A clean cross-platform handoff for a heritage nonprofit's online store.
Migrated Bodie Foundation’s online store from Ecwid to Shopify, set up the shop subdomain and DNS, and verified SSL with zero merchant downtime.
PROOF SO FAR
A focused four-hour technical engagement. Stats reflect operational outcomes from the migration itself, not multi-month growth.
The situation
Bodie Foundation preserves the Bodie ghost town in California's Eastern Sierra, an authentic 1880s mining settlement that now runs as a state historic park. Their online merchandise store was on Ecwid and they wanted it moved to Shopify, with the public shop link living at shop.bodiefoundation.org. The main site stayed on Squarespace. Three live platforms, one registrar, one piece of plumbing to connect them without breaking the rest of the setup.
This was not a redesign. It is a small, careful operations job. The public site, the shop, and the domain all had to keep working together so the foundation still read as what it actually is: a regional nonprofit tied to a real place. Plumbing work, treated with the same care as the page itself.
The work
Credentials and access intake
Squarespace, Ecwid, Shopify, GoDaddy. Confirmed scope, mapped how the handoff actually had to flow, and surfaced password issues early so they didn't sit waiting to derail the cutover.
Shopify subdomain and GoDaddy DNS
Added shop.bodiefoundation.org as a custom domain inside Shopify, then wrote the matching CNAME record into GoDaddy pointing to shops.myshopify.com. The new executive director ran the final DNS step herself with a five-minute step-by-step.
Verification and cutover
SSL provisioned automatically, the subdomain went live globally inside the hour, store link operational. The Squarespace site was untouched. Zero merchant downtime, start to finish.
Three decisions that mattered
Decision 01. Don't migrate what works.
The Squarespace site was doing its job. The brief said move the shop, not consolidate platforms. We could have pitched a Shopify-on-everything rebuild and billed the bigger engagement, the kind of full web design and build the studio runs when a business actually needs one. We did the smaller, cleaner thing instead. The foundation kept its public site, the merchant flow got better, and the appetite for a rebuild stayed in the bank for a moment, when it would actually serve the work.
Decision 02. Cutover with zero downtime, not a maintenance window.
Most platform moves come with a "site under maintenance" page and a billed evening. We timed this one so the new Shopify subdomain was provisioned and SSL-verified before any DNS pointed at it, then flipped the CNAME and let propagation handle the rest. Customers never saw the transition. The old store stayed reachable right up to the moment nothing needed it anymore.
Decision 03. Documentation over dependency.
The original executive director moved on partway through the project. The DNS step was written up in plain language so the incoming ED could finish it without booking a second engagement. The handoff ended when the foundation could run the playbook themselves, not when the billable hours ran out.
What it moved
The shop subdomain went live with full SSL and zero merchant downtime. The cutover slid past customers unnoticed, and the old store stayed reachable until the new one took over.
What it set up
The shop has been live and quietly running since launch. The natural next layers are merchandise expansion as the foundation's preservation work grows, seasonal content tied to the historic park, and a future platform escape if and when one becomes a real need instead of a vendor's idea. A small, well-handled handoff that left the foundation with cleaner plumbing and the documentation to make the next platform decision on their own terms, without a vendor on speed-dial.