offers great migration solutions that help you transfer your data from the current eCommerce platform to Shopify accurately, painlessly with utmost security.

FREE DEMO AVAILABLE

Step 2. Design Your Shopify Store

• Page Builder

Sometimes, you may find Shopify templates quite restricting. Then, a page builder could be what you’re looking for. It allows you to create and design different pages for your website that will look exactly the way you want them to. An excellent page builder will also include extra features such as split testing, SEO, analytics, and so on.

The best page builder for you to build a Shopify store currently is PageFly. It ranks #1 on the Shopify app store for page builders, with an overall rating of 4.9 and 1,800+ reviews. You can have a look at our detailed review of PageFly here.

In case you desire to find a team that can walk you through the whole process of setting up the Shopify Store, C2-Digital will be the right choice for you. They are Shopify experts and specialize in Shopify web design, development, and consulting. Moreover, C2 Digital is delighted to offer an exclusive 20% discount for all LitExtension customers when using their service (with the LITEXTENSION code).

Step 3: Switch your domain

After your shopping cart migration is completed, you should switch the domain to your new store.

Here are the three most prevailing situations you might face after completing a migration:

• You have both stores hosted by the same provider, under the same domain. Yet, your target store is in the subdirectory.
• Both of your stores are hosted by the same provider, yet each of them has a different domain name.
• You have source and target stores hosted by different providers, under different domain names.

Please check this document to find the step-by-step instructions to switch domains to your new store in each case.

Step 4: Set up your shipping

It's of great importance to get shipping rates and methods set up correctly before your new store officially goes live. Otherwise, you will have to face undesired situations, for example, asking customers to pay more because you didn’t charge them enough to cover the shipping cost, or, having to refund because you’ve overcharged them.

Then, to start, let’s follow the steps below to set up your shipping:

1. Go to Settings -> Shipping, and add your shipping address to get accurate shipping rates based on your location.

   

2. Create shipping zones so that you can ship to different regions, states, and countries.
3. Configure your shipment dimensions if you're using carrier-calculated shipping rates. Many carriers use volumetric weight (the height, weight, and depth of a package) to calculate shipping rates.
4. Then create shipping rates for the shipping zones that you've created.
5. Plan a shipping strategy that works best for your business.
6. After that, have a look at fulfillment services. You need to decide who is going to ship orders, yourself or someone else.

Step 5: Establish a payment provider

To help customers make a payment easily, you need to set up a payment provider. The payment provider allows you to accept payments via credit card securely. However, Shopify also offers its own payment provider (Shopify Payments) along with a wide range of supported third-party payment providers.

• Shopify payment:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Payment providers.
2. Activate Shopify Payments: If you haven't set up any credit card payment provider on your account: Click on Complete account setup in the Shopify Payments section. If you have already enabled a different credit card payment provider: Click Activate Shopify Payments in the Shopify Payments box and then click Activate Shopify Payments in the dialog. This action will remove any other credit card payment provider from your account.
3. Then, enter the requested information about your store and your banking details, and then click Save.

Note: Shopify Payments is available only to stores in certain countries. See here for the list of supported countries.

• Third-party payment providers

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Payment providers.

   

2. Click Choose a third-party provider in the Third-party providers' section.
3. Then select the provider that you want to use from the list. You can only enable one credit card payment provider at a time. If you already have one, Shopify allows you to change it to another.
4. Enter your account credentials for the provider that you selected.
5. Click Activate.

You should carefully go through the details about Shopify payment methods in the Shopify documents here.

After you’ve finished configuring your payment providers, you need to set up your checkout page so you can process customers’ orders.

Step 6: Try placing some orders

Now, it’s necessary to test if the transactions will work as you expected. Therefore, placing a test order will help you understand your customer’s journey of buying products on your website. Then, you can make some changes to make the journey more accessible and more pleasant.

Here are a few different types of transactions that you can run test orders for:

• Completing a successful and a failed transaction
• Refunding and canceling an order
• Fulfilling or partially fulfilling an order
• Saving a successful order

These are all essential steps you need to take to set up a Shopify store. Make sure you don't miss a thing. After that, you can confidently launch your new store! Let's join our community to get more eCommerce knowledge.