The Silver Vault — EKM to Shopify Migration

The Silver Vault had outgrown EKM. After years of trading on the platform, the cracks were starting to show in places where it mattered most — speed, flexibility and revenue.

The existing EKM store had built up thousands of products, decades of customer accounts, and an order history that was tightly bound to EKM’s proprietary database structure. Migrating any of that without losing data, breaking SEO, or interrupting the busy sterling silver gifting trade was the first hurdle.

EKM’s theming engine made it difficult to deliver the mobile-first, image-led experience that a luxury silverware brand demands. Page speed on mobile was sluggish, the checkout was rigid, and adding modern features — predictive search, faceted filtering, dynamic product recommendations — meant fighting the platform at every step. The integrations The Silver Vault relied on (Royal Mail, accounting, marketing) had been hand-glued together over the years and would all need rethinking on Shopify.

There were SEO concerns too. The Silver Vault ranks for high-intent queries across hundreds of product categories — christening gifts, anniversary silver, sterling silver photo frames, hallmarked jewellery. URL structures, redirects, schema markup and metadata needed to be carried across precisely. One slip and years of organic visibility would vanish overnight.

Finally, the marketing stack — Google Ads feeds, abandoned cart flows, post-purchase email sequences — was tangled with EKM-specific exports and webhooks that simply would not survive a platform move. The brief was to migrate everything cleanly, modernise the storefront, and come out the other side with stronger SEO, better ads performance, and a marketing engine actually built for Shopify.

The migration could not break the business while it was running.

We treated this as a full Shopify migration programme — not a theme swap. Every system, dataset and marketing flow was mapped before we touched a single product.

Customer & Order Migration

We exported the full EKM customer database — names, billing and shipping addresses, contact details, account history, marketing consent flags and customer tags — and imported it into Shopify with passwords flagged for secure reset on first login. Years of historical order data was migrated record-by-record so The Silver Vault’s customer service team could continue handling enquiries, returns and reorders without ever having to log back into the old platform.

Product Catalogue Migration

Thousands of products were migrated with full metadata intact — titles, descriptions, hallmark details, weight, dimensions, multiple images, variant pricing, stock levels and category structures. We restructured collections to take advantage of Shopify’s tagging and metafield system, and rebuilt the navigation so customers could find exactly what they were looking for in two taps.

SEO Migration — Done Properly

Every EKM URL was mapped to its Shopify equivalent with 301 redirects. Page titles, meta descriptions, H1s and structured data (Product, Breadcrumb, Organisation, Review schema) were rebuilt on Shopify with the brand’s ranking history protected. Internal linking was strengthened, image alt text reviewed, and an XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console on launch day with full coverage. Within weeks of go-live, organic visibility had not just held — it had improved.

Theme & Storefront Build

We built a bespoke Shopify theme designed around the way customers actually shop for silver gifts — large lifestyle imagery, generous whitespace, predictive search, faceted filtering by occasion, recipient and price, and a streamlined checkout. Mobile speed scores moved from sluggish to consistently high, and the site finally looked like the premium retailer The Silver Vault actually is.

Google Ads & Shopping

We rebuilt the Google Ads account around Shopify’s native feed. Performance Max campaigns, branded protection, dynamic remarketing and a full Merchant Centre feed pulling enriched product data from Shopify metafields. Conversion tracking, enhanced conversions and GA4 ecommerce events were configured from the ground up so every pound of ad spend was attributable.

Klaviyo Email Marketing

We replaced the patchwork of EKM-era email automations with a full Klaviyo build — welcome series, browse abandonment, cart abandonment, post-purchase, win-back and VIP segmentation. Existing subscribers and consent data were migrated cleanly, segmentation was rebuilt on Shopify’s event data, and revenue-per-recipient started climbing from week one.