21phi plans and runs Shopify migrations, from a Liquid theme to Hydrogen, from Shopify to Shopify Plus, or from another platform onto Shopify, and stays on as the team that runs the store afterwards.
Shopify migration services are the planning, build and cutover work that moves a store onto Shopify, up to Shopify Plus, or from a Liquid theme to a Shopify Hydrogen storefront without losing search rankings, customer data or sales momentum. 21phi provides them to direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands across North America that want a small senior team to run the migration and then stay on as the team behind the store.
We are a Shopify Hydrogen agency and a Shopify Partner with Shopify Plus experience. The risk in a migration sits with the brand, not the agency: ranking URLs, customer accounts, order history, discount logic, pixels and integrations all have to arrive intact, and we treat that list as the scope. Our core migration is headless: the storefront front end is decoupled from Shopify's back office and checkout and talks to Shopify through APIs; Shopify still runs products, orders, customers and checkout. In that case the commerce data stays where it is, and only the storefront around it changes.
What sets our Shopify migration services apart is what happens after the switch. We stay in your team's channels and close whatever comes next: an app that stopped syncing, an attribution gap the ads team found, a landing page for the next drop. This costs more than a body shop, and it is why the store keeps improving instead of quietly decaying.
The first is a Liquid theme moving to Hydrogen. In this headless migration Shopify keeps running products, orders, customers and checkout while the storefront is rebuilt. A Liquid theme is a conventional Shopify storefront built with Shopify's Liquid templating and the theme editor; the alternative to Hydrogen. Shopify Hydrogen is Shopify's React-based framework for building headless storefronts on top of Shopify's Storefront API; current versions are built on React Router (formerly Remix). The new storefront is hosted on Oxygen, Shopify's global edge hosting for Hydrogen storefronts, included with Shopify plans. See Shopify Hydrogen development, and a Shopify Plus apparel storefront that made this move.
The second is a brand that decides to migrate to Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus is Shopify's enterprise plan with higher limits, checkout extensibility, Shopify Functions, B2B and Markets features. A Shopify Plus migration is less about moving data and more about replacing workarounds with what Plus unlocks. See Shopify Plus development.
The third is Shopify replatforming from another system: a Magento to Shopify migration, a BigCommerce to Shopify migration, a WordPress to Shopify migration (WooCommerce included), or a move off Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Here the data does move. Our approach is the same discipline with a different export: map every entity before import, keep the legacy site reachable for comparison, and never cut over until the redirect map covers every URL that earns traffic.
Every product, collection, page and article URL with impressions gets a mapped 301 redirect. Metadata and structured data are carried across rather than rewritten, and sitemaps and canonicals are checked against what the new storefront will serve.
Before the switch, every ad destination is audited so no campaign lands on a redirect chain or a dead page. Test orders in each market confirm that pixels, click IDs and purchase events survive through to Shopify checkout. See SEO and AI search.
The switch is staged: existing customers first, then all traffic. It happens in a night-time window with a monitoring period afterwards, paid traffic is paused in agreement with your ads team, and the checkout subdomain is repointed in the same plan. We do not migrate on Fridays or weekends, because that is when vendor support is thinnest.
We do not sell promises about what cannot go wrong. We sell a switch that is scheduled, staged and watched by the people who built the storefront, with a named senior person on the call.
The real work starts after the switch. 21phi works as your embedded commerce team: the people who ran the migration keep running the store, inside your own group chats and on a shared task board. Requests land with us from every department: a final-sale label for customer care, an inventory sync question from logistics, pricing display in a second market for operations, a navigation change for the founder. Integrations of every kind, apps, ads, analytics and chat. Visuals for a launch. A broken app, with us chasing the vendor. Urgent fixes that go to the front of the queue. Framework and Shopify API upkeep as a standing monthly item. A weekly analytics review of what changed in the funnel and what to test next. Sergey Gridin, co-founder, leads the engineering and analytics work with clients.
This costs more than a body shop, and it should. A body shop knows nothing about your store the day after handover, so every request becomes a new briefing and every integration failure becomes your problem. An embedded team already knows the codebase, the catalog rules and the people, which is why requests close fast. See Shopify support and maintenance.
Most ecommerce migration services are sold as a project with an end date. If you are comparing one Shopify migration company with another, ask four questions. Who owns the redirect map, and will they show it before the switch? Who is on the call during the cutover window? Do they build on both Hydrogen and Shopify Plus, or only one? What happens the month after launch: a handover document, or a team still in your channels? The same questions sort any list of Shopify migration experts.
21phi is a small, senior ecommerce migration agency: the people who scope the migration run it and answer afterwards. If a well-built Liquid theme would serve you better than a headless rebuild, we will say so on the first call.
A Shopify Hydrogen storefront for a men's performance apparel brand, built around product systems and run by 21phi as the embedded storefront, analytics and growth team.
Shopify Plus · Shopify Hydrogen on Remix / React Router · Oxygen edge hosting · Storefront API and Customer Account API · Shopify Markets · Shopify web pixels and ad pixels, implemented in code · Amplitude for funnels, retention and session replay · Mux for video
Shopify migration services cover the move of a store onto Shopify, up to Shopify Plus, or from a Liquid theme to a headless Hydrogen storefront. The work includes URL mapping and 301 redirects, carrying over metadata and structured data, reconnecting customer, order and catalog data, re-integrating apps and pixels, test orders, and monitoring indexation after the switch.
A migration can be planned so rankings are protected. 21phi maps every URL that earns impressions to a 301 redirect, keeps metadata and structured data intact, checks sitemaps and canonicals against the legacy site, audits ad destinations and monitors indexation afterwards. No agency can honestly promise that no ranking will move, but the risk is controlled by doing this work before cutover.
A headless Shopify migration replaces the storefront while leaving Shopify's back office and checkout in place. The new front end, usually built on Shopify Hydrogen and hosted on Oxygen, talks to Shopify through the Storefront API, so products, orders, customers and checkout never move. The risk sits in URLs, tracking, integrations and the checkout subdomain, which is where 21phi focuses the work.
Migrating to Shopify Plus and going headless often belong in one project, because the two decisions reinforce each other. Shopify Plus adds checkout extensibility, Shopify Functions and Shopify Markets, and a Hydrogen storefront is where those features are put to full use: branded checkout within platform limits, custom cart and discount logic, locale-aware pricing per market. 21phi scopes both together so the brand does not pay for two migrations where one would do.
21phi treats replatforming from Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, BigCommerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a data and redirect project first. Every entity is mapped before import: products and variants, customers, order history, reviews, content pages and the URLs that earn traffic. The legacy site stays reachable for comparison, the redirect map is reviewed with the client, and test orders confirm tracking before traffic is switched.
21phi designs, builds and keeps running headless storefronts on Hydrogen, Oxygen and the Storefront API for Shopify Plus brands, and stays embedded with your team as the people who own the store after launch.
21phi builds and runs Shopify Plus storefronts on Hydrogen, then stays embedded with your team as the people who close every request, from checkout logic to a broken app.
21phi builds search visibility into the storefront itself: technical SEO on Shopify Hydrogen, structured data an AI assistant can read, and a team that stays after launch to keep both working.
