How to Plan an Ecommerce Replatforming Project

If your ecommerce platform is slowing you down, draining your team, or blocking features your competitors ship with ease, you’re not imagining it—your tech stack may be holding your entire business back. Many growing brands reach a point where “making it work” becomes more expensive than moving on.

This guide breaks down everything you need to know about ecommerce replatforming, from spotting the early warning signs to planning a smooth migration and avoiding the mistakes that cost teams time and money. If you’re ready to upgrade your store without the chaos, you’re exactly where you need to be.

What ecommerce replatforming means

Ecommerce replatforming is the process of moving an online store from one ecommerce platform to another. In practice, it’s a structured ecommerce migration where the store’s data, design, features, and day-to-day workflows are rebuilt on a system that offers more flexibility and fewer limitations. 

The idea is straightforward: retire a platform that’s become a drag on the business and replace it with one that can support future growth without constant patching or workarounds.

During a typical ecommerce platform migration, the following elements move to the new environment:

• Product data: Titles, descriptions, SKUs, variants, pricing, inventory rules.
• Customer data: Accounts, addresses, and in many cases, order history.
• Content: CMS pages, blog posts, static content blocks, menus, and other site structures.
• Orders: Recent or historical orders, depending on what the new platform supports.
• Design assets: Brand imagery, icons, and reusable components used in the website redesign.
• Integrations: Marketing tools, payment methods, fulfillment systems, and any custom apps.

Replatforming may also involve a full CMS migration, updated business logic, and new automations that weren’t feasible on the previous system.

When to consider ecommerce migration

Ecommerce replatforming is a costly, time-consuming project, so it doesn’t happen on a whim. Instead, the decision usually comes after months—sometimes years—of dealing with limitations that quietly chip away at growth. Most merchants reach a point where the current platform causes more friction than value, and continuing to “make it work” becomes riskier than moving on.

According to the Replatforming and Migration Trends for 2025 report, ecommerce leaders cite three primary drivers for switching platforms:

1. The need for improved scalability (79%)
2. A better user experience (79%)
3. A faster speed of innovation (78%)

Many also point to the push for stronger personalization (53%), rising operational costs (49%), and internal strain from maintaining an outdated setup (25%).

“The number one buying trigger for ecommerce migrations is the need to create better user experiences, as this allows for differentiation and helps businesses compete.” — Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools

These numbers capture the strategic reasons behind migration, but day-to-day symptoms usually show up long before leadership formally raises the topic. If any of the following sound familiar, a platform upgrade may be overdue.

Signs it’s time to replatform:

• Your site can’t keep up with traffic spikes: If holiday sales, influencer hits, and product drops send your store into meltdown mode, the platform’s scalability ceiling is becoming a growth blocker.
• Development work takes forever: When simple updates require weeks of engineering time or constant custom workarounds, the platform architecture is no longer aligned with how your team needs to work.
• Design constraints hold back brand growth: Rigid templates, limited layout control, or CMS tools that make merchandising harder than it should be will eventually show up in conversion rates.
• Your marketing team feels boxed in: If launching new landing pages, testing on-site content, or personalizing experiences requires a developer every single time, the platform has become an obstacle rather than an enabler.
• Performance issues affect sales: Slower page loads, unreliable checkout flows, or frequent downtime can quietly drain revenue long before anyone notices the pattern.
• Integrations constantly break: Legacy plugins, brittle APIs, and outdated connectors create operational drag (and sometimes a full-time job for whoever drew the short straw on maintenance).
• Global expansion feels unrealistic. If adding regions, currencies, or localized storefronts triggers a cascade of technical complications, the current platform may not be built for multi-market growth.
• Security or compliance needs outpace the platform. When meeting new standards requires custom patches or unplanned workarounds, the risk becomes difficult to justify.
• You can’t adopt new technology easily. Many teams run into limitations the moment they try to layer on AI-driven tools, advanced search, real-time personalization, or more modern headless or composable components.
• Your team keeps saying the same thing: “We’ve outgrown this.”

Ecommerce replatforming: A step-by-step replatforming guide

If the issues from the previous section sound familiar, you’re in the same boat as most ecommerce teams. The latest replatforming report shows that only 14% of companies feel genuinely satisfied with their current ecommerce platform, and 77% expect to migrate within the next year due to scaling limitations and weak customer experiences.

The process may look intimidating, but replatforming becomes much more manageable once you understand the sequence of work. Here’s a concise, practical walkthrough of the full ecommerce migration lifecycle—from early discovery to launch.

Start with a focused ecommerce discovery phase

Discovery is where the migration truly begins. This stage clarifies what the business needs now and what it will need later, preventing costly detours once development starts.

Use discovery to:

• Document the current platform’s bottlenecks: operational, technical, and customer-facing
• Identify map-breaking workflows in merchandising, content management, checkout, or integrations
• Define the capabilities the new platform must support (e.g., headless CMS, cross-border selling, B2B tools, advanced search)
• Establish success metrics for the migration

Get stakeholders aligned early

Replatforming touches every corner of the business, from IT and marketing to finance and customer service. Getting the right people around the table early prevents last-minute detours and budget surprises.

Gather input from:

• Technical teams, who understand limitations and integration requirements
• Marketing and merchandising, who need flexible content and promotional workflows
• Finance, who cares about long-term costs and risk
• Operations, who manages orders, fulfillment, and customer service tools

Tip: Bring them in during the planning stage—not when the platform has already been picked—to reduce friction later.

Evaluate platforms with criteria that reflect real needs

Once your priorities are established, you can begin assessing platforms. This step isn’t about browsing feature lists—it’s about determining which platform best supports the workflows uncovered in discovery.

Focus your evaluation on:

• API stability and extensibility
• CMS usability for non-technical teams
• Checkout customization and extensibility
• Performance benchmarks and scalability guarantees
• Integration ecosystem and third-party support
• Long-term cost, including maintenance and development
• Roadmap transparency and vendor responsiveness

Ask every vendor practical questions: How fast can content teams publish? What happens during flash-sale traffic? Which integrations require custom development?

Consistent questioning makes comparisons easier and exposes gaps early.

Shape the customer experience during the design phase

After choosing the platform, shift to designing the storefront and internal workflows. This stage includes UX planning, visual design, content modeling, and defining components used across the site.

During design:

1. Map the buyer journey from entry to checkout
2. Create a clean navigation and product taxonomy
3. Establish reusable components for landing pages, product pages, and merchandising
4. Outline content structures for the CMS migration
5. Set performance and accessibility requirements
6. Align teams on the look, feel, and functionality of the new store

Prepare and clean your data before development kicks off

Data migration is often the most time-consuming part of replatforming. Cleaning your data early keeps development moving and reduces launch-day surprises.

Key tasks for successful data migration include:

• Standardizing product attributes, variants, and naming conventions
• Removing outdated content, unused redirects, and broken links
• Consolidating duplicate customer profiles
• Fixing inconsistent categories and tags
• Reviewing images and assets for quality and size

Build and integrate the new storefront

After long preparations, this is where the project turns into something tangible. Engineers set up the platform, implement the design system, configure the CMS, rebuild key flows, and connect third-party tools.

During development:

• Implement structured content models for easier publishing
• Build responsive templates and reusable components
• Recreate essential workflows (cart, checkout, promotions, search)
• Integrate ERP, PIM, OMS, CRM, and marketing tools
• Document internal processes so teams know how to use the new system
• Maintain ongoing communication between engineering, design, and marketing

Tip: A steady, iterative development process avoids bottlenecks later in QA.

Run thorough migration testing across the entire ecosystem

Testing protects revenue and SEO, so this stage must be intentional. Involve multiple teams to ensure coverage across all workflows.

Your migration testing should include:

• Functional QA for navigation, PDPs, cart, and checkout
• Payment, tax, and shipping validation
• Redirect mapping and SEO checks (metadata, structured data, internal links)
• Integration testing with ERP, CRM, OMS, PIM, and marketing tools
• Performance and load testing
• Accessibility and mobile responsiveness
• CMS content validation

Coordinate a controlled launch and immediate post-launch QA

Finally, with everything ready, you can launch (and, hopefully, celebrate!) 

Just remember that a well-executed launch is structured, not rushed. Once testing is complete, plan a rollout that reduces risk and supports quick issue resolution.

Your launch plan should cover:

• A defined release window and rollback strategy
• Real-time monitoring of logs, errors, and performance
• Cross-team communication so everyone knows what’s happening
• Quick-response channels for triaging issues
• Post-launch QA during the first weeks to confirm redirects, data syncing, and checkout stability

A controlled launch ensures the new platform starts strong and continues improving once customers begin using it.

Common ecommerce platform migration mistakes and how to avoid them

One finding from the 2025 replatforming report stands out: 96% of successful migrations had direct C-level involvement, most often from the CTO or CIO.

And that’s no coincidence. When leadership alignment is missing, teams move in different directions, priorities shift mid-project, and the migration becomes far harder than it needs to be.

But that’s not the only mistake you can make—and should avoid—during ecommerce replatforming. Here’s a quick overview of the common mistakes and their fixes.

SEO considerations during migration: A SEO migration checklist

With so many moving parts in a replatforming project, SEO is often the first thing to slip through the cracks. That’s risky. A new storefront, new URLs, and new content structures can easily disrupt rankings if they aren’t handled with care. 

The good news is that most issues are preventable when SEO is woven into the process. Follow this checklist to ensure yours isn’t an afterthought.

SEO migration checklist:

Audit your current site: Export all URLs, metadata, structured data, and internal links. Confirm which pages drive the most traffic and revenue.

Define your new URL structure early: Finalize naming conventions for product pages, categories, and content before development begins.

Prepare a full redirect map: Match every old URL to its new destination with 301 redirects. Avoid redirect chains.

Preserve metadata: Carry over titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and header structures where still relevant.

Rebuild internal links intentionally: Update navigation, breadcrumbs, and on-page links to match the new structure.

Validate structured data: Ensure product schema, review markup, pricing data, and availability fields survive the migration.

Review page speed and Core Web Vitals: Test performance early in staging. Fix large images, unused scripts, and layout shifts.

Check canonical tags: Ensure canonicals point to the correct URLs and aren’t inherited from development environments.

Test indexing settings: Keep staging environments noindexed and remove noindex tags at launch.

Re-submit sitemaps post-launch: Submit updated XML sitemaps in Search Console once the new site is live.

Monitor rankings and crawl errors: Check Search Console daily for the first few weeks to catch broken links or misconfigured redirects quickly.

Post-launch optimization

A strong launch is only the starting point. The first weeks on a new platform reveal how the site behaves under real customer activity, so this period deserves close attention. 

Monitor performance trends, validate that redirects and indexing behave as expected, and keep a close eye on checkout, search, and other high-impact flows. Confirm that integrations sync cleanly and that merchandising and content tools work the way teams expect. 

Tip: Encourage support and marketing to flag recurring issues so they can be addressed quickly. With steady refinement, the new storefront becomes more stable, faster, and better aligned with customer behavior.

From Shopify to Adobe Commerce: How TDI Holdings LLC grew their operations through replatforming with Elogic

A fashion retailer, TDI Holdings, needed a faster, more efficient way to launch new storefronts. Each brand operated on a different platform, slowing releases and creating unnecessary operational strain. 

That’s when they turned to us for a more scalable, unified approach.

We rebuilt their ecommerce ecosystem on Adobe Commerce Cloud and completed a full Shopify to Adobe Commerce migration for Tactical Distributors. 

Our team delivered a shared admin for all brands, a redesigned buying experience, NetSuite and Zakeke integrations, and over 200 custom features supporting complex catalogs and personalization. 
MSP Design Group now launches stores in weeks and manages 15 live sites from one dashboard, giving TDI a cleaner, faster workflow that supports continued growth.

Conclusion

Replatforming requires time, budget, and technical know-how. That’s true. But the payoff is hard to ignore!

Recent industry data shows that almost every company that migrated saw stronger commercial performance, with many recording double-digit revenue growth and a notable share achieving 30% (and more!) increases. 

Performance improvements were even more striking: 94% reported faster, more stable sites, 86% gained better customization, and 62% said the new platform was easier for their teams to use.

When handled properly, the return on investment is substantial and lasting. And with the right partner, the process becomes far easier to navigate.

At Elogic, we support brands through every stage of ecommerce replatforming—from discovery to launch and everything after. If you’re preparing for a migration, we’re ready to help you make it a success.