Magento to Shopify Migration

UTAH SKIS

Platform Migration Catalog Architecture Search Implementation Custom PDP Development Collection Strategy

Buying skis online is a different kind of shopping. A customer looking for a pair of all-mountain skis needs to filter by ability level, waist width, length, and binding compatibility—then see the product in the right color, check a size guide, and feel confident enough to spend $600 without touching the product. The product experience has to do the work that a knowledgeable pro staffer does in person.

UtahSkis knows this better than most. The online arm of Ski ’N See—a Utah institution with 14 retail locations across the Salt Lake Valley and Park City—UtahSkis has built its reputation on matching the big online ski stores on selection while delivering the knowledge and service of a local shop. Their catalog runs deep: thousands of products across skis, snowboards, boots, outerwear, and accessories from brands like Rossignol, Atomic, Salomon, Burton, and The North Face.

But the Magento 2 platform powering the site had become a liability. Hosting costs were high, performance was inconsistent, and the team couldn’t make content or merchandising changes without developer involvement. For a seasonal business where the window between “new gear drops” and “peak buying season” is measured in weeks, that kind of friction costs real revenue.

MTN Haus led the full migration to Shopify—moving 5,000+ products, rebuilding the collection architecture, implementing Searchspring for advanced product discovery, and developing custom PDP features including size guides and image-based color swatches. The goal: give UtahSkis the speed and flexibility of a modern platform without losing the product experience that makes specialty retail work online.

Here’s how MTN Haus got them there.

The Challenge

Magento 2 is a capable platform, but capability comes with overhead. For UtahSkis, the costs had compounded over time—dedicated hosting, ongoing maintenance, security patching, and a developer dependency for changes that should have been routine. Every seasonal catalog refresh, every promotional landing page, every new brand launch required engineering time that the team didn’t have to spare.

Performance was the other issue. Ski gear is researched obsessively before purchase—customers compare specs, read reviews, toggle between colors and lengths. A slow product page doesn’t just frustrate; it sends the buyer to a competitor. And with a catalog of 5,000+ SKUs spanning multiple seasons, categories, and brands, search and filtering had to be fast, accurate, and smart enough to handle the way skiers actually shop.

Then there was the product experience itself. Ski retail isn’t like buying a t-shirt—customers need to see the actual colorway on the actual product, check sizing against a guide specific to that brand and model, and understand compatibility between skis, boots, and bindings. The existing site handled this adequately, but the rigid Magento template structure made it difficult to iterate or improve without significant development effort.

The Solution

MTN Haus approached this as two parallel workstreams: get the catalog and infrastructure right first, then layer in the product experience that makes specialty retail convert.

Catalog Migration & Collection Architecture

The full Magento 2 catalog—5,000+ products with complex attribute sets, multi-season inventory, and brand and category hierarchies—was migrated and restructured for Shopify. This wasn’t a flat data lift. MTN Haus rebuilt the collection architecture to support how ski shoppers actually navigate: by sport, by category, by brand, by season, and by sale status. The taxonomy had to feel intuitive to someone browsing for “2024 men’s all-mountain skis” while also supporting the operational reality of managing thousands of products across overlapping seasons.

Searchspring Implementation

For a catalog this size and this technical, native Shopify search wasn’t going to cut it. MTN Haus implemented Searchspring to power both site search and collection filtering—giving customers the ability to drill into products by size, color, ability level, brand, price, and sport with fast, relevant results. Searchspring also enables merchandising rules that let the UtahSkis team boost seasonal products, promote sale items, and control how results are ranked without writing a line of code.

Custom Product Experience

This is where the migration goes beyond infrastructure. MTN Haus built custom PDP features designed for how people actually buy gear online. Color swatches display the actual product image for each colorway—not a generic color dot—so customers see exactly what they’re selecting. Size guides are integrated at the product level, specific to each brand and category, giving shoppers the confidence to buy boots, jackets, or pants without second-guessing fit. These aren’t cosmetic additions. In specialty retail, they’re the difference between a conversion and an abandoned cart.

The Results

UtahSkis launched on Shopify ahead of the winter season with the full catalog live, Searchspring operational, and all custom PDP features in place. The immediate impact was operational:

Hosting and platform maintenance costs dropped significantly with the move off Magento 2’s self-hosted infrastructure
The merchandising team can now build seasonal landing pages, update collections, and run promotions without developer involvement—critical for a business that operates on tight seasonal windows
Searchspring gives the team control over search merchandising rules—boosting new arrivals, featuring sale items, and adjusting ranking logic as the season progresses
Image-based color swatches and integrated size guides reduce the guesswork that leads to returns and abandoned carts in gear purchasing
5,000+ products migrated with intact taxonomy, no data loss, and a collection structure built for how skiers actually browse

For a seasonal business, speed to market is everything. The UtahSkis team now operates on a platform where updating the storefront for a new season—new products, new collections, new promotions—takes hours instead of weeks. That’s the shift that matters most: the team that knows ski retail best is the team controlling the site.