BigCommerce to Shopify Migration

For this project, we helped a 75+ year-old brand dedicated to worker safety. They offer a comprehensive range of products designed to protect workers across various industries. You may find everything from hard hats and safety glasses to gloves, footwear, and fall protection equipment.

While their BigCommerce store had served them well, they wanted to maximize their online visibility to reach a wider audience via SEO features. They were particularly drawn to Shopify’s intuitive interface for managing SEO. Compared to BigCommerce, it is much easier for them to create 301 redirects when the page or product URLs changed.

In addition to migrating standard eCommerce data (products, customers, orders, etc.), our client had the following specific requirements:

• PDF data migration: They requested that product information currently stored in PDF files be transferred and integrated into their Shopify store.
• Product description video transfer: They wanted to move videos embedded in their product descriptions on BigCommerce to Shopify’s media library.
• YouTube video link migration: They needed to transfer YouTube video links associated with products from BigCommerce to their corresponding product pages on Shopify.

One specific challenge we encountered during this migration involved the handling of product information stored as PDF files. When transferring data from BigCommerce to Shopify, the link to these PDF files would be removed. It was important to inform the client about this issue in advance and to find a way to keep this valuable information accessible on their new website.

To successfully migrate the client’s data and fulfill their unique requirements, we implemented the following solutions:

• PDF data integration: Shopify provides specific commands to handle PDF files. Thus, our team only had to extract the PDF links from BigCommerce and integrate them into the corresponding Shopify queries. For the variations in PDF file sizes, we added some custom code to ensure an efficient transfer.
• Product description video transfer: We extracted the video links from the BigCommerce product descriptions. Then, Shopify automatically handled the transfer of these videos into their media library.
• YouTube video link correction: BigCommerce stores YouTube video links in a different query format, which can result in broken links on Shopify. To address this, we retrieved the links from BigCommerce using BigCommerce API. Our team then identified the specific keywords within the faulty links and corrected them. This ensured that the YouTube videos would function properly on the Shopify product pages.