Gifts & Occasions Store: From BigCommerce to Shopify

Our client is a Melbourne-based online gift store serving customers across Australia. Their catalog centers on festival gifts for occasions such as Raksha Bandhan, Diwali, and Bhai Dooj, alongside gift hampers, personalized gifts, cakes, flowers, and silver keepsakes. 

With a large customer base, the client decided to migrate to Shopify to support the next stage of their eCommerce growth. However, festival seasons are the busiest periods for a gift business, so the move had to happen without interrupting sales or losing any customer data.

For this reason, the client needed a migration partner that could move a large customer and order history accurately, keep new data in sync until launch, and handle sensitive balance data. After reviewing their options, they chose LitExtension for our experience with BigCommerce to Shopify migration projects and our responsive, hands-on team.

The client came to us with a clear set of requirements for their BigCommerce to Shopify migration:

• Migrate all essential store data, including products, customers, orders, collections, and blog posts, from BigCommerce to Shopify.
• Transfer all new customers and orders created during Shopify store development before the new site went live, without losing any records.
• Complete a Gift Card Migration and Store Credit Migration that preserves every customer’s remaining balance.

The first challenge was data synchronization. While the new Shopify store was being built, the BigCommerce store kept receiving new customers and orders. Therefore, right before launch, the client urgently needed this latest data moved to Shopify so that no recent purchases or customer accounts were left behind.

The second challenge was the difference in how each platform stores gift balances. On BigCommerce, gift certificates keep their unused balance for future orders, while store credit is a single amount saved in each customer’s account. Shopify, on the other hand, handles gift cards as a separate feature redeemed through Shopify checkout. Its store credit is issued to customer profiles and only works with customer accounts or Shop Pay, not legacy customer accounts. As a result, the Gift Card Migration and Store Credit Migration required careful mapping to preserve every remaining balance.

To begin, our team migrated the client’s core data, including products, customers, orders, collections, and blog posts, from BigCommerce to Shopify. We mapped each data type to Shopify’s structure so the new store kept the same catalog organization and full order history.

Next, we addressed the Gift Card Migration and Store Credit Migration. Our migration experts reviewed how gift certificates and customer store credits were stored in BigCommerce, then applied a tailored migration approach to resolve the platform compatibility gaps. As a result, gift card data and customer store credit balances were transferred to Shopify, so shoppers could keep using the value they already held.

Then, as launch day approached, the client requested an urgent Delta Migration to capture the newest customers and orders. We prioritized the request immediately and ran the transfer using our Recent Data Migration service, which moves only the data added after the initial migration while the source store stays active. Our team confirmed successful completion approximately 51 minutes after receiving the request, ensuring the latest data was in place before the Shopify store went live.

Finally, we performed a full QA check across products, customers, orders, collections, blog posts, and balance data. With everything verified, the client launched their new Shopify store with complete, up-to-date data and no disruption to business continuity.