VTEX to Shopify Migration

Our client is a Brazil-based premium tea brand specializing in high-quality loose-leaf teas, blends, and tea accessories. With more than 3,000 products and a strong customer base, eCommerce plays a critical role in their overall business strategy.

While VTEX is a powerful enterprise platform, day-to-day operations on the backend created real friction for their team. Managing a large catalog of products and variants demanded technical setup, configuring promotions required careful logic and often developer involvement, and even small content or variant updates depended on additional configuration. Over time, this slowed the team down and added complexity to routine work.

They wanted a platform that felt lighter, more intuitive, and easier to run independently. Shopify directly addressed each of those pain points: a clean, user-friendly admin replaced the technical-heavy backend, the native promotions and discount system removed the need for custom logic, and a flexible app ecosystem covered specialized needs without requiring custom development. The result was a setup geared toward marketing-driven growth rather than backend maintenance.

Before choosing a migration partner, the client reviewed case studies and customer feedback to ensure proven Shopify migration expertise. As a recognized Shopify migration partner, LitExtension stood out. After a detailed consultation where we clearly explained our migration process and risk control strategy, they felt confident and decided to move forward with us.

To ensure a smooth and complete platform transition, the client outlined the following key requirements:

• Migrate all core data – including products, customers, orders, and related entities – from VTEX to Shopify without data loss.
• Custom migrate additional custom fields from VTEX into Shopify metafields.

One challenge involved product variant images that looked identical on the storefront but were stored under different URLs in the backend. Since Shopify recognizes images by their URLs, this structure risked creating duplicate images after migration.

Another issue concerned disabled product variants. Although they were not selectable on the VTEX storefront, their data still existed in the database, with prices set to 0. Migrating them as-is could impact product accuracy and pricing consistency on Shopify.

To address the client’s requirements and technical complexities, we implemented a combination of our All-in-One Migration Service and Custom Migration Service. This ensured the entire process was fully managed end-to-end while allowing us to apply tailored data logic where standard automation was not sufficient.

For the image structure, our team restructured the media mapping during migration. We consolidated image references at the database level and adjusted the import logic so that Shopify would recognize and display only the correct set of images per product. This prevented duplication and ensured a clean, organized product gallery on the new store.

Regarding the inactive variants, we first aligned with the client on business rules, then applied custom filtering and conditional migration logic. Only valid, sellable variants were transferred with accurate pricing, while unnecessary entries were excluded. This safeguarded catalog accuracy and ensured the Shopify store reflected the client’s true inventory structure from day one.