The Migration Data Disaster That Doesn't Have to Happen
Platform migrations are among the highest-risk data events in e-commerce. Products get duplicated. Variants get separated from their parents. Images break. Categories get miscategorized. SEO-critical slugs change and redirect rules are incomplete.
The good news: most migration data disasters are preventable with a structured approach to catalog cleanup before and after the move.
Pre-Migration: Clean the Source Data First
Don't migrate a dirty catalog. Cleaning is 10x harder in the destination platform than in the source.
Before you migrate:
- Remove all draft and inactive products that shouldn't be migrated
- Standardize category names and product types
- Ensure every product has all required fields: title, description, at least one image, price, SKU
- Fix duplicate SKUs (they'll cause import errors in most destination platforms)
- Export the cleaned catalog and keep it as your migration source of truth
Sohovi automatically finds every duplicate in your dataset — including near-matches — and shows you exactly which rows are affected.
The Migration Mapping Document
Before you touch the destination platform, create a migration mapping document:
| Source Platform | Destination Platform | Notes | |---|---|---| | Product Type | Collection | Map each type to the correct collection | | Vendor | Brand | Verify brand names are consistent | | Tags | Tags | Tag taxonomy may change | | Metafields | Custom fields | Check if destination supports the same metafields |
This document is your migration spec. Anyone involved in the migration refers to it.
Post-Migration Audit
After the migration is complete, run a reconciliation audit:
Sohovi validates your dataset before it enters the warehouse — catching format errors, nulls, and duplicates at the source.
1. Row count check: Source platform exported N products. Destination platform imported M products. If M < N, something was dropped. Investigate before going live.
2. Image verification: Spot-check 50 products — do all images load? Images frequently break during migrations because they're referenced by URL rather than uploaded.
3. Variant completeness: For 20 products with variants, verify all variants migrated and are linked correctly to the parent.
Sohovi profiles every column in your dataset for completeness and flags the exact rows where values are missing — free to try.
4. Price accuracy: Spot-check 30 prices against your source platform. Price import errors are common and financially consequential.
5. URL and redirect verification: For every product URL that changed, verify the redirect is in place and returns HTTP 301. Broken redirects destroy SEO equity you've built over years.
After Going Live
Monitor for 30 days:
- 404 error rates (broken product URLs you missed)
- Search ranking changes (sudden drops indicate redirect or canonical issues)
- Customer service contacts mentioning "product not found" or "can't find what I'm looking for"
Plan for a 30-day stabilization period. Migrations rarely go perfectly — having a monitoring plan ensures you catch and fix issues before they compound.
