Platform, migration and roadmap planning
The decisions a Shopify strategy consultant spends most time on, and how we approach each one.
Choosing the right Shopify plan
Shopify’s plans differ in fees, reporting, staff accounts and, at the top end, in how much of the store you can change. Shopify Plus adds checkout extensibility, B2B selling, expansion stores and other features aimed at larger or more complex operations, at a higher monthly cost.
The question we ask is not whether Plus is better, but which specific Plus features you would actually use in the next year and what each is worth to the business. If the honest list is short, staying on your current plan and revisiting later is a perfectly good outcome. If you are moving toward wholesale, several regions with different pricing or a heavily customized checkout, the case usually becomes much clearer.
Planning a migration to Shopify
A migration is mostly a data and risk exercise, with design on top. We start with an inventory: products and variants, customers, order history, gift cards, reviews, blog content, and the URLs that currently earn search traffic or backlinks. Each item gets a decision: move it, transform it, archive it or leave it behind. Customer passwords generally cannot be carried across platforms, so the plan also covers how customers will be invited to reactivate their accounts.
Redirects, tracking and integrations get their own workstreams, because they are where migrations usually go wrong. Every old URL that matters maps to a new one, analytics and ad pixels are rebuilt and checked before launch, and connections to ERP, 3PL or email tools are tested with real orders. We have moved stores to Shopify from Magento, for Salus Saunas, and from WooCommerce, for Love by Lilly; in both, data, design and launch had to be planned as one project.
Rationalizing the app stack
Apps pile up quietly. Each one solved a problem when it was installed, but over time stores end up with two review apps, three popup tools, a bundling app nobody configured and snippets left behind by apps that were removed long ago. The cost shows up in the monthly bill, in page speed and in odd conflicts between apps that touch the same part of a page.
Our review lists every app with what it does, what it costs, which pages it loads on and who on the team relies on it. Each one then gets a recommendation: keep it, replace it with a native feature such as Search & Discovery, metafields or Shopify Flow, merge it with another app, or remove it. Removals are planned carefully, including cleaning up leftover theme code and checking that nothing downstream, such as a report or an email flow, depended on the app.
Turning advice into a roadmap
A list of recommendations is not a plan until it has an order. We group work into phases, starting with anything that protects revenue or removes risk, such as broken tracking or a fragile integration, then the items that grow revenue, then the improvements that make your team’s daily work easier. Dependencies decide much of the order: catalog structure usually needs settling before new filtering, and tracking before any conversion work.
Each phase has a rough effort range, the skills it needs and a clear description of done. That lets you budget, brief vendors and say no to requests that do not fit the current phase. We revisit the roadmap at agreed points, because a plan written before results come in should change once they do.
Evaluating agencies and freelancers
Whether or not we build the work, you may need to choose a vendor. When we review a proposal, we look at whether the scope is specific enough to check finished work against, what it assumes about your data and integrations, who owns the code and accounts afterward, how changes are priced and what happens after launch. A low quote is not a problem in itself, but it should be clear what it leaves out.
- Is every deliverable described clearly enough to accept or reject?
- Are assumptions about data, apps and integrations written down?
- Who owns the theme code, app accounts and domains afterward?
- How are changes to scope agreed and priced?
- What support is included after launch, and for how long?
