Ecommerce replatforming and migration is a reality many businesses at some point will have to face. Today, competition is fiercer than it’s ever been, and ecommerce sales are continuing to grow globally at a rapid pace—from $5.8 trillion in 2023 to a projected $8 trillion by 2027.

Ecommerce businesses need to keep up with the demand and, in many cases, that means moving to a more scalable and robust platform.

The platform you choose for your ecommerce business will have a direct impact on your site’s uptime, user experience (UX), scalability, and ability to make improvements and changes in a timely manner. If your platform isn’t keeping pace with your business needs, or if you find yourself spending more time and money on maintaining your existing website than you can reasonably afford, it’s likely time to make a move.

Ecommerce migration has historically been viewed as a time-consuming and costly burden. And without the proper plan and execution strategy, it can be. This guide will walk you through how to effectively navigate ecommerce replatforming and migration so you can set your business up for future success.

Table of contents

What is ecommerce replatforming?
Ecommerce site migration statistics
8 things to consider before replatforming
11 steps for replatforming your ecommerce site
Why do ecommerce businesses replatform?
Ecommerce platforms and types to consider
Creating your ecommerce replatforming plan
Ecommerce replatforming and migration checklist
Data migration services and ecommerce replatforming

What is ecommerce replatforming?

Ecommerce replatforming is the process of transferring an entire online store from one platform to another. It involves moving product data, customer information, design elements, and other relevant components. This migration is typically done to upgrade the old platform, enhance features, improve performance, or accommodate business growth.

Some of the most common reasons to replatform an ecommerce store include:

Improving site operation and speed
Adding new features and functionalities that are not available on the existing platform
Experimenting with new business models or ecommerce infrastructure
Adding more elements to the customer experience, such as localization or personalization

Replatforming does not always mean moving your store from one service partner to another. Many store owners transition from a SaaS platform to their own in-house infrastructure, or vice versa.

In general, there are three types of ecommerce replatforming and migration:

Platform to platform. This includes switching from one monolithic ecommerce solution to another that offers more features or integrations. This could be a switch between cloud, SaaS, or on-premise solutions. For example, migrating from a software like Magento (now Adobe Commerce) or BigCommerce to Shopify Plus.
Phased migration. This might include transitioning your store in different stages, rather than all at once. For example, you could transition to a different CMS, while still keeping some elements of your existing tech stack.
Monolithic to microservices. This is a plug-and-play technique that lets you layer platforms and third-party apps on top of each other to cover different parts of the customer or product journey. This might be a consideration for online stores operating under a headless commerce model.

There are endless variations of the three types of migration mentioned above. Each project template is different and will require a unique plan to ensure you check off all of your ecommerce replatforming project requirements and business goals.

Replatforming is successful when done well. The high-end fashion and sports brand J.Lindeberg migrated to Shopify Plus in 16 weeks. By leveraging the platform's capabilities to improve brand presentation and customer engagement, they increased revenue by 70% and conversion rate by 7%.

As a result, the brand was able to showcase its fashion and sports collections more efficiently, leading to an improved shopping experience and an increase in average order value.

👉 Read J.Lindeberg’s story.

Ecommerce site migration statistics

In the Digital Commerce 360 report, 76% of B2B ecommerce sellers and 27% of the retailers surveyed said they’re actively looking to switch commerce platforms within the next year.

This growing sense of urgency to migrate to modern online platforms correlates directly with the increasing percentage of internet users who purchase online regularly. As of 2023, 56.1% of working-age internet users globally now buy something online every week.

graph showing the latest online shopping statistics — *Data Reportal*

To keep up with this demand, businesses are looking to cloud and SaaS ecommerce solutions that can help them scale and improve the following factors, which significantly impact customer loyalty and sales rates:

User experience: Mobile devices account for 78% of ecommerce traffic, but most sales still take place on desktop. This means that online businesses need to use a platform that lets them provide an optimal UX on mobile or desktop and makes it easy for users to buy on any device.
Payment options: In 2022, digital and mobile wallets accounted for about half of global ecommerce payment transactions, a figure that’s expected to grow to over 54% by 2026. The digital wallet is by far the most popular global online payment method. If your current online store platform cannot currently accept digital wallet payments, it’s likely you’re missing out on potential sales.
Cost: Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the Digital Commerce 360 report said they expect to pay between $25,001 and $500,000 to transition to a new ecommerce system. That’s on top of the internal resources and time commitments needed to carry out the ecommercesite migration.
Checkout and conversion rates: Cart abandonment remains a major issue for ecommerce businesses in 2024, with the average reported cart abandonment rate of 70.19%. A “too long or complicated checkout process” was cited by 18% of surveyed users as their reason for dropping off, and 14% listed “website errors or crashes.”
Site speed: Slow-loading websites also increase cart abandonment rates by as much as 75%.

The majority of these issues, particularly poor checkout experience, website uptime, and site speed, can be directly addressed by migrating to a modern ecommerce platform. In fact, ecommerce sites can gain a 35% increase in conversion rates by optimizing their checkout design alone.

Ecommerce platform migration can be expensive and time-consuming, but you can manage cost and time properly with a carefully thought-out migration plan. This, combined with the future benefits of migrating to another platform, should outweigh the upfront costs.

8 things to consider before replatforming your ecommerce business

Whether this is your first time replatforming an ecommerce website or not, there are several factors to consider before getting started.

1. Intended business outcome

Most organizations consider replatforming when they’re introducing new products, regions, or payment methods, scaling their businesses, or when they have several issues to resolve all at once.

Whatever your reason, replatforming won’t be worth investing time, money, and effort in if there’s no significant improvement in terms of design, functionality, performance, and output.

Replatforming is a long-term investment. So, develop clear migration objectives and pick a replatforming solution that can meet those requirements and can adapt to future market changes before you start the process.

2. Costs

Ecommerce replatforming and migration costs vary depending on the complexity of the transition.

Variables that influence the pricing include:

Ecommerce platform
Type of migration and whether you’ll do the job yourself or outsource it
Down-time during transfer
Testing and launching
Performance monitoring
Maintenance of the new platform
Staff training

Determine and project these costs and plan your replatforming exercise around them.

3. Platform features and functionality

You’re not just migrating to another platform because of its design, but majorly for what it can do for you. Compare the features and capabilities modern ecommerce platforms offer compared to your current one, then pick one with the key features and functionality your business needs.

4. Seamless integrations

Your existing ecommerce platform would already integrate with plugins, extensions, and apps that ensure core functions, such as your CRM, marketing, sales, and payments work properly.

So, choose a platform that fits in seamlessly into your existing infrastructure and supports the integrations in place without worrying about performance loss. For example, if your sales app works well, the platform you’re shifting to should integrate seamlessly with the app and other enterprise systems without affecting its performance.

Plus, if you need to switch integrations, conduct a thorough audit of your tech stack to ensure they’re compatible on the new platform, and that the data transfer is automated and secure.

5. Your team’s technical skills and expertise

Replatforming is a major organizational shift that requires all hands on deck. It isn’t just on developers to execute it.

From marketing to finance to IT to content, you’ll need to involve your entire team and ensure they have the necessary technical skills to take the process forward. This way, you’ll minimize the time and effort needed to carry out the replatforming and adjust to the new system.

6. Customer support

You might have a fantastic team on-board, but it’ll take a responsive, knowledgeable, and friendly customer support team to collect customer feedback and solve errors quickly and properly when they arise, for a smooth migration process.

Ensure the ecommerce platform you choose offers 24/7 support via multiple channels, including email, phone, live chat, knowledge-base articles, and tutorials, so you can get the help and answers you need to keep your store running.

7. Replatform and migration timing

The time you choose to replatform and migrate can impact your conversions and revenue.

While there’s never one ideal time to replatform, it’s usually best carried out during slow periods, like off-peak hours or when your site experiences low traffic. That way, you can minimize downtime or disruptions and check for any problems or errors that may arise with the least impact on your business’s performance.

8. Long-term impact and future changes

Replatforming is a long-term investment. Think about the potential impact on the business, future market changes, and potential disruptors.

11 steps for replatforming your ecommerce site

Ecommerce replatforming and migration are two interchangeable terms that mean the same thing: moving your store from one platform to another. The scope of this project—including costs, resources, timeline, and steps—will vary depending on the size and complexity of your ecommerce business.

A successful migration, however, will follow a fairly formulaic process that includes:

Identify your replatforming needs and priorities
Gathering stakeholders
Shopping for a new ecommerce platform
Planning the ecommerce platform migration
Backing up your store’s data
Designing and developing the new ecommerce site
Migrating store data
Optimizing the checkout experience
Conducting an SEO audit pre-launch
Testing (and more testing)
Launching the website

Let’s dig into each in more detail.

1. Identifying your replatforming needs and priorities

Review your current platform to identify any missing features, gaps, areas of improvement, and the benefits and potential drawbacks of replatforming. Then, list the replatforming requirements, including the labor needs, cost outlay, and timelines to complete the task.

2. Gathering stakeholders

Ecommerce replatforming is a collaborative business process that involves both doers and decision-makers. Bring these people together—everyone whom the ecommerce site migration impacts—and present your case for why a replatforming project is necessary.

When doing so, be sure to explain the following:

What you can’t do with your current platform
What activities currently cost you the most time
What could be automated to save time and resources
Any ongoing issues with the platform that cause lost revenue
An estimate of internal resource waste caused by these issues
Barriers to innovation, store growth, and positive customer experience caused by your current system
How a different type of ecommerce platform can alleviate all of the above
Potential replatforming and migration risks, what to expect during and after, and why

Every case will be unique. Compile as complete a list as possible that demonstrates to key decision makers why your current platform isn’t cutting it today, and why that’s a problem for the future.

If your stakeholders agree that using a different platform is the right solution, the next step is to agree on what you’re looking for in a new solution.

To do this, you should identify:

Must-have features, customizations, and integrations
Existing issues that you’d like to fix and prevent in the future
Functionalities that you need in the future
Workflows that can be automated
Data that needs to be migrated (i.e., products, existing customers, orders, etc.)
Resource requirements to support the phased migration
The ideal timeframe to start and complete the migration

An external agency partner is a helpful resource throughout this complex process and can help guide your conversations and decision-making from an early stage.

3. Shopping for a new ecommerce platform

Next up is the discovery phase, where you shop around for other platforms. Sites like G2 Crowd, Capterra, and Gartner are helpful resources when compiling your initial list of vendors. You might also want to consider sending out a request for proposal (RFP) with your list of requirements to help extend your reach and reduce the workload.

Make a shortlist of five or six ecommerce platforms that you’re considering and set up exploratory calls with each.

During those calls, ask questions like:

How much does the migration cost?
How long does migration take?
What does the migration process entail?
How does your team support the migration process?
What type of ongoing customer support do you offer?
Can you share any stats on your platform’s speed and uptime?
How effectively does your platform scale as more products, sales, and traffic are added?
How do you ensure my data is safe during migration?
What type of security and compliance does your platform have in place?
Can you share a list of out-of-the-box integrations you offer? What can we do if we need integrations that aren’t currently supported?

Add any questions to this list that relate to your specific business requirements. Track the answers to these questions in a shared document so that your team members can effectively weigh potential vendors collaboratively.

4. Planning the migration

Once you’ve selected an ecommerce partner, the next step is to establish a realistic scope of work and timeline for your migration. When doing so, you should map out all key milestones, and resources required for each.

Most migrations will require you to plan sub-projects to tackle the following:

Creating a new website hierarchy
Migrating content
Auditing and deleting existing content
Front-end design
Back-end development
Pre- and post-launch training
Search engine optimization (SEO) migration planning

Data migration is also a critical element in the planning phase. This is when you’ll determine what data needs to be transferred, and how it will be safely moved from one platform to the other. Data migration can be completed using a third-party service, API plug-in, app, or manual CSV transfer. Talk to your agency or solution provider about the best option for your replatforming project.

5. Backing up your store’s data

Moving volumes of data from one platform to another is tricky, and things do sometimes go wrong—even when you’ve got a detailed plan.

Before replatforming, crawl your store to catalog all your existing content and account for all the data you’re migrating to the new platform.

Review your content and determine what you need and what to remove, like older, outdated, non-SEO-optimized pieces. This will save you the headache of cleaning up content and ensure you transfer only up-to-date content that’s valuable, relevant, and current.

Then, back up your current business data, including catalogs, customer profile and order/purchase data, and current ecommerce functionality. Doing this will minimize downtime and disruption to customers and have data to revert back to in case things go awry.

Note where your data is currently stored, whether you can access it during replatforming, and where it will sit in the new ecommerce platform.

6. Designing and developing the new site

The design and development phase will likely take up the bulk of your time and resources. This is where your designers and experienced development team will go to work and create the front and back ends of your new ecommerce store. It’s also where all of the data that you migrated over will be loaded into your new website redesign.

If there are significant changes you’d like to make to your website’s navigation, content, UX, design, or back-end functionality, now is the time to do it.

7. Migrating store data

If you have the technical skills and experience, you can manually migrate your store’s data yourself.

Alternatively, use a migration app or hire a third-party migration service to do it for you. Ensure the provider you use has experience migrating the platforms you’re switching from and to, and can handle the entire migration accurately and securely.

Then, migrate your data from your old store to the new one.

8. Optimizing the checkout experience

Depending on your selected platform, you may also have the opportunity to customize and optimize your checkout experience. Connect any third party checkout apps you may be using in your existing system to another platform, and optimize the user flow as much as possible.

This is a good time to ensure that the new checkout experience matches the best practices you laid out early in the planning phase. The goal is to ensure that the new experience is fast, secure, and efficient for your customers.

9. Conducting an SEO audit prior to launch

Ecommerce replatforming is not without its risks from an SEO perspective. Any time you move a website from one platform to another, you’re likely to run into a wide variety of variables that may negatively (or positively) impact your search rankings in the short term.

To mitigate that risk, make sure that you:

Audit your existing content, and remove old and duplicate content
Create a detailed redirect plan that maps pages on a one-to-one basis
Ensure that any new web content is optimized appropriately with your keyword targets
Migrate all metadata and schema markups from your old site (and optimize it, if needed)

Once your site is launched, continue to monitor your organic traffic, search rankings, and technical SEO profile through tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. Keep an eye out for things like 404 errors, site speed issues, and any other red flag that pops up that might indicate compromised performance.

10. Testing (and more testing)

Before you launch, run multiple tests of the site navigation, checkout experience, front- and back-end website functionality, and product selection process. The more scenarios you can test, the more bugs and hidden issues you’re likely to uncover. This will ensure that your new store is in the best possible state come launch day.

When doing so, run your site through a performance auditing tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to ensure all of your pages are loading and behaving as expected. This will help ensure that there are no speed or usability issues when you launch.

Depending on the size of your store, you will likely want to have numerous people analyze your site from a business and customer perspective. Ask internal stakeholders in your organization to work in the back end of your site and complete specific tasks. Do the same on the customer side. You may even want to consider giving beta or early access to some of your most loyal customers. Gather all of this feedback and work it into your final tweaks before launch.

11. Launching the website

The actual launch of your website should be fairly straight forward. Plan your launch window to minimize disruption to your customers. If possible, work with your agency or solutions partner to create a launch checklist in advance so that you can work through tasks in sequential order.

🏅 Replatforming case study: Morrison increases conversions by 15% and physical sales by 10% thanks to Shopify Plus

Why do ecommerce businesses replatform?

Ecommerce businesses replatform for a wide variety of different reasons, most of which are determined by factors unique to that company. Generally, the motivating factors are either a desire to avoid specific issues or gain specific functionalities (or a combination of the two).

Ecommerce businesses may be looking to avoid or find a solution to:

Poor site performance
Website speed and responsiveness issues
Functionality gaps in their existing platform
Poor admin or back end
Time-consuming and costly maintenance
Poor UX
Mounting technical debt
Lack of platform innovation
Lack of scalability
Unreliable ecommerce infrastructure

Additionally, those same online businesses may be looking to gain the following:

Improved scalability
Better customer experience
Modern integrations and apps
Convenience, security, and affordability
Customized and optimized checkout experiences
Better tracking and analytics
Easier site maintenance and upgrades
Better site and data security

“Ecommerce companies may shift their online presence to a different platform to scale their business and create a better user experience,” says Alexandra Fennel, co-founder and CEO of Attn: Grace. “They choose to replatform when their current provider experiences regular technical issues that harm conversion rates, or when it cannot develop fast enough to keep up with the competition.”

By doing so, says Monte Deere, CEO of Kizik, the business also expands their credibility in the eyes of their customers. “Who’s not impressed with a company—and trusts it more—if an ecommerce platform is just as stylish and intuitive as Apple’s?” asks Deere.

Compromised website speed leading to lost sales was precisely the motivation that Bombas needed to kick start its own migration to Shopify Plus.

Having grown its revenue from $300,000 in 2013 to $4.7 million in 2015, Bombas founders David and Andrew Hath landed a deal with Daymond John on Shark Tank. That was the good news. The bad news was that, because of that success, their website received way more traffic and demand that it could handle—4,000 transactions per day, up from just 500.

Product images broke, customers couldn’t check out, and losses climbed to $15,000 in just a few minutes. That was all the convincing David needed to migrate the Bombas site over to Shopify Plus. The process was time-intensive, and cost about $150,000, but the effort has paid off.

The business and customer experience is better for Bombas and its customers, and the migration saved an estimated $108,000 in platform costs in the first year alone. For the team at Bombas, the catalyst for replatforming was unreliable infrastructure leading to lost revenue, and the payoff was scalability, innovation, and near immediate positive return on investment.

Ecommerce platforms and types to consider

Ecommerce platforms can be broken into three key types, each of which has its own benefits and challenges. The type of platform you choose will have a significant impact on your ongoing expenses, maintenance requirements, and scalability.

SaaS

SaaS ecommerce platforms are subscription-based solutions built and maintained by a third-party provider. Businesses essentially rent the software from the service provider, without the need to build or develop any of their own infrastructure.

Growing ecommerce stores, or those that prioritize ease-of-use and reliability, should strongly consider a SaaS solution. The long-term cost of SaaS ecommerce is much lower than the other two options, and all of the burden of dealing with technical issues, downtime, and security are placed on a third party.

The benefits of SaaS ecommerce platforms include:

Lower cost than on-premise or cloud
No full-time technical staff required to maintain servers or security
Access to ongoing support and success management
Dedicated infrastructure that scales as your business grows
Fully PCI DSS compliant out of the box
Extensive integrations and third-party apps
Automatic software and security updates
Faster store launches

Shopify Plus is an example of a SaaS ecommerce solution.

On-premise

On-premise ecommerce platforms are built with the company’s own resources and hosted in an internal storage facility. Internal or third-party development and engineering teams conduct all of the development and ongoing maintenance, and are responsible for a technical and security infrastructure.

The benefits of on-premise ecommerce solutions include:

Complete control over and direct access to the website code and hardware
Complete control over platform and network security
The ability to make highly customized and granular optimizations to the site

While on-premise legacy systems are a great option for teams with deep technical bench strength, they are also quite costly, averaging $200,000 per year or more for mid-market ecommerce retailers. Plus there are ongoing infrastructure costs, employee salaries, and third-party assistance, when needed.

The performance, backups, uptime, security, and scalability of the site also rests on the internal team’s shoulders, meaning it can be hard to quickly pivot to account for peak seasons and new market opportunities.

Cloud

Cloud ecommerce platforms are a hybrid between the SaaS and on-premise solution, and use an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model. That is, the business hosts its ecommerce website in the cloud through a provider like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

While cloud ecommerce platform vendors rent the storage and hardware infrastructure from a third-party provider, they are in charge of developing and maintaining the core ecommerce platform.

The benefits of cloud ecommerce solutions include:

Avoiding the need to buy or lease expensive infrastructure
Easy data backups and scalability during peak times
Piggybacking on the security of major IaaS providers
The ability to modify and optimize the platform’s source code
Complete customizability over features, user experience, and back-end functionality

While cloud ecommerce platforms are less resource intensive than on-premise, they still carry a hefty price tag at $170,000 per year, on average. Companies will need to pay licensing fees for IaaS infrastructure, and will still need a highly technical team to develop and maintain their ecommerce website.

Creating your ecommerce replatforming plan

Planning your ecommerce replatforming is the most important part of the entire project. Without proper planning you run the risk of missing important steps, running beyond your time and budget constraints, and making costly mistakes that can harm your business.

“The biggest risk with ecommerce migration is not planning properly,” says Nathan Lomax, co-founder of Quickfire Digital. “Trying to replatform in too short a period of time causes problems further down the track, valuable data is in danger of being lost, search visibility can be hit hard, and you end up in an extended period, post-launch, of trying to fix what should have been dealt with easily in advance,” he says.

To avoid costly mistakes, make sure to focus your planning around these five key considerations.

Look at your business needs

It’s critical that you have a thorough understanding of your business’s needs and requirements for the new platform. And that understanding needs to be inclusive of all key stakeholders and future requirements for your company.

“Typically, successful ecommerce programs involve numerous departments,” explains Kevin Patel, CEO of Convrrt. “Ensure that every requirement has been captured by reaching out to all collaborators in your organization. You should compose a list of today’s essentials and wants, and a list of features that may be required in the future.”

To do so, take stock of all of the issues and constraints that you’re facing with your current ecommerce platform. What can you not do? How much does it cost you to maintain your current solution? What is the estimated loss of sales and wastage caused by the issues with your current ecommerce platform? How much will that cost in the future if there’s no intervention?

As you work through these questions, jot down a list of goals you want to achieve, and when you want to achieve them. This will give you a good roadmap for what you need to upgrade on your old platform, and by when. As you think about migrating to another platform, focus on areas where you business can win, and make sure your chosen platform can keep up as you innovate.

If ecommerce replatforming is the right decision for your company, it’s also important to go into the process with eyes wide open.

“It’s often a costly process, since you’re giving up your investment with the original platform,” explains Fennell. “It requires new training for your employees, and it impacts customer data, which could lead to a confusing and frustrating user experience. If you have to switch platforms, map out what areas of your business will be adversely impacted to optimize operations and avoid going offline.”

Develop an RFP

RFPs are a great way to solidify your company’s intentions and requirements for the right ecommerce platform internally, before starting conversations with external vendors. By doing so, you can objectively examine and evaluate prospective solutions on your own terms. RFPs also help to focus the conversations you have with prospective vendors around the platform capabilities and issues that are most impactful for your business.

Your ecommerce RFP can be as detailed or as general as you like. The more specific you get with your requirements, the more tailored the pitches are likely to be from prospective vendors. Keep in mind, however, that RFPs can also cause some vendors to drop out of consideration, even if they may be a partially suitable contender.

When creating your RFP, think about and record your answers to questions like:

Why are you migrating and how soon do you want to relaunch?
What are your goals?
At peak volumes, what volume of traffic, checkouts, and sales do you experience?
How do you currently implement design, product, and UX changes?
What sales channels do you use?
What is your current approach to international commerce?
Do you have any specialized customization or product configurations?
What are your current operating costs?
What are the major competitors or brands that you admire?
What third-party tools, in-house software, and outside partners would you consider “must-keep”? Which are you looking to either replace or begin implementing?

Know your total cost of ownership

Evaluating the total cost of ownership for all ecommerce platforms you’re evaluating is critical to ensuring that you make the right business decision for your company.

In addition to upfront purchase prices, platforms may also require the following investments to get up and running:

Infrastructure
Maintenance
In-house developers, designers, architects, and systems engineers
Surcharges due to traffic peaks
Ongoing fixes, testing, improvements, etc.
Hosting
Security patches and upgrades
User acceptance testing
Performance and load testing
Custom checkouts

Additionally, you likely will also have to account for replatforming and ongoing maintenance costs such as:

Migrating data
Cost of downtime
Retraining employees on a different platform
Additional licenses for product or feature upgrades
Regular website maintenance
UX, navigation, and site structure enhancements
Content development and management
Site customization
Custom app creation
General website maintenance
Site security
Monthly hosting

This is where understanding the nuances of each type of ecommerce platform is important. On-premise and cloud platforms will have many additional expenses that increase your total cost of ownership, beyond the initial licensing fees.

SaaS, on the other hand, bundles a lot of these fees into the core licensing agreement. Shopify Plus, for example, removes entire cost structures from the equation by ensuring that most of the mission-critical features you need are built into the platform.

Make sure that you clearly map out all additional and ongoing costs associated with each platform provider you’re considering. The cost of migration, plus licensing and ongoing maintenance fees, equals your total cost of ownership.

Understand which integrations are necessary

Before selecting another ecommerce platform, it’s also helpful to take stock of all of the technologies you currently use, and which ones need to integrate with your new solution.

For example, you may need to integrate your existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, a customer relationship management software (CRM), or marketing automation software into your new store. Each prospective ecommerce partner should be able to tell you what is possible out of the box, and what might require additional work and investment. In some cases, there may be an alternate ecommerce app that could be a cost-effective alternative to your current solution.

This is also an excellent time to evaluate your entire tech stack to identify what must be transferred over and what could be removed.

Determine how data will be transferred

Transferring data is one of the most important and sensitive parts of the ecommerce replatforming process. You want to ensure that all mission-critical customer and product data is transferred safely, accurately, and in the correct format.

There are four ways that data can be transferred from one ecommerce platform to another.

image of Shopify's importer app for website replatforming — *Shopify Importer App*

When migrating your ecommerce data, be sure to make a backup before starting the transfer. It’s also good practice to turn off customer notifications on the receiving platform to ensure that customers don’t receive emails or messages about historical orders.

For busy ecommerce sites, a delta migration is also a good idea. This is a secondary data import that you do right before launching your new site to account for new orders and customers that were added to your previous site after your initial data transfer.

Meet with all of the right people

While it can be tempting to bring on a large team of people to help with an ecommerce migration, this can actually complicate the process and make it unclear who is responsible for what.

Instead, you should be deliberate about who is involved in the process. For a large scale ecommerce replatforming project this might include:

Internal stakeholders
Platform partners
In-house marketing teams
In-house IT teams
Search and marketing agencies
Ecommerce agencies
A migration consultant

Nathan Lomax from Quickfire Digital recommends that you be ultra clear on who is responsible for what from the very start of the planning process.

“When multiple agencies and internal teams are involved, it increases the chances for tasks to slip through the net. Get your very best project manager on the case to keep everything—and everyone—on track,” says Lomax.

Depending on your chosen ecommerce partner, they may have in-house experts to help with project managing your migration. If not, consider partnering with a migration consultant to help you determine who should be involved, and everyone’s role.

Ecommerce replatforming and migration checklist

It should be evident by now that ecommerce replatforming is a time-intensive process with a lot of moving parts and stakeholders. To make the process easier to follow, here is a simple ecommerce migration checklist.

Audit your current ecommerce site and take stock of all issues
Gather your key stakeholders and explain why an ecommerce migration is necessary
Define your business needs, platform requirements and long-term goals for your new platform
Create a request for proposal or proactively evaluate potential ecommerce solutions
Plan your migration and create a pre-launch plan that includes:

Data and content migration
Data organization
New page and content creation
Site navigation and hierarchy
Front- and back-end design
Responsive design
Integrations mapping
Staff training

Create an SEO plan that includes:

Technical SEO considerations
Redirect mapping
Traffic and KPI benchmarking
Traffic and KPI monitoring post-launch
How you’ll measure issues like 404 errors, traffic drops, and ranking changes

Create a launch plan that includes:

Extensive testing of all website functionality, links, checkout experience, etc., prior to launch
The exact time the new site will be going live
Who will be on call to initiate the site launch and troubleshoot issues
Logging into your domain registrar and changing the time-to-live (TTL) setting to the lowest value possible to ensure fast propagation on launch day
Launching your site via your domain name system (DNS) on launch day
Locking down your old store when making DNS changes
A contingency plan if anything breaks in the process

Create a post-launch plan that includes:

Monitoring and testing checkout functionality
Monitoring and testing email confirmations and notifications
Monitoring and testing analytics and reporting functionality
A technical audit to ensure the XML site map is transferred and that your analytics and tracking codes are working
Ongoing traffic and search rankings monitoring
Double check that email links and downloadable assets are still working
Ensure that user flows for downloads and newsletter signups are still working

Data migration services and ecommerce replatforming

As mentioned, ecommerce data migration is a critical component of the replatforming process. Depending on the scope and complexity of your migration, you may need a combination of technical skills and project management tools to help to complete this process.

Here are some tools and options available to businesses looking to migrate to Shopify Plus.

Third-party migration apps

The Shopify App Store offers a variety of apps to transfer data from one ecommerce platform to your Shopify store. These apps move product listings, customer data, order history, and other relevant information. They help make the migration process as easy as possible.

image of the shopify app store with migration apps

👉 Use third-party migration apps from the Shopify App Store.

APIs

If your ecommerce business is large enough to have internal developers—or if you have the budget to hire some externally—then you can create and use an API to transfer your data. This is a great option for large stores with lots of data that need to have it transferred over to a new platform quickly.

Bulk Account Invite Sender

The Bulk Account Invite Sender app is only available on a Shopify Plus plan. It lets businesses bulk invite customers to re-activate their accounts on your new online store, post-migration.

This is an invaluable tool to add to your post-launch checklist, and will let you quickly rebuild your database of customer accounts quickly.

bulk invite sender email example — *Bulk Invite Sender App*

Agency partners

Third-party agency partners via Shopify Partners is a great option for companies with limited internal resources, technical know-how, or budget. These agencies will work with you to create a custom ecommerce migration plan that accounts for all of your current and future needs.

As an example, Great Little Trading Company enlisted London-based ecommerce expert Underwaterpistol to help it manage the migration of everything from user experience and design to SEO optimization, and the data for 800 products and 1.1 million customer records.

Ecommerce Replatforming FAQ

What is ecommerce replatforming and migration?

Ecommerce replatforming and migration are interchangeable terms for the process of moving the front end and/or the back end of your online business from one platform to another. This includes moving everything that lives on the original platform to the new one, such as products, collections, pages, blog posts, and customer and order information.

What are the steps to an ecommerce migration?

Every ecommerce migration is different, but the most common steps include: Identifying your replatforming needs and priorities, gathering stakeholders, shopping for a new platform, backing up your store data, designing and developing the new ecommerce site, optimizing the checkout experience, conducting an SEO audit prior to launch, testing, and launching the website.

Why do ecommerce businesses replatform?

Businesses switch ecommerce store platforms to either avoid or find a solution to a specific issue, or to gain specific benefits and functionalities from a new provider. Common issues that businesses want to avoid include poor site performance, slow site speed, a general lack of functionality, time-consuming administration and maintenance, poor user experience, and a lack of scalability. Migrating to a new platform can help businesses gain improved scalability, better customer experience, technological innovation, better security, customer and personalized user experience, and affordability.

Which are the 4 phases of ecommerce?

The 4 phases of ecommerce are:

Introduction: This is the phase where businesses start to explore and experiment with ecommerce as an additional sales channel. Often during this phase, ecommerce is experimental in nature. This phase is characterized by businesses taking the initial plunge into online sales with the development of websites and simple ecommerce solutions such as shopping carts on the website. They may rely on search engines like Google to drive traffic to the site, or email to contact customers.
Expansion: The expansion phase sees businesses gradually acquire a better understanding of ecommerce and its potential to transform the way they do business. In this phase, businesses invest in the development of more sophisticated ecommerce solutions, increasing their online presence and focusing on driving traffic to their sites using SEO, social media, and search engine marketing strategies. This stage is characterized by businesses exploring various ecommerce tools to increase sales and taking a more proactive approach to marketing their products online.
Maturity: The maturity phase sees businesses utilizing ecommerce fully and optimizing their online channels to drive revenue growth. This phase is characterized by the use of analytics tools to track and analyze customer behavior, advanced ecommerce technologies such as personalized promotions and email marketing automation, and more targeted digital marketing.
Reinvention: The reinvention phase is characterized by the introduction of new customer engagement models, such as mobile and social commerce. Businesses continue to adapt to changing consumer behavior and technology trends, such as the rise of mobile devices and social media platforms. Companies re-evaluate and reinvest in their ecommerce strategy, and seek to improve customer engagement and experience.

Brendan McConnell