Ecommerce Migration
What we've learned so far
A migration is not a technology project, it is a transfer of a working business from one set of foundations to another while it keeps trading. What you are buying is continuity. The catalogue, the customer accounts, the order history and the search rankings arrive on the other side, and the week after go-live looks like the week before it in traffic, in orders and in support volume.
It has to be done properly because the downside is asymmetric. Industry analysis puts the cost of a poorly executed migration at 20 to 40 percent of organic traffic, with six to twelve months to recover, and the variable that decides it is coverage: whether every indexed URL was mapped before cutover. We have learned to build that map from what actually earns traffic rather than from the sitemap, because the sitemap is the store's idea of itself and the search console export is the truth. The second underestimated line item is integrations. Products move cleanly. Customers, orders and subscriptions carry history the old platform modelled differently, and every connected system, ERP, payments, shipping, email, has to be rebuilt rather than moved. That rebuild is frequently the largest cost in the project and the most common reason dates slip.
AI has made the mechanical parts faster: mapping fields, transforming data, generating redirect rules and rebuilding a front end. It has not made verification optional, and that is where migrations are won. We rehearse against production data, reconcile record by record, and hold the launch date until the numbers agree. Speed is useful here mainly because it buys more rehearsals, not fewer.
What this can involve
Mapping custom fields
Auditing plugins and finding replacements
Rebuilding pricing rules
Moving multi-language content
Reconfiguring payments, tax and shipping
Mapping URL redirects
Reporting and Insight Reviews
Technical SEO Audit
ETL and Data Pipelines
Data Migration Services
Shopify ERP Integration
ERP Integration Services
Database Architecture
Shopify Theme Development
Ecommerce Store Audit
Technical Discovery
Information Architecture Services
How we work
Establish what you are actually leaving
Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Wix, a headless stack or something built in-house a decade ago. Platforms with export tools are a different project from a custom database nobody has documented, and the estimate depends entirely on which one you have.
Get the data out, whatever it takes
Where there is a supported export we use it. Where there is not, we read the schema directly and work out what the tables mean, which on a bespoke platform is most of the discovery effort and the part generic migration tools cannot do at all.
Count the integrations before the products
ERP, payments, shipping, email, subscriptions, anything custom. Each gets rebuilt rather than moved, and the number of them predicts the timeline far better than the size of the catalogue does.
Find the logic living inside the platform
Heavily customised stores hold pricing rules, promotions and checkout behaviour in the platform itself rather than in a system that travels. That behaviour has to be identified, and then either reproduced, replaced with an app or deliberately dropped.
Build the URL map from what earns traffic
Search Console rather than the sitemap. The sitemap is the store's idea of itself. The export is what people actually reach, including the pages nobody remembered existed.
Rehearse, reconcile, then set the date
Full runs against production data, with counts, financial totals and sampled records checked against the source. The launch date follows the numbers agreeing rather than the other way round.
Where this isn't the right fit
If your catalogue is small, your integrations are few and both platforms have supported import tools, run it yourself. This work earns its cost where the connected systems, the custom logic and the ranking history are worth protecting, not on a clean move between two platforms that already speak to each other.
If the store is heavily customised and you expect the new platform to behave identically, the expectation is the problem rather than the migration. Some of what your current setup does will have to be rebuilt differently or dropped, and that conversation belongs at the start. If the destination is undecided, settle it first. Moving off a platform and choosing what to move onto are separate decisions, and the second one changes the cost of the first.
If you are also replacing the ERP or rebranding, sequence them. Two changes at once means that when something goes wrong, nobody can tell which one caused it.
