How to Migrate from Run Free Project to Shopify
A practical guide for run specialty retailers. What to audit before you touch anything, what actually has to move, and how to stop your best content from leading nowhere.
If you run a specialty running store, you already do the hard part. You host the Tuesday group run. You put on the shoe demo nights. You write the race recap, the training block explainer, the "how to know when your shoes are done" post. You build the thing no national chain can buy. And then a shopper reads it, wants the shoe, and the trail goes cold.
First, an honest framing
That disconnect is the most common reason independent running retailers start looking at a platform move. Not because anything is broken, but because the audience they have earned is arriving at content that cannot hand them a product.
Migrating an ecommerce store is not a website redesign. It is a data project with a website at the end of it.
Most of the work is in the parts nobody sees. Matching products to the right variants. Getting sizes and widths structured properly. Mapping old URLs to new ones so you keep the search rankings you have spent years building. Making sure the number on the product page is the same number that is on the shelf in the shop.
The visible part, the theme, is the easy bit. If someone is quoting you mostly for design, they have priced the wrong job.
Five questions to answer before you touch anything
You cannot plan a migration until you know what you actually have. All five of these are about your setup, and you can answer every one of them yourself in an afternoon.
How much of your catalogue is stock you physically own?
Pull a list of everything live on your site and compare it against what is in your stockroom and on your shelves. Some platforms list inventory you do not hold. That is not a bad thing, but it changes the migration completely, because owned stock moves cleanly and virtual stock needs a decision. Know the split before you start.
What is your barcode coverage?
Check what percentage of your variants carry a GTIN, which for footwear is the barcode on the box. This is the best single predictor of how quickly you can be visible in Google Shopping after you move, because Google matches products on identifiers. High coverage means you have already done the hardest part of feed work without realising it.
What do you control on your own product pages?
Open a product page and ask what you could change today if you wanted to. Your delivery promise. Your returns wording. The order of the content. Whether a video can sit next to the buy button. Whether you can filter by size and width the way your fitters think. Write down what you can change and what you cannot. That list is your real requirements document.
Where does your content live, and does it link to anything?
Take your ten best blog posts, event pages and guides. For each one, count how many clicks it takes a reader to get from that page to a product page with an add to cart button. If the answer is more than one, or if it involves crossing to a different website, you have found the leak.
What are you already paying for, and what are you obliged to?
List every recurring cost attached to your current setup, and read your own agreement for notice periods, renewal dates and anything payable on exit. Every contract is different and yours is the only one that matters. If you are not sure what it says, ask your provider directly and get the answer in writing before you commit to anything.
The part most stores underestimate
Your content is not connected to your products. This is the one that costs the most money and shows up on no invoice.
Run specialty retailers are unusually good at content, because the content is just the business written down. Club nights, race calendars, gait analysis explainers, what to wear at 40 degrees. It earns real organic traffic from people with real intent, and it builds the kind of local authority that search engines and AI answer engines both reward.
The problem is architectural. In a lot of independent setups the content sits on one site and the shop sits somewhere else, often on a different hostname, sometimes on a different platform entirely. To a search engine those are two different properties, so the authority your content earns never flows to the products you are trying to sell. To a shopper it is worse. They read something useful, they get interested, and then they have to go and find the thing themselves.
Two properties
Guides and events on one site. Products on another. Authority stops at the boundary. The shopper has to go looking.
One property
A training guide that ends in three shoes, in stock, in their size. An event page that sells the entry and the gear. Fitting knowledge on the product page. Video where the decision is made.
Consolidating those two things onto one domain is usually the highest value outcome of the whole migration, and it is the one that gets talked about least, because it is not a feature you can screenshot.
Google Shopping is the other half of the problem
Here is a pattern we see constantly. A store is spending real money on Google, running text ads and local campaigns and occasionally video, and doing reasonably well with it. Then you search for a shoe they definitely stock, look at the Shopping results, and they are nowhere.
That is not a spending problem. It is a feed problem.
Product listings are generated from a structured product feed, and a feed is only as good as the data behind it. Titles that match how people search. Correct GTINs. Accurate availability, ideally per location. Clean category mapping. Prices that do not drift out of sync. If any of that is missing or stale, the listings either do not serve or they serve badly.
Feed follows catalogue
Fix the catalogue during the migration, which you have to do anyway, and the feed comes almost free. The other order is much harder.
One Merchant Center
Stores accumulate two or five accounts over the years. Consolidate to one you own, with everyone else as a user rather than an owner.
Local inventory
If you have seven shops and your competitor has a warehouse, showing stock nearest the shopper is an edge most independents are not using.
The migration itself, in order
This sequence is the same whatever platform you are coming from.
Step A
Audit and export
Get a complete export of your catalogue: products, variants, sizes, widths, barcodes, prices, images, descriptions, collections. Get a full list of your live URLs, your customer list and your order history. Ask your current provider for anything you cannot export yourself, and ask early, because this is usually the slowest step.
Step B
Structure the catalogue properly
This is where the real work is. Footwear is variant heavy: one model can be six colourways by fourteen sizes by three widths, which is a lot of rows and a lot of chances to get it wrong. Decide how size and width are structured, because that choice determines whether your filters can work the way a fitter thinks. Map every product to the right category. Fill the barcode gaps.
Do not skip this to save time. Everything downstream inherits it: search, filtering, the Google feed, AI answers, per store stock, all of it.
Step C
Build the store and connect the till
Stand the store up, get the theme in place, and connect your point of sale. If you are on Lightspeed R-Series there are established connectors on the Shopify App Store, including Mortar by Accumula and Modern Retail, both of which handle multi location inventory sync, order routing and returns written back to the POS. Most offer a free trial, so you can prove the sync works before committing to anything.
Run a parity check before you go near your live domain. Compare stock counts between the two systems daily for at least two weeks. Agree in advance what an acceptable variance is and what you will do if it is not met.
Step D
Map your redirects
Every URL that currently ranks needs to point at its equivalent on the new store. Product pages, collections, blog posts, event pages, the lot. This step decides whether your organic traffic survives the switch, and it is the one most often rushed, because it is tedious and feels optional right up until the moment it is catastrophic. Build the redirect map before launch, not after.
Step E
Feeds, then launch
Get Merchant Center connected and your product feed clean and approved before the domain switches, so Shopping works from day one rather than three weeks later. Then move the domain, watch Search Console closely for a fortnight, and fix what surfaces.
Step F
Then start actually selling
Everything above only gets you to parity. The gains come after: video on product pages, content properly wired to the catalogue, campaigns running against a feed that works, and the fitting expertise your staff carry in their heads showing up on the pages where people decide.
How long it takes and what it costs
Honest answer: it depends on the size and state of your catalogue, and anyone quoting you without looking at it is guessing.
As a rough shape, a single location store with a few hundred clean products is a matter of weeks. A multi location retailer with a large variant heavy catalogue, POS integration and a lot of ranking URLs is a bigger piece of work. The two variables that move the number most are how much cleaning your product data needs and how many locations have to sync.
Costs to plan for, whoever does the work
Your Shopify plan. A POS connector if you need one, typically a monthly per location or flat fee. Migration and build, either your time or someone else's. And anything payable under your existing agreement, which only you can check.
Do it yourself, or get help
You can absolutely do this yourself, and plenty of retailers have. If you are comfortable in a spreadsheet, you have someone who can own it for a few weeks, and your catalogue is in decent shape, the path above is completely walkable.
Most independents we speak to do not stall because it is too technical. They stall because it is week six, it is the middle of a season, someone is out, and the project is sitting at eighty percent done with nobody free to finish it. That is the normal failure mode, and it is worth being honest with yourself about the risk before you start.
Where we come in. Zenbundle builds and runs the online channel for independent footwear and run specialty retailers. We do the migration, the catalogue work, the POS connection, the feed, the campaigns, the shoppable video and the AI shopping assistant, as one managed service. The store is transferred into your name at the start, so you own it from day one and you keep it whether you stay with us or not.
If you would rather just do the migration and run it yourself afterwards, say so and we will tell you honestly whether you need us.
Frequently asked questions
Can I move to Shopify without losing my search rankings?
Yes, if you map your redirects properly. Every URL that currently ranks needs a one to one redirect to its equivalent on the new store before you switch the domain. Rankings usually wobble for a week or two and then settle. The stores that get hurt are the ones that launched without a redirect map.
How long does a run specialty migration take?
Weeks rather than months for most independents. The variables that matter are how clean your product data is and how many locations need to sync with your point of sale.
Do I have to change my point of sale?
No. Moving your website to Shopify does not require changing your till. Connectors exist for the major specialty POS systems, including Lightspeed R-Series, and they sync inventory, route orders and write returns back to the POS.
Will I lose my product images and descriptions?
Not if they are exported properly. For footwear specifically, most brands run a media portal you can be added to, so new releases arrive with their imagery attached rather than needing to be shot.
Can I keep selling while the new store is built?
Yes. The new store is built in parallel and stays private until it is ready. Your existing site keeps trading until the day the domain switches.
What happens to my blog and event pages?
They come across and, ideally, onto the same domain as the shop. That is usually the biggest single gain of the whole exercise, because it lets your content link directly to products and lets the authority it earns flow to the pages you are trying to sell from.
What Shopify plan does an independent running store need?
Most independent multi store retailers do fine on the mid tier plan. The things that push a retailer up a plan are staff account count, third party payment gateway fees at higher volume, and carrier calculated shipping. Work out which of those apply to you rather than defaulting to the most expensive option.
Is Zenbundle affiliated with Run Free Project?
No. Zenbundle is an official Shopify app and an independent Shopify partner, and we work with retailers moving from a range of platforms.
We will walk your catalogue with you
Thirty minutes, no charge. You leave with your barcode coverage, your owned stock split and a redirect count, whether you work with us or not.
30 min
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A note on names
Run Free Project, Lightspeed, Shopify, Google and Mortar are trademarks of their respective owners. Zenbundle is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them, and references here are for identification only. Nothing in this article is legal advice. Your own agreement with any provider is the only one that governs your situation, so read it or have it read before you make a decision.
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