What is Ecommerce Replatforming? The Guide to Ecommerce Migration

Ecommerce replatforming, or ecommerce migration, is more common than many business owners realize. Over time, the needs of your company and your customers will undoubtedly change.

Technology in the ecommerce world will evolve, and your initial ecommerce platform may become clunky, outdated, or simply inefficient. While moving your entire store to a completely different environment can seem like a daunting process, it can deliver a lot of benefits.

By 2027, the ecommerce market is expected to be worth a whopping $5.47 trillion. This means the online world will be more lucrative, but also more competitive than ever. The only way to stay ahead of the competition, and earn consistent revenue, is to ensure you’re using the right tools.

Switching to a new ecommerce platform can help to reduce your operating costs, while improving customer experiences, and unlocking new opportunities for your brand.

Here’s everything you need to know about ecommerce replatforming.

What is Ecommerce Replatforming?

Ecommerce replatforming, otherwise known as ecommerce migration, is the process of moving the components of ecommerce store (Frontend and backend design) from one platform to another.

Basically, it’s a data migration process, that takes everything from your existing ecommerce site, and transfers to it to a new commerce platform. For instance, you might decide to move your WooCommerce online store to Shopify, or your Wix store to BigCommerce.

While around 90% of entrepreneurs say they’re hesitant to transition to a new platform, doing so can be crucial to ensuring and retaining growth. Moving away from an ecommerce solution that no longer works for your company can provide access to new features, and benefits.

In fact, your replatforming project could be the key to improving site operation and speed, enhancing user experience, and exploring new business opportunities, such as cross-channel sales.

There are various ways to approach the migration process, such as:

Monolithic to microservices transition: This technique involves layering various third-party apps and platform services on top of each other, to address various parts of the customer journey. It’s a common process for companies considering a headless commerce model.
Phased migration: With a phased migration, you work with migration services to gradually move certain parts of your site from one environment to another. For instance, you might move to a new CMS, while still keeping certain payment processors and tools.
Platform to platform: This is the most common ecommerce replatforming strategy, which involves moving from one ecommerce solution to another. You could move from an open-source solution like WordPress or Magento (Adobe Commerce) to Squarespace or Shopify. Or you might move your tech stack from one SaaS solution to another.

Each type of ecommerce migration strategy comes with its own ecommerce replatforming checklist to consider. Some strategies can be more time-consuming than others, and some require the assistance of in-house or remote technical professionals.

What are the Benefits of Ecommerce Replatforming?

Just like moving your entire physical store to a new location in the real-world is a time-consuming and expensive process, replatforming can be exhausting. It’s definitely not something any company should consider doing lightly. Approach the migration process the wrong way, and you could risk losing your search engine rankings, your data, and even your customers.

However, there are times when ecommerce replatforming may be necessary. If your current online store solution isn’t addressing your business needs, or your conversion rates are dropping, you may need to make a change. Studies show that around 76% of B2B executives believe they need to update their ecommerce solutions soon.

Additionally, many B2C and Direct-to-customer sellers also find themselves needing to move to a different platform over time. If you approach the process carefully, ecommerce migration can deliver a handful of crucial benefits, such as:

Opportunities for Increased Revenue

An old, outdated, or inefficient ecommerce platform prevents your business from reaching it’s true potential. If your website is slow, performs poorly, or simply doesn’t look its best, you could risk driving customers away from your store.

Similarly, if your ecommerce platform doesn’t have the right features, such as the ability to sell across multiple channels, offer subscriptions, or support digital product sales, you could be missing out on selling opportunities.

Streamlined Business Processes

Speaking of missing features on ecommerce platforms, some older solutions might not give you the right resources you need to enhance and improve your company operations. An advanced ecommerce platform, complete with AI tools and automation can save you a lot of time and effort.

Up-to-date tools might help you to better track customer products and orders throughout the purchasing journey, automate customer messaging strategies, or even improve your fulfilment and logistics processes. This could make your entire business more efficient.

Improve Business Agility

Some older ecommerce tools still place significant limitations on how you can grow and change your store. As the worlds of online sales and customer service continue to evolve, a more flexible ecommerce platform could help you to increase your agility.

For instance, you could move to a headless commerce solution, which allows you to make dynamic updates to customer experiences without disrupting your backend architecture. Switching to an open and flexible ecommerce platforms with support for endless apps and integrations can help you to add new tools and sales strategies to your business in a matter of minutes.

Enhanced Customer Experiences

Few things are more important in today’s digital sales landscape than offering your customers the ideal online experience. Every customer wants their shopping process to be as streamlined, convenient, and personalized as possible. If your ecommerce solution doesn’t make it easy for your customers to make a purchase, they’ll go elsewhere.

An ecommerce replatforming strategy can help you to implement new strategies to boost user experience for every customer. You can implement new security and privacy methods, access faster-loading pages and tools, and create a more personalized shopping experience with modern tools.

Reduced Operational Costs

Sometimes, the best reason to move away from legacy infrastructure for your ecommerce store, is that it can allow you to save crucial money on operational costs. Cloud-based technology can remove the costs associated with hosting and servers that used to be essential for ecommerce business owners.

With an API-based approach to online selling, you can even avoid paying for features and tools you don’t need. Simply switching to a new SaaS solution can be enough to give you access to all of the crucial features your store relies on, without hefty monthly subscription fees. You can even leverage AI and automation tools to reduce your labor costs.

Why Ecommerce Businesses Migrate to New Platforms

There are plenty of reasons why an ecommerce store owner might decide to invest in an ecommerce migration or replatforming strategy. The benefits above are just some examples. Ultimately, change is something that happens frequently in the ecommerce landscape.

Sometimes, companies on outdated ecommerce platforms can simply change their plans or add new features with APIs and integrations. Other times, they need to take an entirely new approach. The most common reasons companies choose to replatform include:

Poor site performance: If an ecommerce website is performing poorly, sometimes the best option is to replatform and access a solution that can address site speed issues, responsiveness, and other common problems.
Lack of scalability: Some ecommerce tools are designed primarily for smaller businesses. If your site is growing rapidly, and you’re struggling to scale, replatforming may be necessary.
High costs of ownerships: A high cost of ownership for your ecommerce platform means you’re using more of your resources to keep your site running. This means you don’t have as much cash left over to invest in growth.
Lack of innovation: If the platform you choose is unable to provide new features or tools, then you could end up with gaps in your site you struggle to fill. A new site platform might offer more of the functionality you need.
Poor back end: If the site is difficult to manage due to a problem with the admin environment, or an unreliable ecommerce infrastructure, switching to a new platform could resolve these problems, and improve the user experience.

What’s more, switching to a new ecommerce platform can help businesses to retain the trust and respect of their target audience. A problematic, or outdated site doesn’t just potentially lead to losses in revenue, it could also harm your relationship with your target audience.

Types of Ecommerce Platforms to Consider

When investing in an ecommerce replatforming strategy, companies have a variety of routes they can potentially take. The most common ecommerce platform options fall into three distinct categories, each with their own benefits, and issues to consider:

On-Premise Platforms

On-premise ecommerce platforms are potentially the most “old-fashioned” form of ecommerce platform for business leaders, but they can also be the most secure and customizable. On-premise solutions are built with the company’s own dedicated resources, and the data is stored within an internal storage facility, on business-owned servers.

Third-party or internal development companies work with businesses on all of the ongoing maintenance and development requirements, and are responsible for securing the site, and ensuring exceptional technical performance.

An on-premise ecommerce platform gives companies absolute control over their site, code, and hardware, as well as network security. With an on-premise solution, making granular, high-level customizations to your site is relatively straightforward. This makes on-premise options an excellent option for larger companies with a lot of technical talent on staff.

However, on-premise solutions can be extremely expensive to manage and maintain. There are ongoing infrastructure and employee salary costs to think about. Plus, the backups, performance, security, uptime, and performance of the site are all dependent on the internal team.

SaaS Platforms

Software-as-a-service, or “SaaS” ecommerce platforms are a slightly more common option in today’s digital world. With a SaaS solution, you pay a subscription fee each month to access solutions that are built and maintained by another company. Essentially, you’re renting the software for your site, and the hardware required to run your store, from another service provider.

Many growing ecommerce businesses with a need for scalability, flexibility, and ease-of-use prefer to stick with SaaS solutions. Generally, the long-term costs of SaaS ecommerce tools is lower than it would be for other options. Plus, you don’t need as much technical talent on-hand.

Many SaaS solutions from companies like Shopify and BigCommerce can scale with any size of business too. They offer their own enterprise packages, headless commerce, and other innovative solutions. With SaaS platforms, you get dedicated infrastructure to scale with your site, and security and updates are managed for you.

Plus, SaaS solutions generally offer a lot of flexibility. You can still customize your site with code, themes, templates, APIs, integrations and more.

Cloud Platforms

Cloud ecommerce platforms fall somewhere between the on-premise and SaaS solutions mentioned above. They use an infrastructure as a service model, or “IaaS”. With this strategy, a business hosts its ecommerce website on the cloud using a provider like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.

The company essentially rents the hardware infrastructure and storage from a third-party provider, similar to in a SaaS model. However, with this strategy, you’re in charge of maintaining and developing the core components of your ecommerce solution.

With a cloud strategy, you can avoid the need to purchase or lease your own expensive infrastructure for an ecommerce site. Plus, you should have access to simple data backups and plenty of scalability. Leading IaaS providers can also provide access to great security, while you still maintain excellent options to customize user experience, features, and back-end performance.

Although cloud solutions are less expensive than their on-premise alternatives, they’re still not as affordable as SaaS solutions. You may also need to pay for a technical team to help develop and maintain your ecommerce website.

Creating an Ecommerce Migration Plan

An ecommerce replatforming process, or migration is a time-intensive and complex process, that requires careful planning. Without the right strategy, you could risk missing out on important steps that end up harming your site performance, or leading to lost data.

Don’t rush through the process of migrating your store to a new landscape. Make sure you have the right foundations in place. You can start by:

Assessing your requirements

The first step in planning a successful ecommerce migration is assessing and understanding your specific business needs. The more you know about your requirements, the easier it will be to choose a new solution that will scale and grow with your brand.

Crucially, when assessing your requirements, it’s important to get every stakeholder in your business involved in the process. Ensure all of the departments in your team can share their input when it comes to things like essential features and common concerns.

Think about the issues you’re currently having with the ecommerce platform you have right now. How much is it costing you to run, how much time are you wasting on addressing common problems, and how many sales are you potentially missing out on?

As you work through those questions, transform them into step-by-step goals you want to achieve as you move through to your new ecommerce platform solution.

Design a Request for Proposal (RFP)

An RFP or Request for Proposal is a formal document designed to solidify your intentions and requirements when you’re initiating a replatforming process. It can also help to guide you through the process of assessing new vendors and opportunities.

RFPs are excellent at focusing the conversations you’re going to have with prospective vendors about the issues you face, and the capabilities you need to access. You can make this document as general or specific as you like. However, the more detail you can provide, the easier it will be for vendors to tailor their pitches and suggestions to your unique needs.

Your RFP should answer questions like:

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What third-party tools, partners, in-house software solutions and other resources do you need to keep hold of after the migration process?
What are your current operating costs, and how do they compare to benchmarks?
Who are the major competitors and businesses in your landscape with sites that you admire, and what is their ecommerce strategy?
What is your current approach to scalability, international commerce, and multi-channel selling. Which strategies would you like to use?
How do you deal with design, UX, and product changes in your ecommerce website today, and how would you like to do this in future?
What kind of volume do you typically see during peak times when it comes to sales, checkout processes, and traffic?
Why are you migrating, and what kind of goals do you want to achieve?
When do you want to ensure your migration process is completed? Do you have any specific deadlines or requirements?

Understand Your Total Cost of Ownership

Evaluating your total cost of ownership for the current ecommerce platform you’re using, and the TCO of the solutions you’re evaluating will help you to make more lucrative and valuable decisions for the future of your company. Remember, TCO is about more than just subscription and purchasing prices. You’ll also need to think about things like:

Site infrastructure
Maintenance costs
Salaries for designers, developers, engineers, and architects
Surcharges based on traffic peaks
Hosting costs
Ongoing testing, fixes, and patches
Security updates and upgrades
Performance and load testing fees
Customizations to checkouts and other pages

Notably, you’ll also need to account for the ongoing maintenance and replatforming costs associated with your migrating. Downtime, migrating data, and retraining employees on a new ecosystem can all take time and money. You may also need to pay for additional licenses for product features, regular maintenance, UX, navigation, and structure enhancements, and site customization.

Other potential costs can include fees for site security, monthly hosting, site maintenance, app creation, content development, and site customization.

Notably, a SaaS solution will have fewer costs to consider than on-premise and cloud-based solutions, which can increase your total cost of ownership. If you’re thinking of using a more expensive strategy, it’s important to ensure you know the strategy will pay off.

Consider essential integrations

Just because you’re migrating to a new ecommerce platform or solution, doesn’t necessarily mean you want to leave all of your existing technology and investments behind. Before you select your new solution, it might be worth auditing your existing environment.

Ask yourself what kind of tools you want to bring with you from your old processes, into your new landscape. You might already be using ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools that you want to bring with you into your new project.

You might also want to integrate solutions for marketing automation, inventory tracking, warehouse management, or staff collaboration. Most ecommerce partners and vendors will be able to work with you to show you which integrations you can access immediately, and what you might need extra help with, through APIs and developer assistance.

Keep in mind, if your vendor can’t offer you an easy way to integrate your existing tools with their new service, they might be able to suggest an alternative solution that’s more cost-effective, reliable, or valuable than your existing tools.

Plan your Data Migration

Perhaps the most important, and sensitive part of the ecommerce replatforming process, is deciding how you’re going to migrate your ecommerce data. You’ll need to ensure that all of the essential information from your existing ecommerce platform is moved safely to your new environment.

This includes transferring product and customer data, as well as historical data that might help you to assess your store progress over time. There are a few different ways to potentially migrate data:

API migrations: Agency partners can work with you to build proprietary APIs that allow you to instantly import data into your new platform, with minimal effort.
Apps: Some software providers have apps that allow you to rapidly import order history, products, customers, and other information to your new store.
Manual solutions: Teams and agency partners can work with you to download products and customer data into a CSV and transfer it to your new site that way.

Whenever you’re migrating data from an old ecommerce solution to a new platform, it’s important to make sure you create a comprehensive backup before you start the transfer. You might also consider a delta migration (a secondary form of data import) that you can do just before you launch your site, to account for any new orders or customers that your old site received after the first transfer.

Bring the Right People Together

Finally, while it’s sometimes tempting to have multiple people involved in your ecommerce replatforming strategy, to help you with every aspect of the process, try not to overwhelm yourself with too many people. Instead, you should be focused and deliberate about who you include in the migration process.

Common people to get involved include platform partners, internal stakeholders, IT and marketing teams, search and marketing agencies, and ecommerce agencies. If you absolutely need extra help, you could consider speaking to a migration expert or consultant too.

Once you’ve decided who is going to be involved in the migration process, make sure every member of your team is clear on their responsibilities. It’s easy for things to slip through the net when multiple people are involved in the same migration. With that in mind, get a project manager involved to keep everyone on track and focused.

How to Conduct an Ecommerce Site Migration

An ecommerce platform migration can be a time-consuming process, depending on the amount of data you need to move from your existing system.

While there are digital commerce experts and platforms that can help you with the process, you’ll still need to follow a careful, step-by-step process. Here are some of the key stages involved in an ecommerce replatforming project.

Step 1: Gather the relevant stakeholders

The first step in your migration involves getting all of the right stakeholders involved. A successful migration requires a collaborative approach between technical experts and decision makers.

The project leader should explain why the replatforming project is necessary, and which steps need to be taken to streamline the process. Outline what’s missing from the current platform, where the current solution is leading to losses in time and money, and where barriers exist.

Next, showcase how a new ecommerce platform can alleviate these problems, and demonstrate where the benefits lie for the business and its customers. Make sure everyone agrees on the components necessary in a new ecommerce platform by identifying:

Current problems and issues you need to avoid in future
Must-have features, integrations, and customizations
Workflows that can be automated or improved
Functionality you might need to access in future
Data that needs to be migrated from the existing platform
The timeframe and process for completing the migration
Resources necessary for completing the project

Keep in mind, working with an expert may be helpful throughout the process, as they’ll be able to help you navigate the migration, and provide useful guidance and support.

Step 2: Find Your New Ecommerce Platform

Once you have everyone in your team aligned, the next step is to select the ecommerce platform you’re going to be using next. The crucial components you and your team outlined during initial stakeholder conversations will be useful here. However, it’s also worth doing extra research.

Examine industry reports from leading analytical platforms, read reviews on trusted sites like Capterra and G2, and consider sending your “RFP” documents to relevant companies. Using all the data you collect, make a shortlist of five or six platforms you want to use, and for each platform ask:

How long is the migration going to take to complete?
How much will the migration cost?
What does the process of replatforming entail?
What kind of customer support and guidance will you receive?
How will the platform preserve and protect data?
What are the speed, performance, and uptime stats of the solution?
How well can the platform scale for your business in future?
What kind of compliance and security features are available?
How will integrations and customizations be managed?

You can also add further questions that might be related to your specific requirements and goals. Keep a record of all of the responses you receive so you and your team can collaboratively make the right decision on which solution to explore further.

Step 3: Create a roadmap for the Migration

Once you’ve decided on a new system for your online shopping experience, it’s time to create a step-by-step plan for how the migration is going to take place. Your development team and migration partners should be able to help with this.

Most of the time, a comprehensive migration will involve a number of crucial steps, such as creating a new hierarchy for your site, migrating your content for SEO purposes, and auditing and deleting unnecessary content. You’ll also need to think about back-end development, front-end design, and pre- and post-launch training for your teams.

Understanding how you’re going to handle the data migration process from your legacy systems is going to be crucial during this stage. Take the time to think carefully about what kind of data needs to be moved, and how you’re going to transfer it safely from one platform to the next. Remember, you can use manual transfers, API plugins, or third-party services, depending on your strategy.

Step 4: Develop and Design the new Ecommerce Site

In your ecommerce replatforming project, the stage of designing and developing the new site will likely take up the majority of your resources and time. You’ll need to consider carefully the kind of experience you want to give your customers, and how you’re going to showcase your brand.

Your development team and designers will need to work together to create the front and back-end components of your website, and manage the data you’ve migrated into the new system. Think about new features and components you want to add, such as social media plugins and apps.

This is the perfect time to start thinking about user experience optimization, and how you can enhance your website’s navigation, content, and functionality to stand out from the competition, and overcome the weaknesses of your old platform. Remember, you may need to set up redirects for SEO purposes.

Step 5: Conduct an SEO audit

Speaking of SEO, it’s important to ensure your new site is capable of ranking just as effectively on the search engines as your previous solution. Any ecommerce replatforming strategy will undoubtedly come with risks from a search engine optimization perspective.

Moving your information and data from one platform to another can mean you end up losing potential rankings and customers if you’re not careful. You’ll need to find ways to reduce your risk as much as possible by making sure that you:

Audit old content and remove any duplicated or outdated content
Create a detailed plan for redirects that maps pages effectively
Update and enhance web content with search engine strategies
Migrate all scheme markups and meta data from your old site.

Once you’ve launched your website, you’ll need to continue monitoring your search rankings, technical SEO profiles, and organic traffic. Using tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you should be able to watch for common issues like site speed issues and 404 errors.

Step 6: Optimizing the Buyer Journey

Once you’ve fully optimized all of your content and your website components for the search engines, you’ll need to ensure the buyer journey is as streamlined and effective as possible to ensure you’re earning consistent revenue.

A migration process is a great opportunity to enhance the checkout process, so look for any areas where you might be able to customize the experience for your customers. Think about how easy and convenient it is for your customers to add products to their cart and make purchases using the payment methods they prefer.

Make sure any third-party checkout apps you need to use are connected securely, and think about the common issues your users might face.

Step 7: Testing your Website

Though you may be keen to launch your website as quickly as possible, it’s important to make sure everything is running and working as expected. Run plenty of tests looking at site navigation, checkout experience, back-end, and front-end functionality and more.

The more time you spend testing, the more likely it is you’ll be able to find bugs and hidden issues in advance before your customers start using your new platform. You can run performance auditing tests with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, to pinpoint any usability or speed issues.

Depending on the size and functionality of your store, you may need to have numerous people assess your site from both a customer and business perspective. Ask stakeholders in your organization to work on the backend of your site with testing strategies. You could also ask some of your VIP customers to help with the testing process.

Step 8: Launch Your New Website

Finally, it’s time to officially launch your new ecommerce experience. Make sure you plan your launch carefully, looking for ways to minimize downtime and disruption for your customers.

Some agencies offering migration services will be able to help you by creating a checklist with step by step guidance for your team. As you launch your website, think about the tools you can put in place to monitor metrics and other information that might be relevant to your success.

Remember to ensure you have a backup of your site available so you can roll everything back if something goes wrong, or jump into action with fixes.

Mastering Your Replatforming Project

Ultimately, an ecommerce replatforming project can be a time-consuming and stressful process. However, it can also be a necessary requirement for business leaders who want to improve their chances of success in the long-term.

Eventually, the ecommerce platform you started with when you first launched your business may no longer be suitable for your organization. When this happens, migrating to a new solution can help you save valuable time and money, and improve your chances of earning the loyalty of your customers.

Remember, working with the right experts throughout the process can be extremely valuable, as it may minimize some of the risks you face throughout your journey.

FAQ

What can be migrated to your new ecommerce platform?

A successful migration process should allow you to move all of the key data and components of your existing website into a new platform. This means you can transfer all of your data, content, systems, and integrations to another provider.

How much does an ecommerce site migration cost?

The cost of a migration can vary depending on the complexity of your website and the amount of help and support you need throughout the process. Your cost will also depend on the kind of new platform you choose for your online store.

Why should a business migrate to another platform?

Switching to a new ecommerce platform can allow you to unlock additional functionality for your website, improve user experience for customers, and minimize risks. It could also reduce your total cost of ownership for your ecommerce store.