FREE WORKBOOK. NO DEMO REQUIRED.
eCommerce migration checklist, cost model and vendor scorecard
47 checks across nine phases, a three-year TCO model across three architectures, and a scorecard that ranks four platforms, ours included. Built as the working file for the team running the move.
CUSTOMERS WHO MIGRATED
Four moves, four different business cases
Clark Rubber, from Shopify Plus
One storefront for the whole franchise network, not sixty. Stock is visible across every store, and each order is dispatched from the nearest one that can actually fulfil it. Live since 2022.
Save a Life, from three systems to one
Courses are the product. Catalogue, checkout, assessments and certificates now run on one platform, replacing WordPress, a standalone LMS and a separate store. Live since 2024.
Direct Chemist Outlet, from Shopify
A franchised pharmacy network selling to consumers and business customers from one site. Every store has its own profile page and an order portal to manage its online orders, and each order routes to the closest store that can fill it in full. In build now.
V-ZUG, B2B and B2C on one platform
Three buyer types, three pricing models and a deep SAP integration. Sales orders now reach SAP in two minutes, down from about 15.
The migration, phase by phase
Work back from your licence renewal date. Selection, discovery and build all have to fit before it, or the outgoing vendor sets your timeline.
WEEK 1
Discovery
Bring a full crawl, organic sessions by page and every integration with a named owner. Decide what is not moving, and who can call a rollback.
WEEKS 2 TO 5
Architecture
Decide how gift card balances, open quotes and contract pricing carry across. The page-level redirect map is built here, faceted and paginated URLs included.
WEEKS 6 TO 7
Migration
Products, customers, content and order history move with standard tooling. Stored payment tokens only move if your processor supports vault-to-vault transfer.
WEEKS 8 TO 10
Cutover
Both platforms run in parallel, with a named person who can call it back. Expect some ranking movement, and keep redirects in place for at least a year.
COST
What decides the cost of a migration
01
Integrations
How many systems it connects to
ERP, PIM, tax, fulfilment and payments. Each connector needs its own mapping and testing, and this is where estimates overrun most often.
02
Commercial state
What live data has to carry across
Contract pricing, credit limits, open quotes and gift card balances each need their own migration and reconciliation.
03
Storefronts
How many storefronts, brands and markets
The first property carries the architecture. Each one after it moves faster, but still needs its own content, pricing and cutover.
04
Parallel running
How long both platforms run together
A longer parallel run lowers risk and adds cost, because both platforms are live and supported at once.
WHAT TO ASK ANY VENDOR
Six things to get in writing before you sign
Ask every vendor on your shortlist for a written answer to each, with a named person against it. With Core dna, platform and delivery come from the same team, so each one has a single owner.
| Capability |
Typical answer
Vendor plus implementation partner |
Core dna
Platform and delivery from the same team |
|---|---|---|
|
Proof before contract
Your hardest requirement, working |
Demo A scripted run of the standard product. Gaps surface after signing. | Prototype Your hardest requirement wireframed and prototyped in discovery, before anything is configured. |
|
Pricing as you grow
What happens at twice the volume |
Often per user Licensed per active user, so growth raises the bill. | Consumption Priced on usage with headroom built in, reviewed once a year. |
|
Vendor continuity
If the vendor changes course |
Unknown Ownership and roadmap can change after you sign. End of life tends to arrive with a renewal notice. | Since 2004 Bootstrapped and independent since 2004. Source code escrow available on request. |
|
SEO and redirects
The redirect map and its verification |
Often nobody Assumed to sit with your agency, your SEO contractor, or your team. Frequently in no statement of work at all. | Ours Built during architecture and verified before cutover by the people doing the build. |
|
Integrations
ERP, PIM, tax engine, fulfilment |
Split per connector Every vendor pair needs an owner, and each one is scoped and priced separately. | Ours Configured in admin against 140+ certified connectors, not custom-coded between two vendors. |
|
After go-live
Who you call in month four |
Retainer The partner rotates off the account and the knowledge leaves with them. | Same team Managed services with one accountable owner and weekly status. |
Proof before contract
Your hardest requirement, working
Typical answerDemo
A scripted run of the standard product. Gaps surface after signing.
Core dnaPrototype
Your hardest requirement wireframed and prototyped in discovery, before anything is configured.
Pricing as you grow
What happens at twice the volume
Typical answerOften per user
Licensed per active user, so growth raises the bill.
Core dnaConsumption
Priced on usage with headroom built in, reviewed once a year.
Vendor continuity
If the vendor changes course
Typical answerUnknown
Ownership and roadmap can change after you sign. End of life tends to arrive with a renewal notice.
Core dnaSince 2004
Bootstrapped and independent since 2004. Source code escrow available on request.
SEO and redirects
The redirect map and its verification
Typical answerOften nobody
Assumed to sit with your agency, your SEO contractor, or your team. Frequently in no statement of work at all.
Core dnaOurs
Built during architecture and verified before cutover by the people doing the build.
Integrations
ERP, PIM, tax engine, fulfilment
Typical answerSplit per connector
Every vendor pair needs an owner, and each one is scoped and priced separately.
Core dnaOurs
Configured in admin against 140+ certified connectors, not custom-coded between two vendors.
After go-live
Who you call in month four
Typical answerRetainer
The partner rotates off the account and the knowledge leaves with them.
Core dnaSame team
Managed services with one accountable owner and weekly status.
One migration that removes vendors
Core dna runs content, commerce and hosting as one system. Moving onto it takes vendors off the contract list.
- CMS and commerce become one system, one contract.
- iPaaS licences and vendor-pair integrations become configuration.
- Hosting, CDN, WAF, upgrades and patches are ours to run.
- The catalogue is readable by AI agents at launch, through the MCP server that ships with the platform.
MORE QUESTIONS
eCommerce platform migration FAQ
For a mid-market store, plan three to six months end to end. Enterprise B2B builds involving ERP integration, contract pricing and corporate account hierarchies usually run eight to fourteen months. A full composable rebuild with a separate front end can run twelve to twenty-four months.
The build is rarely the long pole. Data reconciliation, redirect mapping, integration testing and stakeholder approvals are what stretch timelines. Teams that compress the schedule almost always compress testing, which is the phase that protects revenue.
For an enterprise migration, the cost comes from the scope. Four things move it most: how many systems the platform connects to, how much live commercial state has to carry across, how many storefronts, brands and markets are involved, and how long the old and new platforms run in parallel.
Platform licensing is usually the smaller part of the total. Implementation, integration, data migration and testing make up most of it, so a quote built from the licence fee alone understates the project.
Expect temporary movement. Google's own guidance states that you may experience ranking fluctuations while it recrawls and reindexes, and that for medium-sized sites it can take a few weeks or more for new URLs to replace old ones in results. Larger sites take longer.
Permanent loss is an execution problem, not an inevitability: missing or chained redirects, bulk redirects to the homepage, staging environments left indexable, structured data dropped in the rebuild, or facet and pagination URLs nobody mapped.
The standard set: products and variants, categories and taxonomy, prices, inventory, customer accounts, order history, content pages, reviews, discount codes, tax classes, shipping rules and SEO metadata.
The set that causes production incidents when missed is different. Gift card and store credit balances are a live financial liability and need reconciling to the penny with Finance. Stored payment tokens are vendor-scoped, so confirm whether your processor supports vault-to-vault transfer or subscriptions will break at renewal. Live B2B state means open quotes, credit balances, approval chain configuration and contract price effective dates.
In most cases, yes. The pattern is to build and verify on the new platform while the current store keeps trading, lower your DNS TTL around 48 hours ahead, run a final delta import of orders and customers created since the main load, then switch.
What you cannot fully avoid is a short window where orders could land in two places. Plan for it explicitly rather than hoping: either pause order capture for a defined period, or reconcile the gap afterwards with a documented process.
Very little, in common usage. Migration tends to describe moving data, content and URLs from one system to another. Replatforming tends to describe the broader programme: the new platform, the integrations, the team workflow and the operating model.
Rehosting is genuinely different and worth separating out. Moving the same platform to new infrastructure is a hosting change. It carries none of the data mapping or redirect risk that makes a replatform hard, so do not let a vendor price one as the other.
At least twelve months. Google's guidance is to keep redirects in place for as long as possible, generally at least a year, because that timeframe allows all signals to transfer to the new URLs, including recrawling and reassigning links on other sites that still point at your old ones.
This is worth stating because most migration checklists treat redirects as a launch-week task that can be cleaned up once traffic looks stable. They are a twelve-month commitment. Removing them early forfeits exactly the link equity the project spent months protecting.
Three patterns recur. Unowned decisions: when two people sit in the accountable seat for the same milestone, the milestone stalls, and no amount of engineering capacity fixes it. Migrating legacy workarounds forward instead of categorising each one as replicate, refactor or retire, which faithfully rebuilds the problem you paid to escape. And no rollback plan with no named authority to trigger one, which turns cutover night into a judgement call made under pressure by whoever is still awake.
On budget specifically, research across 5,392 IT projects found a mean cost overrun of 1.8 times estimate, distributed with a long tail rather than normally. A ten percent contingency does not reflect that shape, and the projects that fail financially are usually the ones that treated the reserve as a formality.