metric 01
$850K
MRR at migration anniversary. DTC + Amazon parallel combined.
§
§ · case study · big game sports
Big Game Sports · Magento 2 to $850K MRR.
A 22-month rebuild that moved an athletic equipment brand off legacy Magento 2, onto Shopify Plus, through performance optimisation, and out to parallel Amazon operations. +340% revenue, 1.9s LCP, 38% Amazon share.
§ 01 · four metrics
Four numbers after the replatform.
Big Game Sports had an operational profile we see constantly: a Magento 2 store that worked but hurt, paying for performance it never quite got, and enough retail revenue to make a ground-up rebuild feel scary. Twenty-two months later the brand runs $850K monthly with Amazon carrying 38 percent and DTC carrying the remainder. Measured on Shopify Plus, verified against Google Search Console and Amazon Seller Central.
metric 02
+340%
YoY revenue vs final TTM on Magento 2, all channels.
metric 03
1.9s
LCP on mobile post-optimisation. Down from 4.6s on Magento.
metric 04
38%
Amazon share of total brand revenue after parallel launch.
§ 02 · the challenge
Legacy platform, modern expectations.
Big Game Sports had grown into a $2.4M annual business on Magento 2 Open Source, hosted on a VPS that made sense in 2019 and made less sense every quarter since. The PDP took 4.6 seconds to reach LCP on mobile. Google Ads Quality Score had slid from 8 to 5 across the hero SKUs. Conversion on returning visitors sat at 2.1 percent.
The in-house developer who knew the codebase left six months before we met the founder. Every upgrade broke something; every broken something needed the original developer to fix. The Magento annual bill (hosting, Adobe Commerce licence pro-rated, three-developer retainer) ran higher than a Shopify Plus licence plus our full retainer would.
Amazon was a growing but underutilised channel. The brand held decent shelf position on Amazon but no Brand Store, no A+ content, no Transparency codes against the three counterfeiters gaming the listing. DTC and Amazon operations sat in separate spreadsheets that drifted apart on pricing every other week.
BFCM was coming in eleven weeks. The founder's ask was simple: migrate without losing the fiscal year. Our first question was whether we could do it in thirteen weeks without breaking Christmas.
§ 03 · the approach
The Revenue-Safe Replatform, thirteen weeks.
Migrations fail on SEO, data, and buyer experience. We engineered against all three.
- 01
Discovery (weeks 1-3).
URL map of every indexed page. Data schema lift from Magento. Checkout flow audit. Competitive Core Web Vitals benchmarking. Risk register drawn up with SEO, data integrity, and revenue-window protection as top three.
- 02
Front-end rebuild (weeks 4-8).
Shopify Dawn-based theme rebuilt with sections tuned to the product catalog. Critical CSS inlined. Hero images served via Shopify CDN with srcset. Font display swap + preload. Third-party scripts deferred via Web Pixels API.
- 03
Data pipeline (weeks 4-10).
Customer + order history via Matrixify. Product metafields built from the Magento attribute set. Historical reviews migrated to Okendo. Loyalty points rebalanced under a new program. Klaviyo account rebuilt from scratch; abandoned customer lists inherited via CSV import.
- 04
SEO safeguards (weeks 10-12).
Every indexed Magento URL got a 301 to its Shopify equivalent. Canonical tags + hreflang preserved. Structured data improved. Sitemaps submitted to Search Console the hour after DNS flipped.
- 05
Soft launch (week 12).
10 percent of buyers routed via Cloudflare workers to Shopify; 90 percent still on Magento. Conversion parity confirmed within 36 hours.
- 06
Full cutover (week 13).
DNS flipped during a 4am Tuesday window. Revenue held flat day one, up 12% by day seven, up 31% by day thirty.
§ 04 · the stack
Seven tools, tight integration.
01 · platform
Shopify Plus
Dawn-based theme. Sections + Blocks. Shopify Markets for Canada.
02 · migration
Matrixify
Customer + order + product migration from Magento 2. 217K records.
03 · email
Klaviyo
Abandoned cart, back-in-stock, BFCM warm-up flows.
04 · attribution
Triple Whale
Cross-channel attribution covering DTC + Amazon + Google Ads.
05 · reviews
Okendo
Photo reviews. Sport-type filtering. Syndicated to Google Shopping + Amazon.
06 · support
Gorgias
Warranty claim macros. Sizing guidance. Amazon ticket forwarding.
07 · CDN
Cloudflare
Image optimisation layer. Worker-driven soft-launch routing.
08 · amazon
Brand Registry
Transparency codes. A+ content. Brand Store. Subscribe and Save.
§ 05 · the results, before and after
Migration metrics that compounded.
| metric | Magento 2 (final TTM) | Shopify Plus (month 22) | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| MRR | $193K | $850K | +340% |
| LCP mobile | 4.6s | 1.9s | -59% |
| PDP conversion | 2.1% | 4.3% | +105% |
| Google Ads Quality Score (avg) | 5 | 8 | +60% |
| organic sessions YoY | -8% | +72% | recovered + grew |
| Amazon share of revenue | 12% | 38% | +217% |
Numbers verified against Shopify, Search Console, Amazon Seller Central dashboards on April 1, 2026. Screenshots on NDA request.
§ 06 · in their words
"The migration that did not break Christmas."
Founder
Big Game Sports · athletic equipment
§ 07 · your migration
Your Shopify Plus migration starts with a call.
30-minute audit. Honest read on migration fit, timeline, and revenue-window risk. Scoped quote within 48 hours.