Bringing Party Supplies Retail to Shopify

Our client is an online party supplies retailer, offering everything shoppers need for a celebration, from party bags and fillers to tableware and decorations. Many of their customers are busy parents and event planners who shop close to the party date.

As the business grew, hosting and plugin maintenance on WooCommerce took more and more time away from selling. The client therefore decided to move to Shopify, a fully hosted platform that could handle seasonal traffic peaks with far less upkeep.

However, their product pages and blog content had built up search rankings over the years, so existing URLs had to keep working after launch.

Since a separate website team was handling the design and launch of the new Shopify store, the client wanted a migration partner who could work smoothly alongside them. Our track record with WooCommerce to Shopify projects, plus our willingness to adapt to that team’s workflow, made LitExtension the right fit.

Here is what the client needed from the project:

• Migrate the core store data from WooCommerce to Shopify, along with blog posts and CMS pages.
• Provide 301 redirect support to protect existing links and search rankings after launch.
• Deliver a spreadsheet of source URLs, organized by categories, products, and blog posts.

Redirects were the trickiest part of this project, mainly because of timing. In particular, the website team wanted to configure redirects themselves closer to the Shopify launch. As a result, our existing redirect setup needed adjusting, and the team also needed a clear list of old URLs to work from.

On top of that, the two platforms build their URLs in different ways. A WooCommerce product usually lives under /product/, and a category under /product-category/. Once moved to Shopify, the same pages sit under /products/ and /collections/, and blog posts shift to /blogs/. Without an organized list, matching every old URL to its new destination would have been slow and error-prone.

We started with the core migration, moving all store data and website content from WooCommerce to Shopify. Before the Full Migration, we ran a Demo Migration and compared the source and target data, so the client could confirm the results early.

With the data in place, we adjusted the existing redirect setup to fit the website team’s launch plan. This gave the team room to configure the final redirects themselves at the right time before going live.

Alongside this, we prepared a customized URL handover in the form of a source URL spreadsheet, grouped into categories/collections, products, and blog posts. Using this list, the website team could match each existing URL with its new destination page and then prepare the redirects on Shopify.

To wrap up, we ran source-to-target checks across all migrated data. With the data verified and the URL list in hand, the client and their website team could move toward launch with confidence.