Migrating Products
Migrating products over to Shopify is probably one of the most complex parts of the import process. Here, you'll need a thorough understanding of which standard Turbify fields you want to migrate, and what additional fields you'll need in order for your new Shopify store to provide the same (or similar) functionality and customer experience as your existing store.
Starting with the standard fields, you'll need to map those to their Shopify equivalents. Some of them, however, require special handling, and I'll mention a few of those below.
Handle and ID: These are roughly equivalent in the two platforms. Both uniquely identify a product in Turbify and Shopify, and both also become the URL of the product: the handle becomes the product's URL in Shopify, while ID is the URL of the product in Turbify. Shopify also uses internal IDs for products and variants, but these are different from Turbify's product IDs. We normally treat Turbify IDs and Shopify handles as equivalent during migration. However, this is also a good opportunity to create handles based on your product names, which can be better for SEO. If you do this, you'll need to maintain a handle/ID mapping and set up the 301 redirects accordingly.
Price: In Turbify, products have a regular price called "price," and when on sale, there's also a "sale-price." In Shopify, "price" is always the actual selling price (Variant Price in Matrixify), and if the product is on sale, you enter a higher value in "Compare At Price" (Variant Compare At Price in Matrixify). In addition, Turbify allows quantity-based price discounts by entering multiple quantity/price pairs in either price field. Since Shopify doesn't natively support this, you'll need to ensure your price fields (in the import CSV file) contain only single numeric values before importing. Quantity discounts can later be handled using a custom app.
Image Src: This is the URL of the product image, which can be obtained from your store's catalog.xml export. However, some text manipulation is required since catalog.xml doesn't provide this data in a clean format.
Any non-standard fields will need to be handled via Metafields, which are the Shopify equivalent of custom properties in Turbify.
If your products have variable overrides or editor-only custom fields (fields that appear only in the editor but not in Catalog Manager), these will also require special handling.
Additional Images / Media
Turbify, by default, only supports one additional image (called Inset) and no videos. Many Turbify stores, however, allow uploading multiple additional images and sometimes videos. Shopify natively supports unlimited images and videos. If your Turbify store supports multiple images per product, these additional images (including the Inset image) will need to be uploaded using separate line items in the product import CSV, or through a separate media upload file.
Our migration program handles additional images and can also be adapted to support videos. However, since videos are implemented in different ways across customized Turbify stores, video migration will need to be customized for each store individually.
Options and Variants
Turbify gives you full flexibility when adding user-selectable options to products, so it may come as a surprise that Shopify limits you to a maximum of three user-selectable options (for example, Color, Size, and Style).
The reason is that while in Turbify, options act as "attributes" a shopper can select, in Shopify, options define product variations known as Variants. Each variant in Shopify can have its own image, price, weight, inventory, and SKU. While Shopify does support user-selectable attributes, setting them up (without custom coding or a custom app) can be more complex than in Turbify.
Additionally, if you use "incremental pricing" in your Turbify options, this functionality can only be replicated through a custom app in Shopify.
HTML and File References
If your product descriptions include HTML code that references files stored in the editor's Files library, those files will need to be uploaded to Shopify, and any such references in your HTML will have to be updated to point to their new Shopify locations. These updates can be tedious, but our migration process takes care of them automatically.
Migrating Inventory
Shopify offers a much more robust inventory management system than Turbify and integrates with most major third-party inventory management solutions. If you're already using online inventory management, it can usually be migrated directly to Shopify. And if you're using a supported third-party provider, you can simply switch your integration over to your new Shopify store after migration.