How this store with thousands of products migrated to Shopify in only 30 days
We sat down to talk to Tyler Eagleton of Free State Group who was tasked with the onerous job of migrating Inbox Fitness — a major fitness accessories store — onto Shopify. An e-commerce store that carries thousands of products at any given time, Tyler was able to do the unthinkable — complete the migration process within a month.
He tells us about the ups and downs, as well as the tools that made it possible. He lets us know the key factors to be considered when choosing an e-commerce platform, as well as some of the biggest hurdles he faced.

You were working with Inbox Fitness — how was the decision made to migrate to Shopify?
What we do in our business is that we’re focused on helping with e-commerce. Over the past 24–36 months we’ve noticed a tendency — most of our new clients are looking at Shopify as an option. That may be true because a number of aspects, possibly due to name recognition, and that it’s easy to use. They also want to be able to focus on being retailers, rather than paying for hosting.
Inbox Fitness was a large store with a constantly changing inventory. With all the data, we had to think of what’s the best way to manage that both for the migration, as well as for the customer going forward. By building a system on Shopify, supported by various apps, we believed we were able to offer a complete and comfortable ecommerce solution.
What were the biggest challenges in making the migration?
The client had several thousand products in their store, a constantly changing product catalogue. With new price lists and product lists coming in from the suppliers regularly, we knew that we’d have to provide a way to manage the thousands of products more effectively.
Inbox Fitness also has a lot of additional info like tabs, label facts, nutritional facts, etc. Also additional facts on the backend. Not only base information, but also additional meta information that can be tacked onto the product.
At this scale, manually recreating the product catalogue is not feasible. Doing this manually was never an option. We would’ve had to use a combo of a few different apps — without anything it would be several weeks. It would’ve still been a factor 4–5 times to migrate.
There’s not a lot of flexibility in Shopify. We’d have to find out a better solution than the options offered through the Shopify admin.
How long did it take to migrate to Shopify?
We first got notice on August 26, and we started outlining the functionality by the end of the month. We launched October 2. So just over one month.
We started right away with data migration. We got to final product/collections file imports, with our first full import on September 22. We had to map over each product and how it would be used in Shopify. We worked 3 weeks to put together the mapping.
The biggest challenge is that the old system was customized over a period of many years, and had custom fields to be reviewed. Getting all of that into a format that would work into a format that would make more sense for Shopify took the bulk of our time.
We make a point of exploring several options, including new apps to support our task. We found that it’s important to evaluate if what we’re doing, can it be more effective to do something better in a new way.
Which tools did you use to speed up migration?
We decided to pair the Shopify platform with an app extension called Excelify.io, which allows you to manage the store contents more effectively than with the existing Shopify admin, which limits you to manual alterations.
When we found that solution not only better to manage product records but also collections, that was a big selling point for us.
We can use a single excel file to manage multiple aspects of the product catalogue. At any point we can get an export that’s a more complete record of the catalogue structure, but we can use it to update aspects as we go.
That played a big part in migration — setting up products individually was unfeasible. We saved days if not weeks using Excelify.io as a solution.
One other thing that’s a huge difference with Excelify.io is the built-in import-export feature. The base import-export feature in Shopify makes you include every piece of information, every time you import a file. If you want to update price, you have to include every piece of info — vendor, weight, description, unrelated to the change, but makes it longer, plus it makes files with info you don’t want to update. If you miskey something, you run a greater chance of user error. The coolest feature in Excelify.io that was very useful in the migration, is that you can only include fields in your import/export file related to changes you want to make.
Another app we used to manage redirects is called Transportr — it imports huge lists of old url structures, mapped to the new ones (down to individual product pages). Inbox Fitness had 8826 redirects, so this app played a large role in automating the redirect mapping.
What goes into migrating a store?
Essentially you can divide it into migrating data, selecting a new theme, setting up the front end. A more detailed list might look like this:
- Data migration
- Reorganizing data (figuring out new catalogue)
- Migrate static content (FAQ, shipping, etc.)
- Design
- Customer accounts + orders
- Redirects (as url structure changes, if they hit an old product page they go to new one)
- Marketing + reporting are in place (ex. Google analytics, FB pixels)
Some of the migration is done nicely by the platform — like setting up Google Analytics and Facebook pixels. But the rest has to be managed by us.
Another thing we had to manage was that the old version had a split desktop and mobile version. We unified it to a single responsive version.
What would you suggest to store owners who are looking to make the move to Shopify?
It’s important to understand the pros and cons of any e-commerce platform, along with your clients needs, before making a final decision. As part of that investigation, it’s equally important to not only consider the base platform features and functionality but also the strength of the developer community supporting the platform with additional apps and modules. In many circumstances, features that may not be included in Shopify by default are still easily available through well-supported 3rd party apps which can have a big impact on whether Shopify will work for your needs. We’ve found that the app developer community for Shopify is full of people excited at what’s possible which make us optimistic for the future.
