E-commerce Data Migration: The Replatforming Playbook
The Complete E-commerce Data Migration Guide: How ITG Replatforms Minus the Chaos
E-commerce data migration is the process of moving your store’s critical data, including products, customer accounts, order history, integrations, and content, from one platform to another. Each replatforming project is a technical undertaking, but the stakes are entirely business: downtime, lost orders, fragmented customer experiences, and blown timelines are all on the table if it isn’t handled correctly.
Most organizations decide to replatform because their current platform can’t scale properly or provide the tools they actually need to operate efficiently. At ITG, we lead e-commerce replatforming without disrupting your customers or your operations. This guide walks through the full migration project lifecycle — from discovery through optimization and go-live — so you know exactly what a well-run replatform looks like.
Signs E-commerce Replatforming Is Overdue
Not every platform problem is worth migrating over. But with many, the longer you wait, the more expensive the workarounds will inevitably become.
The clearest signal is performance cracking under pressure. When Funko’s flash sales and product drops started pushing order volumes toward 5,000 per minute, Shopify couldn’t keep up. During a major peak sales event in 2020, the platform went down. For a brand built on limited-availability drops, that’s not just a bad day. That’s an existential risk.
Other Signs It's Time for an E-commerce Store Migration:
- Your merchandising team is burning hours on manual tasks.
- Your business stakeholders are working around the platform instead of with it.
- You’re managing inventory across multiple warehouses without real-time visibility.
- Your third-party integrations are held together with workarounds rather than proper architecture.
If any of those sound familiar, you don’t have a platform problem — you have a growth problem that a platform migration can solve.
Building Your Website Replatform Project Plan
The overall success of a replatforming project lies in the planning phase. By the time you’re writing code, the most important decisions should already be made: what you’re migrating, in what order, who owns what, and what “done” actually looks like.
A solid website migration project plan covers four things:
- A full audit of your existing platform
- A clear brief for the new one
- A stakeholder alignment process
- A realistic timeline that accounts for the unexpected
That last part matters more than most teams expect. When ITG migrated Vari from Shopify Plus to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (now called Agentforce Commerce), one of the first challenges was purely organizational. Vari’s new platform introduced Salesforce Page Designer, a powerful content management tool that required significant customization to fit a content-heavy site like Vari’s. ITG not only built custom components and layouts, but also had to onboard and train Vari’s business team on entirely new tooling. Getting internal buy-in for new technology is its own workstream, and it needs to be in your plan from day one.
The organizations that navigate website migration well are the ones that treat the project plan as a living document, rather than a kickoff deliverable that gets filed away. A successful migration acts as an active reference that every workstream is aligned to throughout the e-commerce site migration process.
The Four Phases of an E-Commerce Site Migration Process
No two e-commerce store migrations are identical, but the same four workstreams often appear in every well-run project. Miss one and you’ll feel the consequences at go-live.
1. Data Audit & Inventory
Before anything gets moved, you need a complete picture of what you have. That means cataloguing every product, customer account, order record, and content asset — and making a deliberate decision about what migrates and what gets left behind. For Hunter Douglas, this meant migrating an entire parts catalog, product data, and CMS-driven content from Salesforce Commerce to Shopify Plus, with a custom-built sync application to keep Sanity and Shopify aligned post-launch.
2. Integrations Mapping
Every third-party tool your current platform is connected with needs to be accounted for before a single line of code is written. Payment gateways, tax compliance, address validation, loyalty programs, warehouse management, and PIM systems — each one is a dependency that needs to be re-architected. When ITG migrated Vari to SFCC, the integrations list included NetSuite for warehouse management, InRiver for product information management, and Boomi as middleware for real-time data synchronization. Mapping all of that upfront is what prevents last-minute surprises.
3. UX & Content Strategy
A platform migration is also an opportunity — and a risk — for your customer-facing experience. Navigation, page templates, and content all need to be accounted for in the plan. For Vari, whose site is content-heavy by design, this meant building custom Page Designer components in SFCC and reworking navigation to accommodate newly enabled content features without sacrificing performance.
4. QA & Load Testing
This is where most teams underinvest. Functional testing is what separates a smooth go-live from a disaster, and stress testing against real-world peak scenarios. For Funko, that meant engineering and validating a system architecture capable of handling 5,000 orders per minute, with load testing calibrated to their actual drop-and-flash sale patterns instead of just average traffic.
Funko needed a platform that could scale with its own success. Vari needed tooling that matched the ambition of their content team. Hunter Douglas needed a modernized architecture that could scale without the complexity of their legacy system holding them back. Three different businesses, three different platforms, one consistent approach: plan thoroughly, execute cleanly, and build for what comes next.
Your Platform Migration Checklist
1. Data Audit & Inventory
- Catalog all products, variants, and attributes
- Export the full customer account and order history
- Identify content assets (images, documents, CMS content)
- Decide what migrates, what gets cleaned, and what gets cut
- Validate data integrity before and after migration
2. Integrations Mapping
- List every third-party tool connected to your current platform
- Document data flows between systems
- Identify which integrations need to be rebuilt vs. reconfigured
- Confirm payment gateway, tax, and fraud tool compatibility
- Plan middleware architecture for real-time data sync
3. UX & Content Strategy
- Audit current navigation and page templates
- Map content to the new platform's CMS structure
- Identify custom components that need to be rebuilt
- Plan stakeholder training on the new tooling
- Validate mobile and cross-browser experience
4. QA & Load Testing
- Define performance benchmarks based on your real peak traffic
- Build a regression testing plan covering all critical user flows
- Stress test against your actual worst-case scenarios
- Confirm all integrations are functioning end-to-end
- Establish a go-live cutover and rollback plan
Ready to Start Your E-commerce Data Migration? Let's Talk.
E-commerce replatforming is one of the most complex projects a digital commerce team can take on. With the right partner, it’s also one of the most transformative. ITG brings the full team, the enterprise platform experience, and the project discipline to get your migration done right and on time, without disrupting your customers or your operations.
Let’s get in touch, scope your migration needs, and see how ITG can get you there faster.
