You bought the store. We made sure you were the only one holding the keys.

The situation

The buyer of a men's grooming brand received the store the usual way: an account transfer carrying the previous owner's staff logins, a decade of app installs with live API credentials, and data from before the brand existed. For an asset they'd just paid for, they had surprisingly little proof of what it contained — and no certainty about who else could still get in.

What made it hard

• Unknown residual access. Staff accounts and app API keys accumulate for years; any one of them is a back door.
• 92,406 orders of history the support team needed for warranty claims and repeat-purchase context.
• Gift cards. Shopify masks gift card codes from every API — outstanding balances were real liabilities that had to survive.
• 203 redirects from years of product renames — the store's SEO depended on them.

How the migration ran

The destination store was wiped to factory-clean first — orders, customers, products, themes, metafields, files — with a staff report printed before and after, so the buyer could see exactly one name with access: their own. Then everything worth keeping migrated across: catalog, customers, the full 92k-order history with tracking numbers, blogs, redirects and theme. Gift cards were re-issued with identical balances, customers and expiry dates, with the new codes delivered as a CSV plus ready-to-send customer email copy.

The numbers

• Orders: 92,406 / 92,406 matched, tracking numbers preserved
• Redirects: 203 / 203 — no SEO loss
• Gift card liabilities: 100% re-issued, codes delivered securely
• Previous-owner access after handover: 0 accounts, 0 API keys
• Second pass: created 0 records