Replatforming Your Ecommerce Site: What to Do With the Product Content
The new site can look finished and still be the old catalogue. Themes, checkout, and apps get the project plan. The products arrive as an export: short supplier descriptions, three names for the same colour, categories that only made sense in the old menu, and a folder of specification PDFs nobody opened.
That export is what people will search, filter, and buy from on the first day. Changing platform copies it. It does not repair it.
What is worth carrying across
Orders, customers, and redirects need a plan. So does the catalogue, which is the part that gets treated as a file conversion. A spreadsheet of titles and prices will import. It will not invent the missing size, rewrite a 40-word manufacturer blurb, or map last year’s categories onto the tree the new platform expects.
Before anyone maps columns, decide which values you want to keep and which you would rather rebuild. “Oak”, “oak”, and “Natural Oak” should become one colour before they become three filters. A description you would be embarrassed to read aloud is not an asset you need to migrate carefully.
Build the fields before the templates
The new theme will have places for material, size, care, and dimensions. Those places stay blank if the export never had the columns. Agree the fields for each product type first, then fill them, then let the design show them. In merchi.ai those fields are schema blocks. A template drawn around attributes you cannot fill is a redesign you will do twice.
The old categories will not fit
Your menu, Shopify’s taxonomy, and Google’s product categories are three different lists. Products filed for the old navigation land in the wrong place, and Shopping feeds notice. Sorting this out is part of the move, not a ticket for the month after launch. The mechanics are in automated product classification.
Do not translate the export as a last step
If you sell in more than one language, a late translation of the English file keeps the English size words and hopes the reader copes. Colour names and care instructions should be written from the same attributes, in each language, so the filters agree. That is what languages in one pipeline run are for.
The useful data is often in a PDF, not the spreadsheet
A lot of what the new fields need was never typed in. It is on the pack shot, the care label, or the specification that arrived with the range. Document upload reads a supplier PDF into the attributes. Confidence scoring shows whether a value came from that file. If it did not, leave it for a person. Do not publish a guess as a specification. Photographs can come in with the style codes as a ZIP upload.
Feeds will judge you on day one
Google Shopping and the marketplaces will take the new catalogue immediately, and they drop products that are missing required fields. Launch week is a poor moment to learn that colour was never a column. Enrich, then import. How feed quality follows from that is in product feed management and product content.
If you already know the new platform
Shopify Plus builds run into this on almost every migration. The agency version is how Shopify Plus projects handle product content. Moving onto WooCommerce is covered in AI product content for WooCommerce. If the question is whether Magento needs a PIM at the same time, start with what a Magento PIM connector actually does. Whatever the platform, the work underneath is product data enrichment.
A UK flooring retailer cleared a backlog of 1,000 products that could not be published because the data was incomplete. Online revenue grew 976%. The case study is the long version. On a replatform, that work belongs in the weeks before cutover.
Talk it through against your catalogue
If you are replatforming and the export is thin, the categories will not match, or the real specifications are still in supplier PDFs, book a call and we can look at the catalogue you are about to move.
Or start a 30-day free trial and run it on a sample of that export.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens to product content when you replatform an ecommerce site?
The platform change moves the records you already have. Titles, prices, and whatever attributes were filled in will import. Missing fields, duplicated colour names, thin supplier descriptions, and categories built for the old menu come with them. The new theme does not complete that data. If you want a better catalogue on the new site, you enrich it before cutover and import the improved records.
Should you migrate product descriptions as they are?
Keep a description only if you would happily publish it again. Manufacturer text of a few dozen words, copied across every colour, is how duplicate content and thin pages survive a redesign. Rebuild those from the product’s attributes. Preserve the descriptions your team actually wrote and still stands by.
What product data should you fix before go-live?
The fields the new site will filter on, the category each product belongs in, the languages you sell in, and any fact a feed requires (colour, size, material, identifier). Also anything that currently lives only in a specification PDF. Leaving those until after launch means the first weeks of the new site are spent on content the project thought was finished.
Can supplier PDFs be turned into product attributes during a migration?
Yes, when the PDF has selectable text and you know which fields you need. A document upload can read dimensions, materials, and ratings into those fields, with a confidence score and the source attached. A value the file does not support should stay blank for review. A scanned image of a spec is harder to read than a text PDF, so those are worth checking by hand.
Do you need a PIM to replatform?
Not by default. A PIM is useful when the same product data has to feed several channels from one master record. It does not write the missing content. Many replatforms are one storefront plus a spreadsheet. In that case, fill the attributes and import them. Add a PIM when distribution, not writing, is the problem. Magento merchants weighing a connector can use the Magento PIM connector guide.
How does taxonomy change when you move platform?
Your old category tree rarely matches the new platform’s taxonomy, and it rarely matches Google’s product categories either. Products need to be classified again against the tree you will actually use, including Shopping and marketplace categories if those matter on day one. Doing it from the old menu labels is how products launch in the wrong place.