Change platforms without losing what you built.

Replatforming means moving your store from one ecommerce platform to another, taking the catalog, customers, orders, content, and URLs with you. It is not a redesign, though the two are often done together. The goal is to change the system underneath without losing the traffic, revenue, and history you already have.

Rehosting moves the same software to different infrastructure, so the platform stays the same and only the servers change. Replatforming changes the platform itself, which means data models, URLs, templates, and integrations all have to be rebuilt or remapped. Replatforming is the larger job by a wide margin.

Most of our clients move for one of three reasons: the current platform needs constant maintenance and security patching, hosting and extension costs keep climbing, or the team cannot ship changes without a developer. Shopify and Shopify Plus trade some low-level control for a hosted platform your team can operate directly.

Often you should fix what you have. Replatforming is worth it when the platform itself is the constraint, for example an unsupported version, a security burden you cannot carry, or B2B rules the platform cannot express. If the real problem is a slow theme or a bad checkout, that is far cheaper to fix in place, and we will tell you so.

Most commonly Magento and Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus, WooCommerce to Shopify, and Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress to Shopify. We also handle BigCommerce, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Volusion, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and SAP Hybris, in both directions, including Shopify to WooCommerce or Magento where that is the right move.

Not if the URL mapping is done properly. The single biggest cause of traffic loss in a migration is unmapped or badly redirected URLs. We build a complete old-to-new URL map before launch, implement it as single-hop 301 redirects, and keep the old sitemap available so search engines can find and follow every redirect.

We crawl and inventory every indexed URL first, map each to its new destination, preserve titles, meta descriptions, headings, and structured data, keep image filenames and alt text where possible, and match or improve page speed. After cutover we monitor Search Console for coverage errors and redirect chains daily for the first few weeks.

Yes, more than most teams expect. Every extra hop wastes crawl budget and some crawlers give up before reaching the destination. We enforce single-hop redirects, meaning old URL straight to final URL, and we specifically check that no redirect destination is itself the source of another rule, which is how two-hop chains appear by accident.

Four things, in order of frequency: URLs that existed but were never mapped, redirects pointing at the homepage instead of the equivalent page, the staging site getting indexed because robots rules were not switched at launch, and structured data quietly dropped in the new theme. All four are preventable with a pre-launch checklist.

Products with variants and images, collections and categories, customers and their addresses, order and fulfilment history, discounts, reviews, blog and CMS content, redirects, and B2B specifics such as company accounts and contract price lists. What transfers cleanly depends on the source platform, so we audit it before quoting.

Usually not, and any agency promising otherwise deserves scrutiny. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, and most platforms cannot import another platform's hash format. The standard approach is to migrate accounts without passwords and trigger a password reset flow at launch, communicated to customers in advance so it does not read as a security incident.

Yes, in most migrations. Historical orders can be imported so customers still see past purchases and your team keeps reporting continuity. Some platforms limit how far back or how much detail imports cleanly, so where that is a constraint we keep an exportable archive alongside the live data rather than pretending everything fits.

They have to be rebuilt against the new platform, and this is routinely underestimated. A migration is not finished when the storefront is live; it is finished when orders flow to the ERP, inventory syncs back, and fulfilment triggers correctly. We scope integration work as part of the migration rather than as a surprise phase afterwards.

Yes, and it needs particular care. Contract pricing, customer-specific catalogs, credit limits, and account hierarchies are the parts most often lost or silently corrupted in a migration. We reconcile them against your ERP both before and after cutover rather than trusting the import report.

Most run from a few weeks to a few months. A small catalog with clean data and no ERP integration sits at the short end. A large catalog, custom B2B rules, or a deep ERP connection sits at the long end. Data quality is the variable that moves the estimate most, which is why we audit it before quoting.

It depends on catalog size, data quality, how many integrations need rebuilding, and whether you are redesigning at the same time. We scope it on a short call and send a fixed proposal before any work starts, so the number does not move mid-project.

The storefront rebuild is the predictable part. The hard parts are data quality, URL mapping, and integrations, in that order. Teams that treat migration as a design project get surprised; teams that treat it as a data and redirect project usually land it cleanly.

No. We build and test on staging, run a full data sync, then a final delta sync of anything that changed during the build, and switch DNS at a low-traffic window. Orders keep flowing throughout. We plan the cutover window with you rather than picking one unilaterally.

DNS changes typically propagate within a few hours, though registrars can take up to 48 hours for a full domain transfer. We usually point DNS at the new store rather than transferring the registrar at the same time, which keeps the two risks separate and makes rollback simpler if anything looks wrong.

Yes. We keep the old store live and reachable until the new one is verified, so a rollback is a DNS change rather than a rebuild. We also keep the pre-migration data export, which is what lets us reconcile anything that looks off in the first weeks.

In practice it means an agency that has done the specific source-to-destination path before and can show you the URL mapping and data reconciliation from a past project, not just a portfolio of storefronts. Ask any candidate how they handle passwords, order history, and redirect chains. The answers separate experience from enthusiasm.

Three things: a full export or admin access to your current platform, a list of every integration touching the store including ones marketing set up independently, and a crawl of your indexed URLs. Having these ready shortens scoping considerably and surfaces surprises while they are still cheap.

Yes. You own the code, the data, and the platform accounts. Nothing we build is rented back to you, and there is no proprietary layer you cannot maintain without us.

Yes, most of the brands we work with are US-based, across DTC, B2B, wholesale, and manufacturing, with a decade-plus of commerce builds behind us.