Custom Platform to Shopify Migration

A custom platform can provide code-level control and exact business behavior, but the business owns infrastructure, security, upgrades, key-person knowledge, and every extension. Shopify provides a managed commerce foundation with defined extension points. Compare differentiating requirements, control, maintainability, risk, integration needs, team capability, and total cost.

A custom platform can embody valuable business behaviour, but it can also contain years of exceptions that nobody has reviewed. Separate what makes the business distinctive from what only makes the software difficult to maintain. The people operating the system often know important rules that are missing from technical documentation.

Read the full answer and checklist

A migration can be planned from bespoke systems and platforms such as Shopware, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Volusion, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce, commercetools, and other proprietary stacks when records can be extracted through APIs, databases, exports, reports, or controlled alternative methods. Feasibility and scope follow technical discovery.

The platform name is a starting point, not a feasibility verdict. Two stores on the same system can have very different customisations, data quality, and access. Review the records, media, business rules, and connected services that must survive before choosing an extraction or import method.

Read the full answer and checklist

We assess read-only database access, exports, reports, backups, files, event logs, existing integrations, and controlled extraction methods. The chosen path must be legal, secure, repeatable, and reconcilable. Unknown fields, relationships, encodings, attachments, and business rules become explicit discovery items.

An API is one way to access records, not the only one. Assess authorised exports, reporting tools, read-only database access, backups, files, and existing integration feeds. Prefer a method that can be repeated safely and that preserves identifiers and relationships. Do not experiment against a live production database without appropriate controls.

Read the full answer and checklist

Products, variants, customers, addresses, orders, content, files, pricing, inventory, companies, and other records can often move when the source is accessible. Every entity needs a system of record, field and relationship map, transformation rule, exception path, validation method, privacy decision, and archive requirement.

Start with an entity map covering products, variants, customers, orders, inventory, content, and any specialised records. For every important field, record where it originates, what it means, who uses it, and what it must do in Shopify. Storing a value is not the same as preserving the behaviour that depends on it.

Read the full answer and checklist

Yes where they remain valuable and fit Shopify’s extension model. Each rule should be mapped to native configuration, Shopify Functions, theme or checkout extensions, an app, Shopify Flow, an external service, or a redesigned process. Rules should not be copied merely because they exist in the legacy code.

Document the rule using an example: a particular buyer selects a product, qualifies for a price, receives a delivery option, or triggers an internal approval. Include exceptions and identify who owns the decision. This makes it possible to judge alternatives without carrying across obsolete implementation details.

Read the full answer and checklist

Document each ERP, PIM, CRM, fulfilment, tax, payment, search, subscription, support, and reporting flow as a data contract. Define ownership, IDs, events, ordering, retries, reconciliation, alerts, security, manual fallback, cutover sequence, and legacy shutdown before implementation.

For each connected system, define which records move, in which direction, which system owns the value, and how identities match. Include timing requirements and the consequences of a missed update. Product publishing, inventory, orders, refunds, and fulfilment often have different rules even when they share one connector.

Read the full answer and checklist

It can protect search value when the source URL estate can be discovered and mapped. Crawl the current site, combine analytics and Search Console evidence, classify retained and retired pages, implement redirects, validate rendering and metadata, update internal links, and monitor crawl, indexation, traffic, and revenue after launch.

Combine available crawls, sitemaps, analytics, search evidence, exports, and knowledge from the team. A custom platform may generate valuable landing pages through rules that are not obvious from its page list. Identify those patterns early and record why visitors use them.

Read the full answer and checklist

Begin with a bounded discovery phase covering code, schemas, data samples, exports, integrations, traffic, operations, owners, risks, and extraction tests. The output is a migration inventory, architecture, mapping approach, assumptions, exclusions, proof points, phased estimate, rehearsal plan, cutover controls, and legacy-retirement decision.

Start with a time-bounded discovery phase focused on the uncertainties that could invalidate the project: source access, extraction, data meaning, critical business rules, and integration feasibility. The useful output is evidence and decisions, not simply a longer feature list.

Read the full answer and checklist