If you’re looking to match with a Shopify agency to handle your migration to Shopify, you want to make sure that your expectations and wants are clearly stated, and that potential partners prove that they can do the work.

As a Shopify Premier Partner, Fyresite has worked with a number of clients who found us through RFPs, and we’ve put together this blog to give you a breakdown of everything you need to build an effective RFP for your Shopify Migration project.

Step One: Introduce Your Company

Your RFP isn’t going to get you the responses you want if potential partners don’t understand the company. When you build your Shopify Migration RFP, it should clearly explain the business, its current technology, operational requirements, and desired outcomes.

The goal is to give any agency reading it enough information to recommend the right architecture without attempting to design the entire solution in advance.

Step Two: Breakdown Business Goals

This section is the ‘why’ of the RFP. What is currently happening with your business, why do you want to change it, and what are you hoping to accomplish with the migration. What are your goals? Why do you need this migration?

Goals may include:

  • Lowering total cost of ownership
  • Improving conversion
  • Simplifying site management
  • Supporting B2B growth
  • Improving performance
  • Reducing custom development
  • Preparing the business for future growth

Step Three: Document Your Current Tech Stack

To provide solutions, answering agencies need to understand what tech you’re using now and what they’re being used for. Identify the systems currently supporting the business, including:

  • Ecommerce platform
  • ERP
  • PIM
  • CRM
  • OMS or WMS
  • POS
  • Search platform
  • Tax engine
  • Payment gateways
  • Marketing platforms

Clarify which system owns products, pricing, inventory, customers, orders, and fulfillment data.

Step Four: Ask for Tech Stack Solutions

One of the top benefits of building a RFP is to get to see how these different agencies would solve your problems and find which solution (and agency providing it) is the best fit. Ask responders to inventory the plugins, extensions, apps, scripts, middleware, and third-party services currently in use.

Ask potential partners to determine which systems should be:

  • Replaced by native Shopify functionality
  • Consolidated
  • Replaced by a Shopify app
  • Rebuilt as a focused custom solution
  • Retained
  • Retired

The goal should be a more stable and maintainable architecture with fewer unnecessary dependencies and lower ongoing costs.

Step Five: Define Business Requirements

It’s important that the agency you choose to work with understands your business and your business needs. In this section of the RFP, don’t tell the agencies how you want to fix problems. Instead, give them the problems and ask for their solutions.

Important business requirements may include:

  • Vehicle fitment
  • Configurable products
  • Product kits
  • Core charges
  • Dealer verification
  • Custom quoting
  • Customer-specific pricing
  • Consignment
  • Distributor routing

Step Six: Give Catalog and Migration Volumes

The amount of data and products that you want to include in a migration will change the scope. It might seem irrelevant, but it impacts every aspect of migration.

For example, take one of our current clients, who have

  • Approximately 1.5 million SKUs
  • Approximately eight million fitment records

These volumes significantly affect the proposed search, integration, and migration architecture.

In this part of your RFP, you should include estimated counts for:

  • Products
  • Variants
  • Customers

Orders

  • Fitment records
  • Images
  • Documents
  • Content pages
  • Historical URLs

For each of these, explain where the data is currently and whether or not it is migration-ready.

Step Seven: Differentiate Your Business

There are standard functions that are expected during a Shopify migration, like products, collections, and carts. What functionalities make your business different? What should agencies be paying special attention to during your migration? Your RFP should ask answering agencies how they will work with the functions that differentiate your business.

If you’re unsure what these could be, here’s an example from clients we’ve worked with:

Step Eight: Define Every Commerce Channel

Omni-Channel commerce is essential for eCommerce brands, and for a successful migration, agencies need to understand every channel you sell on. In this section, clarify what channels you sell on that you’re including in the migration.

Top channels include

  • Direct-to-consumer ecommerce
  • Shopify B2B
  • Retail and Shopify POS
  • Phone orders
  • Dealer sales
  • International commerce
  • Marketplaces
  • Multiple brands

Here you’ll also explain if you’re expecting one blended Shopify store, expansion stores, or separate storefronts.

Step Nine: Explain Integrations and Business Workflows

Naming an ERP or integration platform is not enough. Your RFP needs to be more in depth.

Explain:

  • What information is exchanged
  • Which direction the data travels
  • How frequently it updates
  • Which system is the source of truth
  • What happens when an integration fails

Include workflows for:

  • Pricing
  • Inventory
  • Orders
  • Fulfillment
  • Cancellations
  • Returns
  • Refunds
  • Customer records

Step Ten: Share Your Workflow for SEO Preservation

If you start thinking about preserving your SEO during the migration, it’s already too late. It needs to be discussed and workflows made during the discovery phase. When you’re building your RFP, ask responding agencies to share their SEO preservation workflow.

Ask about their plan for

  • Crawling the existing site
  • Identifying high-value landing pages
  • Preserving URLs where practical
  • Creating and validating 301 redirects
  • Migrating metadata and structured data
  • Maintaining product and content parity
  • Monitoring rankings, traffic, revenue, and indexing after launch

Why is this important? Look at TruDoor, one of our migration clients. In their migration, we

  • Migrated approximately 47,000 products.
    • Nearly 50,000 redirects required mapping and validation.
      • Product attributes, documents, content, and URLs were reviewed for parity on every product

Clear SEO acceptance criteria helps reduce preventable traffic and revenue loss after launch, so make sure the agencies include their plan.

Step Eleven: Define Acceptance Criteria, Timeline, and Budget

To make sure you get relevant RFP responses, this step is crucial. Your RFP can’t be vague: saying ‘the site needs to be fast’ won’t get you the responses you’re looking for. Instead, provide measurable expectations.

Define the requirements for

  • Core Web Vitals
  • Search performance
  • Data accuracy
  • Integration reliability
  • Accessibility
  • User acceptance testing
  • Launch readiness
  • Post-launch support

Clearly separate:

  • Confirmed requirements
  • Assumptions
  • Open questions
  • Optional features
  • Future phases

This is also where you should put other key information. Any due dates, seasonal constraints, internal resource limitations, and budget expectations need to be clearly defined. If there’s specific scoring criteria that you’re using for the RFP you want agencies to see, include that.

An Overall Look

A Shopify migration RFP should communicate the business model, operational complexity, existing technology, required outcomes, and known constraints. The best RFPs create clarity while leaving room for discovery and experienced architectural recommendations.

It should give potential partners enough information to:

  • Recommend the right architecture
  • Identify risks early
  • Reduce unnecessary third parties
  • Protect existing SEO performance
  • Establish a realistic timeline
  • Develop an accurate scope and budget

Skip the RFP

RFPs are a great way to find an agency for your Shopify migration. Another way? Working with Fyresite and knowing that you’re working with a Shopify-approved Premier Partner that has a proven track record with Shopify migrations.

To get a better idea of how Fyresite can help, schedule your free consultation with our team today.