Software Development Blog

Why Ecommerce Migrations Fail (And How to Avoid It)

Most ecommerce platform migrations fail.

Not spectacularly. Not in a way that makes the news. Just quietly, expensively, and predictably.

Orders drop. SEO tanks. The team spends months fixing problems that should never have happened. The new platform works, technically, but it costs far more than it should have and takes twice as long as promised.

Here is why this keeps happening.

Everyone Underestimates Complexity

Your developer looks at your store and thinks it is straightforward. Products, categories, customers, orders. Standard stuff.

Then they start the migration and realise your checkout has custom tax rules. Your product variants are set up in a way the new platform does not support. Half your customers have incomplete address data. Your order history goes back ten years and includes formats that no longer exist.

Suddenly the two-week migration becomes two months.

This happens because people focus on what they can see (the front end) and ignore what actually matters (the data structure, the integrations, the edge cases).

Nobody Plans For Parallel Running

The cheapest way to migrate is to shut down your old store, copy everything across, and hope it works.

That is also the riskiest.

If something breaks during the migration, you are offline until it is fixed. If the new checkout does not work properly, you are losing sales. If customer logins fail, your support inbox explodes.

A proper migration means running both stores in parallel. You build and test the new platform while the old one keeps trading. You only switch when you are absolutely certain everything works.

Most people skip this step because it costs more. Then they pay for it later when things go wrong.

The Data Migration Gets Rushed

Migrating data is boring. It is not creative. It does not look impressive in screenshots. So it gets rushed.

Products import with missing images. Variants lose their SKUs. Customer order history is incomplete. Stock levels are wrong.

These problems do not show up until after launch, when customers start complaining and your team realises the data is a mess.

Proper data migration means mapping everything carefully before you move it. Products, categories, customers, orders, all with their associated metadata. Then testing it thoroughly before you cut over.

It is slow and it is tedious. But it is the only way to avoid chaos.

SEO Gets Ignored Until It is Too Late

Your URLs are going to change. Every product, every category, every blog post.

If you do not set up redirects, Google loses all those pages. Your rankings collapse. Organic traffic disappears overnight.

Setting up redirects properly means mapping every single URL on your old site to the equivalent page on your new site. Then testing them to make sure they actually work. Then monitoring Google Search Console after launch to catch any that were missed.

Most migrations skip this or do it badly. A few months later the client realises their traffic is half what it used to be and asks what happened.

Payment Gateways Break

Your old platform talks to your payment gateway in a specific way. Your new platform talks to it differently.

That means reconfiguring everything. API credentials, webhook URLs, test mode vs live mode, currency settings, 3D Secure.

Get one setting wrong and orders start failing. Customers try to pay and get error messages. You lose sales and do not even know it is happening until someone complains.

Testing the checkout thoroughly, with real transactions in test mode, is the only way to catch these problems before they cost you money.

The Team Does Not Know How To Use It

The new platform works differently to the old one. Processing orders is different. Managing stock is different. Running reports is different.

If your team does not get trained properly, they will waste hours trying to work out how to do basic tasks. Or worse, they will do things wrong and create more problems.

Training needs to happen before launch, not after. Your team should be comfortable with the new platform before you switch.

Nobody Monitors The First Week

Launch day arrives. DNS switches. The new site goes live. Everyone celebrates.

Then orders start trickling in. Some process fine. Some fail silently. Confirmation emails do not send for certain payment methods. Stock levels are not syncing properly.

These problems are fixable if you catch them quickly. But if nobody is watching closely for the first few days, they can snowball into serious issues.

A proper migration includes post-launch monitoring. Someone checking orders are processing correctly, payments are going through, emails are sending, stock is updating. For at least the first week.

How To Avoid All This

Plan properly. Allow enough time. Run in parallel. Test thoroughly. Monitor closely.

It is not complicated. But it does take discipline and patience.

Most migrations fail because someone is trying to save money or hit an arbitrary deadline. They cut corners. They rush. They assume it will be fine.

It is never fine.

If you are planning a migration, do it properly or do not do it at all.

Need help with your migration? Our Platform Migration Service is built to avoid all these problems. Book a discovery call and we will show you what a proper migration looks like.