Sunshop to Shopify Migration

Our client is a U.S.-based online retailer offering a huge variety of sequins, confetti, and specialty craft supplies. Their store is a go-to destination for crafters, designers, and DIY enthusiasts looking for unique, high-quality materials. Over the years, they’ve built a solid customer base by focusing on variety, quality, and reliable service.

However, their old platform, Sunshop, started to limit what they could do online. It lacked the modern design flexibility needed to properly showcase such a large and colorful product catalog. Running promotions, improving the checkout experience, and integrating with marketing tools were also more complicated than they should have been.

To create a smoother shopping experience and open up more growth opportunities, they decided to move to Shopify. With its modern storefront options, easy integrations, and better user experience, Shopify is the ideal platform to take their online store to the next level.

When searching for a migration partner, LitExtension stood out as a Shopify official partner, which reassured them that we understood the platform deeply and could handle all technical aspects correctly. They also came across many positive reviews and success stories from other merchants who had migrated with us. With this trust, they chose LitExtension to take care of the entire process.

The client needed to migrate their store data from Sunshop to Shopify, including customers, orders, and products. However, they requested not to migrate general information pages such as FAQs, shipping information, contact details, and sequin matching guides, as these pages had already been created and finalized on their new Shopify store.

Another key requirement was to combine the long and short product descriptions from Sunshop into a single, well-organized description on Shopify. This was necessary because Shopify only provides one description field for each product, while Sunshop separates them into two.

One of the main challenges in this migration was related to product images. When an image is uploaded to Sunshop, the system automatically creates three versions in different sizes. The thumbnail version is resized down to just 150 pixels, which looks fine on Sunshop but appears low-quality and blurry when displayed on Shopify product pages.

To ensure high-quality images on the new Shopify store, our Shopify migration experts carefully reviewed all three image sizes generated by Sunshop. We tested how each size would display on Shopify product pages to find the best fit. After comparing the results, we chose to migrate only the large-size images, as they provided the best balance between quality and loading speed, avoiding the low-resolution thumbnails that would look blurry on the new store.

After that, we proceeded with our All-in-One Migration Service to fulfill all the client’s requirements, including migrating customers, orders, products, and combining the long and short descriptions into a single product description on Shopify. Once the migration was complete, we ran the “Create 301 Redirects on Target Store” additional option to redirect all old Sunshop URLs to their correct pages on Shopify. This feature is included for free with the All-in-One Migration Service package.