A global collectibles brand needed a Shopify migration where SEO and ops mattered as much as the theme.
Topps sits inside a larger collectibles portfolio with serious traffic, legacy URL equity, and peak moments that do not forgive downtime. The mandate was not a visual refresh alone: migrate to Shopify with a storefront that merchandising could run during live drops, while protecting rankings, redirects, and the operational path for high-volume releases.
Outcomes
99.2%
Critical legacy URLs preserved or redirected at launch (representative audit sample)
14 weeks
From technical discovery to production cutover on Shopify
31%
Reduction in post-release merchandising tickets in the first quarter
The challenge
The legacy stack carried years of indexed URLs, campaign landers, and partner-specific paths. Any migration had to preserve that equity while simplifying how teams launched products tied to athletes, seasons, and limited runs.
Ops and engineering were under pressure during release windows: inventory sync, promo logic, and fulfillment handoffs had to stay stable when traffic spiked. The new platform needed clearer ownership between marketing, merchandising, and technical runbooks, not another fragile theme customization.
What we built
We mapped URL and content parity first: redirect plans, canonical strategy, and template-level SEO guardrails before visual design locked. Shopify became the target architecture with metafields and collection logic built for card taxonomies, not generic apparel defaults.
Launch systems supported timed releases and high-velocity merchandising updates without developer bottlenecks. Performance budgets, CDN behavior, and checkout resilience were validated against realistic peak-load scenarios, not best-case lab tests.
Post-cutover, we ran a stabilization window: monitoring organic landing pages, fixing edge-case redirects, and tightening admin workflows so internal teams could own day-two operations confidently.
In the work
Key surfaces from the Fanatics Collectibles relaunch. Final photography and UI captures ship with client approval.
Fraction treated migration like an operations project, not a redesign. We kept our search footprint and our team finally had a release process we could repeat.
Services delivered
- Migration discovery & redirect strategy
- Shopify architecture & theme build
- SEO parity & structured data
- Release operations & runbooks
- Performance & load validation
- Post-launch stabilization
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