eCommerce Migration

RoR to Shopify Migration – Ninety Percent

eCommerce Migration Project designed for performance, SEO preservation, and scalability.

Project Overview

This project involved the full-scale migration of Ninety Percent's eCommerce site from a legacy Ruby on Rails (RoR) platform to Shopify. The goal was to enhance site performance, improve scalability, and preserve organic SEO value without downtime.

The site had a large and complex structure: over 500 products with 2,000 variants and 8,000+ images. A team of 7 was assembled for the 3-month project, including 2 developers, 1 support admin, 3 marketing associates, and 1 UX designer. I led the entire migration process, from technical execution to team coordination and QA.

The primary challenge was to execute a precise, lossless migration — ensuring all product data, images, SEO meta, and redirect rules were correctly mapped without breaking live functionality. Custom Excel scripts were developed to automate bulk data formatting, image sequencing, and product-image assignment. SEO structure was maintained using manual sitemap configuration and redirect mapping.

The actual site switch took under 3 hours and maintained 100% traffic continuity. Within one month of relaunch, SEO traffic increased by 30% due to improved page speed, SEO-optimized Shopify theme setup, and enhanced structured data.

Key Achievements

Migrated 500+ products, 2,000 variants, and 8,000 images using structured scripts
Zero-downtime migration with complete SEO preservation and 301 redirect management
Shopify SEO features (canonical URLs, alt text, meta fields) fully utilized during rebuild
Used Excel scripting to automate image mapping and bulk product import
Redirect and sitemap optimization led to 30% SEO traffic growth within 1 month post-launch
Managed project via Jira and ensured cross-functional collaboration across dev, design, and marketing teams
CircleCI used for staging/testing pipelines pre-deployment

Technologies & Tools Used

ShopifyRuby on RailsExcel ScriptingJiraCircleCIScreaming FrogAhrefsGoogle Search ConsoleGoogle SheetsShopify Admin API

Challenges & Solutions

Challenge: Migrating 8,000+ product images and mapping them accurately to 500+ products with 2,000 variants.

Solution: Created structured Excel scripts to automate image sequencing, file renaming, and bulk assignments using Shopify's import schema.

Challenge: Preserving SEO rankings with thousands of indexed URLs and metadata during migration.

Solution: Pre-migration sitemap audit and 301 redirect planning. Manual redirects set up in Shopify, verified via Google Search Console. No loss in rankings; traffic increased 30% post-migration.

Challenge: Avoiding downtime during migration.

Solution: Executed all staging, QA, and UAT in a cloned Shopify environment. Final switch executed within a 3-hour window during off-peak hours with rollback protocols in place.

Challenge: Coordinating between developers, marketing, and design across time zones.

Solution: Used Jira for task tracking, Slack for daily syncs, and shared documentation to align timelines and accountability.

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