Ecommerce Replatforming Scope Calculator

Total migration investment is driven by catalog SKU complexity, historical customer and order data volume, custom third-party ERP and WMS integrations, B2B tiered contract pricing rules, custom theme architecture, and rigorous quality assurance testing. A simple 200-SKU DTC catalog with no ERP dependency costs meaningfully less than a 10,000-SKU B2B catalog syncing live inventory across NetSuite and three warehouses.

Shopify says Shopify Plus migrations average three to four months from kickoff to go-live, and a full replatform usually takes 3 to 6 months. Published agency plans vary with scope: 1Digital plans 12 weeks for a mid-market Magento 2 store and 16 to 20 weeks for larger, multi-store or B2B stores. Timelines grow with the number of systems that must stay in sync during cutover, and ERP integration testing is often the longest phase.

Brands migrate to stop managing security patches, server hosting, dependency upgrades and brittle extensions, and to move onto a hosted platform where Shopify reports 99.99 percent uptime on average during the biggest sales events of the year, with Shop Pay accelerated checkout built in. Many are also reacting to a specific pain point, such as an outage during a peak sale or an upgrade deadline on their current version.

It depends on what you pay today. Moving from self-hosted servers to a hosted platform such as Shopify Plus or BigCommerce removes server hosting, security patching and dependency upgrades from your budget, but adds a platform fee and app subscriptions. Pull 12 months of hosting invoices, security retainers and developer time spent on upgrades, then compare that total with the new platform fees before you count any savings.

Legacy platforms store customer passwords as one-way hashes (such as bcrypt or Argon2), so they cannot be decrypted, and Shopify says passwords can't be migrated with a CSV import. Most migrations send account activation emails so customers set a new password, or use new customer accounts with a one-time sign-in code. Shopify Multipass needs Plus and legacy customer accounts, and it only signs in customers who are already logged in on your own external site.

Yes. Complete historical order records, line item SKUs, transaction dates, customer shipping addresses, and financial statuses are cleansed and imported into the target platform for unified customer lifetime reporting. Preserving this history matters for repeat-customer segmentation and loyalty programs, since starting every customer's purchase count at zero on launch day would break lifetime value reporting and tier eligibility.

We write automated schema transformation scripts that normalize legacy multi-attribute matrix items into clean variant structures, preserving custom metafields, technical specifications, and parent-child SKU relationships. A product with size, color, and material dimensions in the legacy system maps cleanly to Shopify's variant model instead of breaking into duplicate or orphaned product listings during import.

We run automated reconciliation scripts that perform line-by-line checksum verification across legacy database exports and staging imports, ensuring exact record parity before DNS cutover. Every product, customer, and order record count is verified against the legacy source before we allow a go-live decision, so a partial or dropped import is caught in staging, not discovered by a customer after launch.

We crawl your entire legacy store to construct a complete URL inventory, map 1-to-1 permanent 301 redirects, preserve exact title tags, meta descriptions, and heading hierarchies, and migrate existing Schema.org structured data. Every redirect maps to the single most relevant new page rather than a blanket homepage redirect, which is what actually preserves the ranking signal search engines associate with the old URL.

Legacy deep category paths (such as /category/subcategory/product.html) get single-hop 301 redirects to their matching /products/ or /collections/ paths, which Google uses as a signal that the new URL should be the canonical one. Shopify stores can hold up to 100,000 redirects, or 20 million on Plus. We build the full redirect map before cutover, not after, so every changed URL has its permanent redirect in place at launch.

Google says rankings can fluctuate during a site move and that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more for Google to show the new URLs. Shopify's Magento migration guide calls a 5% to 10% dip in the first week common even with correct redirects, and says a sustained drop of more than 20% needs immediate investigation. We check Search Console daily through that window and fix redirect gaps as they appear.

Yes. We extract all high-authority referring domains and external backlinks pointing to legacy URLs, verifying that every cited landing page receives an immediate, exact 301 redirect. Losing link equity from an earned backlink because the page it points to now 404s is one of the most common and most avoidable causes of a post-migration traffic drop.

We build bi-directional API connectors that synchronize product master data, live inventory across multiple warehouses, customer credit terms, and sales order creation, running staging tests in parallel prior to live switch. Staging tests run against a full copy of production data for at least two weeks before cutover, so integration issues surface long before they could ever reach a live order.

Delta migration is the process of migrating all new customer accounts, orders, and inventory adjustments generated on the legacy store during the final staging build window immediately prior to DNS cutover, so no recent records are left behind. Without it, any order placed on the old store during the final build hours would be permanently invisible to the new platform, a silent data loss most brands only discover during month-end reconciliation.

We lower DNS TTL values 24 to 48 hours in advance, as Shopify recommends, stage every redirect before the switch, run a final delta import of new orders and customers, then point the domain and place test orders. We schedule the cutover for your lowest-traffic hours, keep the legacy store on standby, and agree in writing on what triggers a rollback before launch day.

You can schedule a direct 30-minute discovery session. We review your existing database schemas and ERP connectors and list the decisions that drive your timeline and cost. After the call we send a written scope, with milestones and a quote tied to your actual catalog and integration complexity, not a generic range pulled from an average project.

You select your current source platform, target architecture (Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce B2B, or headless), catalog SKU tier, historical order volume, and ERP or middleware integration depth. Each selection adds or removes weeks from a base timeline tied to your source platform, and a headless target architecture adds a further 20 percent to account for custom frontend engineering.

Each source platform carries a base timeline in weeks, migrating off Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud starts higher than migrating off WooCommerce, because the underlying architecture is more complex to unwind. We then add time for your SKU tier, order volume, and ERP integration depth, and show the result as a range rather than one number, since real projects vary within that band depending on final QA findings.

No. The savings figure is modeled from typical hosting, patching, and contractor costs tied to your current source platform, with a modest upward adjustment for enterprise-scale catalogs. It is meant to size the opportunity, not replace an audit of your actual hosting invoices, security retainers, and DevOps contractor spend, which we review directly during a scoping call before quoting a migration.

Submitting your email, store URL, and selected scope parameters sends the complete configuration, source and target platforms, SKU tier, order volume, and ERP depth, directly to our team rather than a generic form inbox. You get an on-screen confirmation immediately, and we follow up by email with your custom migration roadmap and a link to schedule a technical scoping call.

Yes. Selecting the composable headless Next.js target architecture adds 20 percent to the base timeline versus a standard Shopify or BigCommerce target, reflecting the additional custom frontend engineering a headless build requires beyond standard theme development. The risk rating and DevOps savings estimate still calculate the same way regardless of which target architecture you choose.