Ecommerce Platform Migration Services

Replatforming an ecommerce store is one of the highest stakes projects a DTC brand can take on. You are changing the foundation a business runs on while it keeps trading. Orders keep shipping, subscriptions keep billing, ads keep spending, and customers keep expecting the experience they know. Any slip shows up immediately in revenue, support tickets, or search rankings. That is why most migrations that go wrong do not go wrong at the code layer. They go wrong in planning, mapping, and the cutover window.

Pixeltree runs platform migrations as a disciplined, phase-gated project rather than a long hopeful rebuild. We have moved brands off WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, and Etsy. We have moved other brands onto headless stacks with Shopify as the backend. The shape of the work is always similar: understand what the current store actually does, decide what moves and what gets retired, preserve everything that drives traffic and revenue, and flip the switch with a safety net underneath.

This hub covers how we think about migrations, what is in scope, and the sub-services we run under it. If you already know which path you need, jump to the leaf page for that route. If you are weighing options, start with the methodology section and the "who this is for" block further down.

TL;DR

• → Most failed migrations lose SEO because URLs change without a complete 301 redirect map.
• → Subscription transitions break more brands than checkout rebuilds do; they deserve their own workstream.
• → Our 6-phase method (audit, map, build, test, cutover, monitor) exists to make the risky parts boring.
• → We keep the old store live until the new one passes a full parity test, then cut DNS in a monitored window.

Why migrations fail

Migrations rarely fail because the new platform is bad. They fail because a handful of high-risk areas do not get the attention they need until it is too late. The three that cause the most damage are SEO loss, subscription breakage, and checkout regressions.

SEO loss happens when URLs change and redirects are incomplete. Search engines treat a moved page without a 301 as a new page. Authority does not transfer, rankings drop, and the brand blames "the migration" when the real cause is a spreadsheet that had 400 rows instead of 4,000. We have reviewed post-migration SEO disasters where the agency shipped redirects for the top 100 URLs and let the rest return 404. Organic traffic dropped by more than half within two weeks. Fixing it after the fact is possible but slow. Preserving it up front is cheap. See our writeup on Shopify URL structure best practices for the specifics on Shopify's forced URL patterns and how to plan around them.

Subscription breakage is the second biggest source of pain, and it is almost entirely unique to DTC. If you run subscriptions, the migration is not just moving a catalog. It is migrating active recurring billing agreements, stored payment methods, cycle dates, discount structures, and customer expectations. The technical side is solvable. What gets missed is the customer communication, the billing verification window, and the cohort testing. A subscription cohort that bills incorrectly on its first post-migration cycle generates refund requests and cancellations that do not come back.

Checkout regressions are the third. The new checkout is usually better, but "better" does not mean "the same." Shipping rules, tax calculation, discount stacking, upsells, and payment methods all need to be validated against the old store's behaviour before cutover. A store that loses 2% conversion in checkout for the first week after go-live often does not notice until a full month of data is in, and by then the pattern is baked in.

Every one of these failure modes is preventable. None of them are prevented accidentally.

Our migration services

We cover the most common DTC migration paths as dedicated sub-services. Each has its own playbook because the source platform dictates what data is exportable, what has to be rebuilt, and where the sharp edges are.

• WooCommerce to Shopify. The most common path for brands that have outgrown the WordPress stack or want to reduce maintenance overhead. See our WooCommerce development page if you are evaluating whether to stay or move, and the Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison for a side by side.
• Magento to Shopify. Typically triggered by Adobe Commerce licence renewal cycles or the cost of keeping Magento specialists on payroll. Complex because Magento stores tend to be older and carry heavy custom logic.
• BigCommerce to Shopify. Usually about app ecosystem and subscription tooling rather than raw platform capability. Subscription cohort transition is the critical path.
• Shopify to headless. Hydrogen, Next, or Nuxt on the front with Shopify as the commerce backend. A performance and brand-experience play rather than a replatform in the traditional sense.
• Etsy to Shopify. For makers who have proven demand on Etsy and need owned traffic, email, and brand. Store reviews migration and category SEO setup are the two things that matter most. Our guide on migrating from Etsy to Shopify covers the full walkthrough.
• Squarespace to Shopify. For brands that started on Squarespace Commerce and hit the ceiling on apps, shipping logic, or international selling.

If your route is not on this list (for example Wix, Prestashop, or a custom-built platform) we still take the project. The methodology is the same. The data export path is what changes.

See our core Shopify development services for what happens once the migration is complete and the store enters its ongoing build and growth phase.

Our migration methodology

The method below is what we run for every migration regardless of source or target platform. Phases are gated. We do not start the next one until the previous one is signed off.

Phase 1: Audit. We do a full inventory of the existing store. Products, variants, collections, customer records, order history, subscriptions, reviews, content pages, blog posts, image assets, meta data, and redirect history. We pull a crawl of the live site and a report of every URL that has received organic traffic in the last 12 months. Anything that has earned a link or a ranking gets flagged for preservation. Anything dead gets flagged for retirement.

Phase 2: Map. This is where the migration is actually designed. We build three maps in parallel. A URL redirect map (old URL, new URL, redirect type) covering every URL that matters. A data map (source field, target field, transform rule, fallback) covering every product, customer, and order attribute. A feature map covering every custom behaviour on the current store and how it will be replicated, replaced with an app, or retired. The map is the single source of truth for the rest of the project.

Phase 3: Build. Theme, apps, integrations, and custom logic get built in a development store. We import a sample of production data early so we are building against real shapes, not assumptions. Anything that depends on third parties (ESP, 3PL, review platform, subscription app) gets configured and connected during this phase, not after cutover.

Phase 4: Test. Parity testing against the live store. Checkout flows under every shipping and tax combination the business uses. Subscription billing simulated against a test cohort. Redirects validated against the full URL map. Performance benchmarked. Analytics and pixel firing verified. The test phase always takes longer than clients expect and that is the point.

Phase 5: Cutover. The actual DNS switch. We run cutovers in a defined window (usually a low-traffic weekday evening in the store's main timezone) with a pre-flight checklist, a go or no-go call, and a rollback plan. The team stays on call for the cutover window and the first 24 hours.

Phase 6: Monitor. The first 30 days after launch. We watch error logs, checkout conversion, search console coverage, subscription billing cycles, and customer support volume. Anything that looks off gets triaged immediately. Most issues that surface here are small, but they surface on a schedule and need to be caught early.

What's included in every migration

The scope below is the floor, not the ceiling. Every migration we run includes all of it.

• Full product catalogue migration including variants, images, metafields, and SEO meta data
• Customer account migration with addresses and order history where the target platform supports it
• Complete 301 redirect map covering product, collection, content, and blog URLs
• Theme build or theme port matching the current brand and layout system
• Checkout parity testing against live-store behaviour for shipping, tax, and discount logic
• Third-party integration setup (ESP, reviews, subscriptions, 3PL, analytics, ad pixels)
• Subscription cohort migration plan where applicable, including customer comms
• Staging environment with production-shape data for stakeholder review
• Cutover runbook with rollback plan
• 30 days of post-launch monitoring and bug-fix support

Anything that is not on this list but is specific to your business gets added to the feature map in phase 2 and scoped explicitly. No surprises at cutover.

Who this is for

Migrations are a big project and they are not the right project for every brand at every stage. You are probably a good fit for a Pixeltree migration if most of the following are true.

• You are on a platform that is actively costing you time, money, or capability (maintenance burden, licence fees, app gaps, performance issues).
• You have organic traffic worth preserving. If you have no SEO to lose, the migration is easier but the urgency is lower.
• You have a catalogue and customer base big enough that a DIY migration via CSV import is not realistic.
• You run or plan to run subscriptions and need the transition handled without churn.
• You want a fixed-scope project with a defined cutover date rather than an open-ended rebuild.
• You have someone on your side (founder, head of ecom, or ops lead) who can own decisions during the project.

You are probably not a good fit if you are pre-launch with no catalogue yet (you want a build, not a migration), if you are looking for the cheapest possible CSV-and-theme-swap (a freelancer on Upwork will do that for a tenth of the cost), or if you want us to decide the target platform for you without doing the discovery work to recommend one.

How we engage

Every migration starts with a discovery call to understand the current store, the pain points driving the move, and the constraints on timing. If the fit is obvious we move to a paid audit phase (phase 1 above) as a standalone engagement. The audit output is a document you own regardless of whether we run the rest of the project. If the audit surfaces reasons not to migrate, we will tell you. That happens more often than you might expect.

After the audit we scope the full project with a fixed timeline and a defined cutover window. Work is invoiced by phase, not by hour. Communication runs through a shared project board with weekly written updates and a working session each week with your team. The cutover itself is scheduled at least two weeks in advance so customer comms, support staffing, and ad spend can be aligned around it.

Post-launch we stay engaged for 30 days of monitoring and a further optional retainer for ongoing build work, growth experiments, or a second phase of scope that was deliberately held back from the initial cutover.

Closing

• → Migrations fail for predictable reasons. A disciplined method prevents the expensive ones.
• → Preserve SEO by mapping every URL that matters and shipping complete 301s at cutover.
• → Treat subscriptions as their own workstream with cohort testing and customer comms.
• → Start with an audit. If the numbers say stay, stay. If they say move, move with a plan.