CASE STUDY · PROJECT RESCUE
E-commerce rescue after vendor abandonment
The vendor stopped responding. Emails weren't arriving and the e-commerce store could barely load. The team didn't have access to the hosting, the database, or even their own domain.
5K+
SKUs migrated
Full
SEO URL remap
Zero
Downtime
THE SITUATION
20 years of business, then the vendor vanished
The company had been selling healthcare products for over two decades. They had 5,000+ SKUs and a steady base of repeat customers. For months the vendor had promised to sort things out — we'll get to it, it's on the list — and never did. Then they stopped responding altogether. The team couldn't get into their own hosting panel, database, or domain registrar. Nobody had been handed credentials or documentation. DNS was misconfigured badly enough that company email had stopped arriving, and the Magento store was buckling under a database problem that would have taken an afternoon to fix if anyone could get in. Every order that quietly failed was a customer — often someone waiting on a piece of medical equipment — who didn't get it.
THE BRIEF
Get the store back, then get off Magento
The immediate priority was access recovery and getting the store functional again. Beyond that, the company needed to move to a platform they could manage themselves. They'd spent 20 years building a catalogue and a customer base, and they weren't willing to depend on a single vendor ever again.
THE WORK
Project rescue, then a Magento-to-Shopify migration
First job: get access back. That meant going to the domain registrar, the host, the payment processor, and the email provider directly, and grinding through each one's verification process. Slow, unglamorous, and the only way through. The DNS was a mess. Someone had copy-pasted values from a Google search without understanding what they were replacing. Once we fixed it, emails started flowing again. The database issue killing the site was easy to diagnose with access, and easy to patch. We got the store back up while we planned the migration. Magento was the wrong platform for this team. They needed something they could run themselves, so we moved them to Shopify. The hard part was the data. The catalogue had 5,000+ SKUs with inconsistent formatting and missing images, and the category structures were a mess. We wrote scripts to clean it up and standardise the catalogue before importing.
THE OUTCOME
A Shopify store they could run themselves
The migration went live with zero downtime and every URL remapped so search rankings carried over. The bigger change was what happened after. Orders were processing again, email was arriving, and the team could update products and run promotions without calling anyone. After months locked out of a business he'd spent 20 years building, the owner had every credential back in his own hands — and was genuinely relieved to have it.
FAQs
Common questions
It's moving an online store from one platform to another. Products, customer data, order history, URL structures, the lot. Done well, your search rankings stay intact, there's no downtime, and you end up on a platform the team can manage without outside help.
Losing orders to a platform you can't fix?
Tell us what's happening. We'll tell you what we'd do about it.