Brands that struggle during replatforming don’t fail because Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, or a custom stack are “too hard to migrate to/from.” They tend to share common failure modes: insufficient discovery, overly aggressive timelines, and late-stage surprises around data, integrations, or SEO. In contrast, brands that succeed treat migration as an engineering discipline, not a leap of faith — here’s how.
The uncomfortable truth: your current platform is already risky
One of the most counterintuitive insights in enterprise migrations is that the “safe” option, staying on the existing platform, often carries more unacknowledged risk than replatforming.
That risk typically manifests as:
- Business-critical logic embedded in undocumented custom code
- Platform upgrades deferred due to fear of regression
- Integration chains that only work because “they always have”
- Deployment processes that rely on a small number of individuals or partners
- Peak trading periods that require weeks of preparation and manual coordination
None of this shows up in uptime dashboards or revenue reports. But it creates fragile operating conditions, where small changes can have disproportionate impact. Replatforming exposes this risk, which is why it feels dangerous, but it doesn’t create it.
*Note: Sometimes the problem really is your new platform, which is why it’s important to take the time, even before discovery, to understand what is the right platform based on business goals and needs and not a platform to replicate how things are already being done. Understand that a new website might look and work different, and that's okay.
Understanding where risk really originates
Most migration risk can be traced to uncertainty. Teams underestimate the extent of custom logic embedded in the platform, overestimate how easily data will translate, or assume integrations will behave identically in a new environment.
Risk increases further when migrations are framed as “lift-and-shift” exercises. Carrying legacy workflows forward without reassessment preserves complexity while removing the context that once justified it.
Four structural failure modes
Across enterprise migrations, failure patterns are remarkably consistent. A failed ecommerce platform migration often shows up as prolonged site downtime, broken checkout flows, or lost customer data that immediately erode trust and revenue. It can also manifest more subtly through degraded performance, SEO losses, or incomplete integrations that increase operational friction long after launch. All of which can be bucketed into four key structural issues:
1. Treating migration as a “lift and shift”
The most common mistake is attempting to recreate the existing platform, quirks, workarounds, and all, on a new foundation.
This approach assumes that every existing workflow is still required, every customization is still valuable and every integration should behave identically. Whereas, in reality, many of these elements exist only to compensate for limitations of the old platform. Migrating them over simply transfers complexity and risk into a new environment.
The safest migrations are selective, they treat migration as an opportunity to distinguish between workflows that are genuinely revenue- or experience-critical, and complexity that exists purely to compensate for historical platform constraints.
2. Discovering complexity too late
Migration risk increases dramatically when critical complexity is uncovered during execution rather than discovery. Late-stage surprises frequently include things like promotions logic split across several tools, checkout behavior influenced by legacy middleware, or product data that behaves differently depending on market, channel, or fulfilment path. Data migration failures, in particular, are rarely about tooling but more about assumptions that were never written down. In many cases, teams also uncover “temporary” fixes that were never designed to survive a platform transition but now underpin key journeys.
Mapping these challenges out the earlier the better can remove risk of delays, and allow time for decision making rather than trading off speed over soundness.
3. Optimizing for launch day instead of long-term operability
Another structural failure occurs when migrations are designed primarily to “get live,” rather than to operate well over time.
In these cases, decisions are made to replicate existing behavior as quickly as possible, even if that behavior is brittle or inefficient. Manual processes are accepted as interim solutions, architectural compromises are deferred, and known issues are scheduled for “later.”
The launch itself may be successful, revenue continues and customers notice little disruption. But post-launch, the organization finds that many of the same challenges they faced with their previous platform, remain.
4. Underestimating organizational change
Replatforming is not purely technical, it alters how teams deploy, test, release, and collaborate. A new platform changes deployment workflows, testing practices, content publishing, and ownership boundaries.
Risk increases when these shifts are not explicitly managed, like when engineering workflows change but ownership doesn’t, or when marketing teams gain more control without guardrails and operations teams inherit new tooling without adequate training. In these situations, technical risk is replaced by organizational risk.
A phased approach to risk reduction
Successful migrations tend to follow a phased structure. Each phase exists to surface a different kind of uncertainty and resolve it before it can compound later:
Discovery is where unknown risk becomes visible. Rather than a lightweight requirements exercise, effective discovery focuses on how the current platform actually behaves: where undocumented logic lives, how integrations really interact, and which assumptions are embedded in the data model.
Planning converts complexity into sequence. Instead of treating the platform as a single system that has to move all at once, teams decide what actually needs to exist on day one, what can follow later, and what shouldn’t be carried forward at all.
Execution is deliberately incremental. Data is migrated in stages, integrations are rebuilt in isolation, and checkout or promotions logic is implemented using modern extensibility models rather than tightly coupled custom code. Assumptions are validated early, while there is still time to adapt, rather than at the point of launch.
Post-migration optimization closes the loop. Launch alone does not prove a migration was successful. Risk only truly declines when the organization can ship faster, operate with less manual oversight, and handle change with greater confidence than before.
The strategic decision to not migrate everything
One of the most effective ways to reduce migration risk is to make an explicit decision about what shouldn’t be migrated.
In enterprise replatforming projects, a significant portion of existing workflows exist solely to compensate for limitations of the current platform rather than to serve an enduring business need. These include promotion logic duplicated across tools, checkout scripts layered on top of native functionality, region-specific data rules that emerged through historical workarounds, and operational processes built to bridge gaps between tightly coupled systems.
When teams attempt to migrate these workflows unchanged, they increase scope, introduce unnecessary testing complexity, and recreate brittle dependencies in the new platform. In practice, these inherited elements are also the most likely to fail during migration because they rely on undocumented behavior or implicit assumptions that no longer hold.
Deciding not to migrate these workflows is about reducing structural risk. It allows teams to rebuild critical journeys using native platform capabilities rather than historical constraints. The result is not only a lower-risk migration, but a platform that is easier to operate and evolve after launch.
Conclusion
Replatforming doesn’t have to be disruptive. When approached with discipline and intent, it can be one of the most stabilizing initiatives an organization undertakes.
For a detailed, enterprise-tested migration frameworks that prioritizes risk reduction, read our migration guides:
