Shopify - Shopify to Lightspeed Retail Migration

Migration Service is available for one time migration of Product and Customer Data from Shopify to an empty Lightspeed Retail account. This makes onboarding with Lightspeed simple and easy.

Important: Due to limitations in how Shopify and Lightspeed handle images, the migration of product images is not supported.

Requirements

• Lightspeed Retail Credentials (admin level login and password)
• Shopify Credentials (admin level login and password, or full collaborator access)  

Data Quality

• Products must have unique SKUs in Shopify for the migration to successfully complete.
• Products must have a unique SKU for costs, weights, or per-location inventory to be migrated.
• Products with no SKU can be migrated, but it is recommended that all products have a SKU.

Expectations

Lightspeed and Shopify have limitations that require careful consideration and data preparation. The most common Lightspeed errors are caused by special characters which are not supported by their API. These include: < > \ & #

Case by Case Examples

To address special characters during the migration:

...will replace all Ampersands with the word "and".  If the ampersand is the first character in a field, the a in and will be capitalized.

• "Example & Example" becomes "Example and Example"
• "Example&Example" becomes "ExampleandExample"
• "& Example" becomes "And Example"

...will remove all backslashes.

• "Example\Example" becomes "ExampleExample"
• "\Example" becomes "Example"

...will convert less than to "lt", and greater than to "gt" on migration.

• " 4<5" becomes "4lt5"
• "<funny>" becomes "ltfunnygt"
• "<" becomes "lt"
• ">" becomes "gt"

Initial Sync Settings

Product Updates

To protect your data in Shopify, initially only Quantity updates will be enabled after the migration. Product Update and Order Download settings can be reviewed after the migration.  We recommend to keep most Product Update settings disabled.

Data Consistency

Product Structure

Products will be migrated to Lightspeed according to how those products are arranged on Shopify.  

• Shopify Products with multiple Variants become Lightspeed Matrices.  
• Shopify Variants become items which are a part of a Lightspeed Matrix.
• Shopify Products with One Variant become single items in Lightspeed.  
  
  

Weights

Weights stored in Shopify are always converted to grams when exported by Shopify.  No conversion is done by the migration process.

Long Descriptions

Lightspeed sometimes errors when processing Long Description data from Shopify that includes special characters, embedded code, or images.

Barcodes

Shopify Barcodes become Lightspeed UPCs.  Lightspeed requires that all UPCs are 11 to 14 numeric characters.  If a Shopify Barcode does not meet Lightspeed's requirements, the Lightspeed Item UPC will be left blank.  

Tags

Lightspeed will automatically make these changes to Tags:

• Remove spaces.  Lightspeed does not support tags with spaces.
• Remove some special characters such as #.
• Adjust all letters to lower case.

Additionally, Lightspeed's API does not support certain tags such as "0" and "00".  These tags will need to be removed before being imported.

Size / Color / Third Options

Lightspeed does not support certain values that get converted to a blank by their API.  This includes "0" and "00".  These values will need to be adjusted or removed before being imported into Lightspeed.

Product Options Settings

This is uncommon in new accounts, but if your Shopify data includes any products with three options a Lightspeed Matrix Attribute Set will need to be created with three options if one does not exist already.

Process Outline

Review Data

We'll review your data, contact you with any concerns, and allow you to make changes before the migration begins.  We will not migrate your data until it meets data quality requirements.

Migration

Once we have your authorization to proceed we'll confirm when the migration begins.  The migration takes a 'snapshot' once the process begins.  During the migration of data any new updates to Shopify products, and new Shopify products will not migrate.  We recommend making those changes in Lightspeed after the migration is complete.  Orders and refunds created during the migration will sync once the migration is complete.

For a Shopify account with about 20,000 items the initial migration of initial data usually takes about 2-3 days, with an additional day needed to process imports for each location.  Validation of your data may take longer, and we conservatively estimate the entire process can take 10-14 days after the migration begins. These timeline estimates will be impacted by data volume.

Do not make any changes to data in Lightspeed during the migration or validation.

Post Migration

Our team will notify you when the migration is complete and you can start making changes to data in Lightspeed.  We will coordinate a meeting to where the migration team will review your integration settings, integration workflow questions, and provide guidance on how to reach our support team now that the integration is live.