Alberto Vena

Every replatform has two projects running in parallel. There's the technical migration, which is complex but ultimately predictable. And there's the organizational one: keeping tens of people with competing priorities, different levels of technical fluency, and their own agendas aligned for months on end. The second project is where most replatforms actually succeed or fail.

In a previous article, we covered the structural mistakes agencies make with enterprise migrations. This piece zooms in on one of those challenges: stakeholder management. Specifically, how to keep alignment from the earliest conversations all the way through launch, and what to do when that alignment breaks down.

## Replatforms Are Political Projects

Most agencies walk into a replatform expecting a clean org chart. There's a product owner on the brand side who gathers requirements, makes decisions, and serves as the single point of contact. The agency talks to that person, that person talks to everyone else, and information flows neatly in both directions.

This almost never reflects reality at enterprise scale.

In practice, the product owner can answer some questions but not others. They know the e-commerce team's priorities, but they don't fully understand how the warehouse processes returns, or why the finance team needs a specific field at checkout, or what the content team's daily workflow actually looks like. They're a generalist in an organization full of specialists, and funneling every conversation through them creates a bottleneck that slows the project down and filters out critical context.

The deeper problem is that this model treats the brand as a monolith, a single entity with a unified set of requirements. Enterprise organizations are collections of teams with their own professional goals, personal motivations, and fears about what the migration means for them:

- **The CFO** wants to see the cost savings that justified the project.
- **The content team** wants a CMS that doesn't make their job miserable.
- **Marketing** wants campaign flexibility without filing dev tickets.

These agendas overlap in some places and directly conflict in others, and every one of them competes for priority within a fixed budget and timeline.

Underneath the professional priorities, there are personal ones that rarely get articulated:

- An operations team might drag their feet on UAT because they're worried the new system will expose inefficiencies in their current process.
- A department head who championed the existing platform may see the migration as an implicit criticism of their original decision.
- A team that has spent years building custom workarounds for the old system's limitations may fear that their institutional knowledge becomes worthless overnight.

These fears are real, they shape behavior, and if you don't account for them, you'll find yourself dealing with resistance that seems irrational on the surface but makes perfect sense once you understand the motivation behind it.

There's also emotional attachment to existing tools and workflows. People build their daily rhythm around specific software and workflows, and they will resist changing them, regardless of whether a better option exists. Those attachments are rational: the team knows the status quo works, they've invested time in learning it, and switching carries real risk for their day-to-day productivity. Dismissing these concerns as resistance to change is a fast way to lose trust.

Mapping these dynamics, both the professional priorities and the personal motivations, is work that starts during discovery and never really stops. As you learn more about the organization, your understanding of who cares about what will evolve. New stakeholders will surface. Priorities will shift. The political map you drew in week one will look different by month three. Keeping it current is part of the job.

Understanding all of this requires something fundamentally different from the traditional agency-client relationship. There can't be gatekeeping on either side. The agency can't hide behind a project manager who shields the team from organizational complexity, and the brand can't funnel everything through a single point of contact who lacks the full picture. The project needs to be deeply embedded, with both teams working side by side, building direct relationships across departments, and developing a nuanced understanding of how the organization actually operates.

This is all very uncomfortable for agencies that prefer clean boundaries. It also happens to be the only way to account for the real complexity of enterprise organizations.

## Discovery Is a Mindset, Not a Phase

There's a famous line often attributed to Eisenhower: plans are useless, but planning is everything. The same principle applies to discovery in a replatform. While initial discovery matters (we'll cover that in depth in a separate article), the real value is in establishing a discipline of continuous questioning that persists throughout the entire project.

The beginning of a project is, paradoxically, the moment when you have the least information. You're making a plan based on what stakeholders tell you they need, filtered through what they remember to mention. As the project progresses, you accumulate context that reshapes your understanding of the business.

This means the principles that guide a good discovery workshop should guide every conversation throughout the project. For every requirement that surfaces, ask why it matters and what the business impact actually is. When someone tells you a feature is critical, dig into how often the scenario occurs and what happens if it simply doesn't exist at launch. Many requirements that feel urgent in the abstract turn out to be low-frequency edge cases that can wait.

The other side of continuous discovery is **proactive requirement gathering**. Stakeholders have full-time jobs outside of your replatform, and getting answers takes longer than you'd expect. Waiting until you actually need a decision to ask for it is a recipe for blocked work. This is also where the embedded model pays off: when you have direct relationships across departments, you can go to the source for answers instead of waiting for information to trickle through a single point of contact.

## Getting The Platform in Their Hands Early

One of the most effective stakeholder management techniques has nothing to do with meetings or frameworks. Give people access to the new platform as early as possible.

You can talk about a new platform all you want. You can run workshops, share screenshots, walk through slide decks. None of it compares to the moment an operations team member opens the new admin, performs a task that used to take fifteen minutes, and sees it happen in two clicks. That's when passive tolerance turns into active advocacy. People who were indifferent to the migration start pushing for it to launch sooner.

This is also the single best antidote to the fears and emotional attachments that surface in the opening weeks of a project. Remember the operations team worried that the new system will expose their process gaps? When they can explore the platform at their own pace, on their own terms, they start to see it as a tool they can shape rather than a threat imposed on them. The department head who felt the migration was a referendum on their original platform choice? Watching the new system handle something their old one couldn't softens that defensiveness faster than any reassurance in a meeting. Early access turns abstract anxiety into concrete, answerable questions: How does this work? Can it do this? What happens when I try that?

Early access serves three purposes at once:

1. **It builds genuine buy-in** based on experience rather than promises.
2. **It functions as training in disguise:** stakeholders learn the new system gradually as it takes shape, which means launch day feels like a natural transition rather than a cliff.
3. **It surfaces feedback when you can still act on it.** A workflow issue spotted in month two is a fixable problem. The same issue spotted the week before launch is a crisis.

The same logic extends to validation. QA and UAT should happen continuously throughout the project, not in a single frantic phase before launch. Give stakeholders a staging environment and encourage them to validate work as it's completed, sprint by sprint. This keeps expectations calibrated, catches issues early, and reinforces the feedback loop that makes continuous discovery work. When stakeholders are reviewing working software regularly, they surface requirements and concerns that no amount of upfront planning would have uncovered. A massive UAT crunch at the end is where timelines go to die.

## Navigating Conflicts and Trade-Offs

Conflicts during a replatform are inevitable. The question is whether you have a process for resolving them or whether each one becomes an ad hoc political negotiation.

When a decision needs to be made, **involve the right people**. This sounds obvious, but the common mistake is consulting only the executive who owns the budget. The person who chooses the logistics tool is often not the person who uses it fifty times a day. Gathering input from operational teams, the people who live with the consequences of decisions, prevents the kind of post-launch frustration that comes from choices made in a vacuum.

This matters even more when you consider the personal dynamics at play. A team that already fears their expertise is being devalued by the migration will read exclusion from key decisions as confirmation. Bringing them into the conversation, even when their input doesn't change the outcome, signals that their experience matters. And often, their input *does* change the outcome, because they know things about daily operations that nobody at the executive level has visibility into.

**Use a structured approach to depersonalize the conversation.** Document each option with its pros, cons, and business impact so the discussion shifts from competing opinions to a shared view of trade-offs. When you can show that one path reduces operational overhead but requires a longer integration timeline while another ships faster but adds manual work for the operations team, the conversation becomes concrete. Stakeholders can disagree about which trade-off to accept, but at least they're disagreeing about the same facts.

Once a decision is made with input from all relevant parties, apply the principle of **disagree and commit**. Everyone moves forward together, even those who advocated for a different approach. Relitigating settled decisions is one of the fastest ways to kill momentum.

## Don't Lose Sight of the Big Picture

The further you get into a replatform, the easier it is to lose the thread. Sprints fill up, integration issues multiply, and the day-to-day mechanics of the project start to crowd out the original goals. Teams that were once aligned on outcomes start optimizing for outputs: tickets closed, features shipped, milestones hit. This is how projects arrive at launch having delivered everything on the plan and still feel like a disappointment.

The antidote is maintaining a regular cadence of communication with senior stakeholders that operates at a different altitude from your sprint reviews and status updates. Not a report on what got done last week, but an honest conversation about whether the project is still pointed in the right direction. Are the decisions being made at the ground level still consistent with the business goals that justified this migration? Are the trade-offs accumulating in ways that nobody has explicitly acknowledged? These conversations are harder to schedule and easier to skip, which is exactly why they matter.

Senior stakeholders are well-positioned for this. They're removed enough from the day-to-day to hold the original vision clearly, and senior enough to unblock things when the project drifts or gets stuck. But they can only play that role if they have an accurate picture. The instinct in a difficult moment is to manage upward carefully, softening the message to avoid alarm. Resist it. Communicating with senior stakeholders requires a different register: not sprint-level detail, but a clear, honest view of where the project stands, what the risks are, and where you might need their help.

This big-picture framing also gives you a natural framework for handling change when it comes, and it will come. Scope cuts and timeline shifts are easier to evaluate when you can hold them against the original goals rather than just the current plan. Deferring a feature is a reasonable call if it doesn't compromise day-one operations. It's a much harder call if it quietly undermines the business case that got the migration approved in the first place. Keeping that context alive throughout the project is what allows you to make those judgments clearly, and to bring stakeholders along when the answer is uncomfortable.

## Your Vendors Are Stakeholders Too

There's one category of stakeholder that often gets overlooked: external vendors. Your SEO agency, your logistics provider, your payment processor, your ERP partner. Each of these has their own agenda, their own timeline, and their own level of investment in your migration's success. Managing them well can accelerate the project in surprising ways. Ignoring them can quietly derail it.

**First, understand each vendor's agenda.** A vendor whose contract is up for renewal around the same time as your migration has a very different motivation than one with a multi-year agreement in place. A vendor who is being replaced as part of the replatform has little incentive to invest time helping you migrate away from their system. A vendor who sees the migration as an opportunity to upsell you on additional services will be eager to help, but their recommendations may not always be aligned with your best interests. None of this makes vendors adversarial by default, but it does mean you need to approach each relationship with clear eyes about what's driving their behavior.

**Second, figure out how each vendor can contribute to the project.** This is where the surprising upside lives. Your logistics provider may have already migrated dozens of clients to the new platform and can handle their side of the integration with minimal guidance. Your payment processor might have a dedicated migrations team that can run testing in parallel with your own QA. Your ERP vendor might be able to take on the data mapping work for their integration, freeing up your development team to focus elsewhere. If you don't ask, you won't know. And if you treat vendors as passive participants who just need to flip a switch on launch day, you're leaving significant help on the table.

**Third, build vendor dependencies into your project plan with the same rigor you apply to internal workstreams.** Vendors have their own release cycles, their own resource constraints, and their own priorities. If your logistics provider needs four weeks to configure their integration and you give them two weeks' notice, that's your problem, not theirs. Map out what each vendor needs to do, when they need to do it, and what information they need from you to get started. At launch time, every actor in the system needs to do their part at the right moment, and the vendors you forgot to coordinate with are the ones most likely to cause a last-minute scramble.

## Replatforms Are Won or Lost in the Messy Middle

Stakeholder management doesn't have a dramatic moment where it either works or doesn't. It plays out across hundreds of small interactions that never show up in a project plan and rarely get acknowledged.

The replatforms that land well aren't distinguished by a smarter technical approach or a more detailed requirements document. They're distinguished by the sustained, thankless work of keeping people aligned across months of competing priorities, shifting context, and accumulated tension.

That kind of work requires genuine embeddedness. Not a clean agency-client boundary with a project manager filtering the complexity out, but both teams working close enough to the organization to understand how it actually operates.

Need help keeping your stakeholders aligned through a complex migration? [Let's talk.](https://nebulab.com/contact-us)

E-Commerce Replatforms Fail Because of People, Not Technology

For an enterprise brand that wants to move to Shopify, picking an agency partner that can execute a smooth migration can be challenging.

Most Shopify agencies built their expertise working with mid-market brands doing anywhere from $5M to $30M in annual GMV. They've developed processes, templates, and technology stacks optimized for that segment. When an enterprise brand approaches them, they scale up the team size and timeline but keep the same fundamental approach. The result is a migration that either goes over budget, misses the mark on business requirements, or both.

In this guide, we're going to show you the most common failure modes for an enterprise Shopify replatform, and how to identify the right partner.

## Mistake #1: Failing to Account for Enterprise Risk

The core difference between mid-market and enterprise migrations is risk. If your store goes down for two hours, what does that cost you? If a data migration error corrupts your marketing opt-ins, what's the likelihood you'll get sued? If you launch a new design that introduces friction, what's the impact on conversion rate?

Mid-market brands can absorb these risks more easily. They're smaller, more agile, and often still figuring out their optimal processes. A failed migration is painful but recoverable. For an enterprise brand doing $100M or more annually, even a small dip in conversion during a botched cutover can translate to hundreds of thousands in lost revenue in a matter of days. The math changes everything about how you plan.

**The risk mitigation that enterprise requires looks different:**

- **Longer testing cycles** with real data volumes, not sample datasets
- **Staged rollouts** that let you validate functionality before full cutover
- **Detailed rollback plans** for when (not if) something goes wrong
- **Parallel running** of old and new systems during transition periods
- **More conservative timelines** that account for organizational complexity

Agencies that treat enterprise as scaled-up mid-market skip these steps or treat them as optional. They've run dozens of migrations where you flip the switch on launch day and deal with problems as they come up. That approach works when you're doing $10M annually and have a small team that can move fast. It falls apart when you have multiple departments, established SLAs with customers, and operational dependencies that can't just pause while you fix issues.

## Mistake #2: Leading with Technology Instead of Business Outcomes

Shopify has opinions about how e-commerce should work. Many of those opinions are good. The platform's constraints force simplification, which often leads to better customer experiences and more maintainable code. But Shopify's way is not always the right way for every business.

Agencies that lead with technology start from the assumption that you should adapt your business to fit Shopify's model. If you have a complex pricing structure, simplify it. If you have custom fulfillment workflows, standardize them. If your checkout has specific fields required by your finance team, find a workaround or drop them.

For a newer brand without established processes, this can be liberating. You get to build on top of best practices rather than carrying forward legacy decisions. But for an enterprise brand with a proven value proposition and market positioning, this approach can denature the business.

The right approach balances platform constraints with business requirements. A good agency knows when Shopify's opinion should win (because it genuinely leads to better outcomes) and when you need to work around platform limitations (because your business model depends on it). They start by understanding what drives your business, then figure out how to map that onto Shopify.

This requires flexibility. Rather than having a ready-made solution that worked for the last five clients, they need to understand your specific drivers, constraints, and competitive positioning. The reassurance of a proven template is tempting, but every migration at this level has its own characteristics and needs a tailored approach.

## Mistake #3: Lacking the Technical Depth for Complex Migrations

Understanding what needs to happen strategically is different from having the technical skills to execute it. An agency might grasp your business requirements perfectly but still fail if they don't have deep technical expertise in both your current platform and Shopify's architecture.

Every e-commerce platform has different affordandces and constraints. Migrating from Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or a custom stack to Shopify requires engineers who understand both systems deeply. You need people who can look at your current data structure and understand not just what it contains, but why it's structured that way, what business logic depends on it, and how it needs to transform to fit Shopify's model.

This goes beyond general web development skills. You need specialists who have worked with:

- **Complex data migrations** at scale, handling millions of records with referential integrity
- **API architecture** across different platforms and integration patterns
- **Custom Shopify development** beyond themes (apps, checkout extensions, custom account portals)

The gap shows up in estimation and execution. Agencies without this depth will underestimate the effort required for data migration, integration work, and custom development. They discover problems late in the project when they're already committed to timelines and budgets. The result is either rushed solutions that create technical debt or delays that push back the launch date.

An agency with real depth will surface complexity you hadn't anticipated—uncomfortable questions about your data structure, your integration dependencies, your edge cases. The difference is hard to spot in a proposal and obvious six months in.

## Mistake #4: Trying to Tackle Too Much at Once

Migrations are an opportunity to fix things. That's both true and dangerous.

The temptation is to change everything at once: new platform, new design, new third-party vendors, new operational workflows, new team structure. After all, you're already disrupting the business. Why not get everything right in one go?

Because every change introduces risk and complexity. When you change multiple variables simultaneously, it becomes nearly impossible to isolate problems. If conversion rates drop after launch, is it the new platform, the new design, or the new merchandising solution? You won't know.

The discipline of a good migration is changing only what the platform transition requires. If your current design works and your team can implement it on Shopify, keep it. If your vendor relationships are solid and the integrations are feasible, maintain them. Save the redesign, the vendor consolidation, and the workflow optimization for after the migration stabilizes.

This doesn't mean never changing anything beyond the platform. It means having a strategic reason for each change and understanding the risk you're accepting. If your current design is built around platform-specific features that don't exist in Shopify, you need a new design. If a vendor doesn't have a Shopify integration and building one would take three months, you might need a new vendor. But make those decisions deliberately, not opportunistically.

## Mistake #5: Underestimating Governance Complexity

Projects at this scale are not linear. You don't gather requirements upfront, disappear for six months, and emerge with a finished product. They're iterative processes involving multiple stakeholders with different priorities, evolving requirements as you learn more, and organizational dynamics that can't be predicted from a kickoff meeting.

The challenge goes beyond technical complexity: it requires coordinating between departments that don't normally work together closely. Your e-commerce team might want to simplify the checkout flow, but finance needs specific fields for tax compliance. Marketing wants content flexibility for campaigns, but brand wants to retain visual control. Operations has workflows built around the current platform that can't just stop working.

Agencies that lack enterprise project governance try to contain this complexity by locking down scope early. They want a detailed requirements document signed off before development starts. They communicate through a project manager who shields the team from stakeholder chaos. They resist changes once the project is underway because changes threaten their timeline and budget.

This approach fails because it's impossible to collect all the context upfront. You discover requirements as you dig into the migration. Stakeholders realize implications of decisions only when they see working prototypes. Business priorities shift during a six-month project. An agency that can't adapt to these realities will either deliver something that doesn't meet your actual needs or blow up the timeline fighting scope changes.

**What good enterprise governance looks like:**

- **Continuous stakeholder communication** throughout the project, not just at milestones
- **Iterative requirement gathering** that expects to learn more as you go
- **Flexible planning** that can absorb changes without derailing the entire timeline
- **Direct access** between your team and the agency's developers and strategists
- **Transparent trade-off discussions** when requirements conflict or timelines need adjustment

The agencies that succeed at this level understand that flexibility and discipline are not opposites. You need structure to manage complexity, but that structure has to accommodate the reality that complex projects involve learning and adaptation. If an agency wants to disappear for months and only surface for status updates, they don't understand how projects of this complexity actually work.

## How These Mistakes Show Up in Practice

Let's say you're evaluating two Shopify Plus agencies for your migration. Both come highly recommended. Both have strong portfolios. But their approaches diverge in ways that reveal everything about how they'll handle your project.

**The first agency** comes prepared with a polished presentation. They've reviewed your site, identified improvements, and mapped out a six-month timeline with fixed pricing and clear deliverables. They show you similar brands they've migrated.

- **Data migration:** They have a tool that handles most of it automatically.
- **Changing requirements:** They emphasize the importance of locking down scope early.
- **Communication:** Everything flows through a project manager.
- **Vendors:** They have preferred partnerships that streamline integration.

Everything feels professional and reassuring.

**The second agency** asks more questions than they answer. What drove the decision to migrate? How is your team structured? What does your integration landscape look like? They propose a paid discovery phase before committing to a timeline or estimate.

- **Data migration:** They want to understand your data structure first because they've seen Magento migrations with custom models that don't map cleanly to Shopify.
- **Changing requirements:** They call it inevitable at enterprise scale.
- **Communication:** You'll have direct access to your design and development team.
- **Vendors:** No locked-in partnerships; they'll evaluate what fits your needs.

The contrast is telling. The first agency is selling you a solution they've refined across previous clients. Their confidence comes from pattern-matching: they're betting your requirements will fit their established approach. If they're right, you get a smooth project. If they're wrong, you discover the mismatch months in when it's expensive to change course.

The second agency is investing in understanding your specific situation before committing to an approach. The uncertainty is honest. Their discovery phase catches the complexity that a templated proposal would miss. Their flexible process accommodates the learning that inevitably happens during enterprise migrations.

The agency that makes you feel most confident during the sales process may be the one least equipped to handle the reality of your migration. Confidence is easy when you're applying a template. Look for the agency that asks harder questions, that wants discovery before committing to answers, and that treats your migration as genuinely unique rather than another variation of the last one they completed.

## Choosing the Partner Who Understands Enterprise Complexity

The mistakes outlined here share a common root: treating enterprise migrations as bigger versions of mid-market projects. Instead, these projects require a fundamentally different approach to risk, planning, technical execution, scope management, and governance. The agency that gets this right will be the one that resists the temptation to apply a proven template and instead invests in understanding what makes your business, your data, and your organization unique.

When you're evaluating partners, pay less attention to polished proposals and more attention to the quality of questions being asked. The right agency will make you slightly uncomfortable with how much they want to learn before committing to a plan. That discomfort is a sign they understand what they're getting into.

Need help navigating your migration to Shopify Plus? We'd be happy to talk through your specific situation and share what we've learned from working with enterprise brands. [Let's talk.](https://nebulab.com/contact-us)

Why Most Shopify Agencies Get Enterprise Replatforms Wrong

Replatforming is one of those moments that can either unlock a step-change in organic growth—or erase years of SEO equity overnight. 

A new commerce stack can improve speed, flexibility, and long-term maintainability. It most likely also breaks URL structures, buries content, and confuses search engines at scale. A 20–40% traffic dip in the first months after launch isn’t unheard of when fundamentals are missed, and the revenue impact can be painful. The upside, though, is equally real: treat SEO as a first-class citizen throughout the migration and you can come out with faster pages, cleaner architecture, and a stronger growth engine than you started with. 

As we repeat as a mantra, and it applies to every aspect of a migration, especially with SEO, to try to change as few things as possible during the migration, and patiently wait until the improvements are easy and safe to implement.

This guide blends hard-won lessons from complex e-commerce migrations with practical checklists you can use right now. We’ll cover the technical foundations *and* the organizational dynamics that make or break replatforms. Because SEO fails less often in code editors than in project plans.

## Pre‑Migration Audit & Benchmarking

### Establish a Baseline Before You Move Anything

If you can’t describe exactly how your site performs today, you can’t diagnose what changed tomorrow. Start with a thorough SEO audit and a shared benchmark doc that the stakeholders agree to protect.

At minimum, benchmark:

- **Traffic & revenue baselines:** Segment by channel (organic/non-brand vs. brand), device, market, and key templates (home, category/PLP, product/PDP, content hubs, blog, help center). Tie organic sessions to revenue where possible.
- **Rankings and visibility:** Track head terms and long-tail queries per template, Capture average ranks and note which terms drive conversions.
- **Crawl data & index footprint:** Export from your crawler and Google Search Console. Inventory indexable vs. non-indexable pages, canonicalized duplicates, parameterized URLs, pagination, and index bloat.
- **Top-performing pages and link equity:** Identify the top 10–20% of URLs that drive 80% of organic value. Map internal links to these pages and log external links you must preserve.

Document technical debt you plan to fix on the new stack: render-blocking scripts, slow templates, thin content, overlapping intent, and legacy parameters. Include dates on every report to ensure post-launch comparisons are apples-to-apples.

## URL Mapping & Redirect Strategy

### One-to-One Redirects Are Non‑Negotiable

Your URL structure is your site’s skeleton. Change it without a precise redirect plan and the body collapses. For any URL that changes, implement **one-to-one 301 redirects** from the old canonical to the new canonical. Avoid chains and loops; every additional hop dilutes signals and slows users down.

**Homepage and category dumps are rank-killers.** Blanket-redirecting old PDPs to the homepage (or to their parent category) is a fast path to irrelevance. Search engines treat irrelevant redirects like soft 404s—you don’t preserve equity, and users bounce because intent isn’t met.

### Practical Tips for Redirect Excellence

- **Build the map early.** Start from your top-value URLs and work down. Include query parameters that resolve to unique content (e.g., `/size=xl` may be ignorable; `/color=navy` may map to a canonical color page if that’s how your new platform works).
- **Normalize everything.** Decide on trailing slashes, case sensitivity, and default file extensions. Enforce consistently to prevent duplicate paths.
- **Keep UTMs safe.** When implementing your redirects, be sure you are not removing UTMs (or any other query params) from the URLs, otherwise you might compromise attribution tracking.
- **Test before launch.** Validate your redirect file in staging with a crawler. Check for 200/301/404 distributions, chains, loops, and relevancy (old product → closest new product or guide).
- **Deploy at the edge.** If possible, run redirects at your CDN/edge layer for speed and reliability.

### Treat Content as the Oxygen of SEO

During migrations, content gets “cleaned up” or rewritten. That can be good—but accidental pruning is common. Titles, H1s, product descriptions, and alt text are easy to strip when templates change. Structured data is often left behind or auto-generated with gaps. If there are content mistakes that can be addressed along with the migration, stop doing it and take a note for later. Again, it’s better not to change too many things together; otherwise, it will be hard to understand where SEO issues originate. 

### What to Preserve—and Improve

- **Metadata parity:** Ensure title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, and canonical tags carry over. Where templates change, confirm variables resolve correctly (e.g., brand + model + key attribute).
- **On-page copy and attributes:** Preserve unique product copy, comparison tables, FAQs, and reviews. Standardize units and naming conventions to avoid duplicate content from near-identical variants.
- **Media and alt text:** Maintain image URLs where feasible, or redirect them. Keep descriptive alt text for accessibility and image search.
- **Structured data:** Recreate JSON-LD for Product, Breadcrumb, Review, Article, FAQ, and Organization. Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test and ensure parity with visible content.

**Manual review is mandatory.** Pick the top 50–200 URLs by organic value across templates and review them page-by-page in staging. Look for lost copy chunks, missing schema, and new UX that hides or defers critical information. If something feels “lighter,” it probably is.

## Technical Considerations

### Replatforming Is a Chance to Upgrade, Not Just Replicate

Perfect preservation isn’t realistic. Your new platform will bring its own SEO opinions, often better than what you had before, and some of them are non-negotiable. Shopify’s URL structure, as an example, is fixed. That’s not a threat; it’s a constraint you can leverage. Treat these standards as a built-in upgrade path: use the move to clean up crawl paths, modernize rendering, and lift Core Web Vitals where possible. The key here is balancing touching only things that have a real impact or are in a no-risk zone. Some examples:

**Robots & index controls:**

- Align **noindex** and **canonical** rules to your new architecture. If you consolidate filters or change pagination, update rel=“prev/next” strategies and canonicals accordingly.

**Sitemaps:**

- Generate clean, modular XML sitemaps (≤50k URLs per file) by template and locale. Exclude noindex/redirecting/404 URLs. Host them on the primary host and reference them in `robots.txt`.

**Rendering & performance:**

- Prefer SSR or SSG for content-critical templates; hydrate interactivity progressively. Ensure your SPA routes are indexable and expose canonical, meta, and schema on initial HTML;
- Use the migration to improve **Core Web Vitals**. Compress and lazy-load media, reduce JS bundle size, and adopt modern image formats. Measure template-by-template rather than sitewide averages.

**Internationalization:**

- If you operate in multiple locales, validate `hreflang` across the new structure. Misaligned language-region pairs or missing return tags can throttle international visibility.

## Pre‑Launch Testing

### Treat Staging Like Google

Your staging environment is where good intentions meet reality. Crawl it with enterprise-grade tools and with Googlebot-like settings. The goal: catch anything that could impair discovery, understanding, or measurement. 


> In Shopify, crawling a store has been historically a problem, as the platform was failing to distinguish genuine and controlled crawls and malicious bots. They recently released an update to allow SEO specialists to use [Web Bot Auth](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture) to authorize tools to crawl the website and complete audits. 

**What to QA before launch:**

- **Canonical tags:** Are they self-referential and stable? Watch for environment URLs sneaking into canonicals.
- **Meta and headers:** Confirm `noindex`, `nofollow`, and caching headers are correct by template.
- **Structured data:** Validate JSON-LD at scale. Check Product offers/prices/availability match the page.
- **Internal links:** Ensure navigation, breadcrumbs, related products, and in-content links point to production paths (not staging) and use consistent trailing slash rules.
- **Pagination & filters:** Verify canonical strategies and indexability of facets. Decide which filters deserve indexation and which should be `noindex`.
- **Analytics & tags:** Confirm GA/GTM (or your stack), conversion events, and ecommerce schema fire correctly. Deduplicate events to avoid inflated revenue.
- **Sitemaps & robots:** Generate production sitemaps from staging, then disable staging in `robots.txt`. Dry-run the production `robots.txt` to avoid surprises.

## Post‑Launch Monitoring

### The First 4–6 Weeks Are the Danger Zone

Launch day isn’t the finish line; it’s when the real work begins. Search engines will revisit, recrawl, and reinterpret your site. Tiny issues can compound into big problems if you’re not watching closely.

**Daily (and weekly) checks:**

- **Crawl errors:** Monitor 404/5xx spikes in logs and Search Console. Prioritize legacy URLs with external links.
- **Redirect health:** Watch for chains and high-latency routes. Patch mismapped redirects quickly.
- **Indexation & coverage:** Track valid vs. excluded pages. Investigate sudden swings in “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical” or “Crawled – currently not indexed.”
- **Rankings & traffic:** Compare to pre-migration baselines by template and market. Watch non-brand first—brand often masks issues.
- **Sitemaps:** Ensure new URLs are submitted and rising in “Indexed” count. Remove retired sitemaps.
- **Core Web Vitals:** Check for regressions by template. Tracking scripts and A/B tools often bloat JS unexpectedly.

## Ongoing Optimization

### The Migration Is the Beginning of a New SEO Cycle

With the new stack live, resist the temptation to “set and forget.” The best-performing teams set a 90-day post-launch roadmap to convert the migration into momentum.

Focus on:

- **Internal linking refinement:** Use crawl and click data to push equity toward high-value pages—new collections, seasonal hubs, or evergreen guides. Revisit nav and breadcrumbs with real user behavior.
- **Backlink reclamation:** Outreach to update important external links that still point to redirected URLs. Every updated link removes a hop and strengthens relevance.
- **Content re-optimization:** Compare pre- and post-launch rankings. Refresh thin or underperforming pages. Expand FAQs based on emerging queries. Build content around new capabilities the platform unlocks (e.g., better comparison components or dynamic bundles).
- **Schema enrichment:** Add missing structured data types and test eligibility for new SERP features.
- **Technical hardening:** Keep pruning parameter cruft, improve caching, and continue shrinking JS. Treat Core Web Vitals budgets as part of your web performance SLOs.

## Final Takeaway: Paranoia and Precision Protect SEO

Replatforming is equal parts engineering project and change-management exercise. The teams that win keep SEO at the table from discovery to post-launch, blend caution with ambition, and treat baselines as a contract with the business. Precision in redirects, content parity, and technical configuration prevents avoidable losses. Paranoia—healthy skepticism and relentless verification—catches the edge cases that otherwise compound.

Most importantly, view replatforming as the start of a stronger SEO engine. Take advantage of all these tasks to clearly understand what’s needed to fix crawl waste, speed up templates, consolidate content, and build richer experiences once you are on the other side. Done right, you won’t just protect your rankings—you’ll future‑proof your visibility and open new lanes for growth.

If you’re planning a replatform or recovering from one and want an experienced partner to guide the process, **let’s talk**: [https://nebulab.com/contact](https://nebulab.com/contact).

How to Ensure SEO Integrity During a Replatform

*This is the second article in a series about enterprise e-commerce replatforms. The first article is about [running discovery workshops](https://nebulab.com/blog/replatform-discovery-workshops), which lay the foundation for a successful migration strategy.*

Replatforming is one of the riskiest moves an enterprise e-commerce team can make. For brands processing thousands of orders an hour, the thought of switching platforms conjures visions of downtime, lost sales, and panicked operators scrambling to fix errors. It’s no surprise that many CTOs and e-commerce managers hesitate to move to Shopify Plus, even when their legacy platform is holding them back.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. At Nebulab, we’ve developed a phased, risk-mitigated approach to Shopify replatforming that allows enterprise brands to make the switch incrementally—without downtime, feature freezes, or disruptions to daily operations. The key? A zero-risk rollout strategy that begins with a comprehensive Discovery Workshop.

## How to Roll Out Shopify Without Risk

One important tradeoff to consider with this approach: while it may slightly increase the overall project timeline, it significantly shortens your time-to-value. Because you're launching a lean implementation early in the process, your team begins learning, iterating, and delivering value from day one—long before a traditional big-bang launch would go live.

Our rollout strategy begins by identifying a part of the business that can be safely isolated. This might be a low-volume country, a non-core sales channel, or a product line with minimal business impact. We then build a lean Shopify implementation for that segment, prioritizing reliability over feature parity.

Once live, we run both platforms in parallel. To maintain data consistency, we implement bi-directional sync mechanisms between Shopify and the legacy platform. Orders, inventory updates, and customer data are pushed in near real-time via middleware or a shared OMS. For instance, when an order is placed on Shopify, it is instantly mirrored on the legacy platform, and vice versa. This ensures fulfillment, accounting, and analytics teams can continue operating without change.

Depending on the systems involved, we may use webhooks, direct API integrations, or tools like Matrixify—especially when data is already formatted for its use. Where necessary, we normalize data structures across platforms to avoid inconsistencies and edge-case failures. The result is a seamless flow of information, so business teams don’t need to alter their workflows.

We also implement robust monitoring and logging for every sync operation. This allows us to detect and resolve any data mismatches or delays before they become operational problems. By this stage, Shopify is already live in production—but the real value lies in observing its performance with real traffic and users.

Let’s break down the phases of a hypothetical rollout plan:

## Phase 1: Run Shopify Side-by-Side

In the first phase, we establish a dual-platform setup.

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/61212d99d708984bdd92ed04f5614daa3bf15178-2572x1408.png?fit=clip)

Here’s how it works:

* We launch Shopify for a single, low-risk market or sales channel. This might be a small international market or a limited product line.
* Users in that segment interact solely with Shopify, while other markets continue using the legacy platform. A useful trick here: leveraging Shopify’s new Customer Accounts. These accounts use one-time passwords, so we can migrate only the relevant users’ orders without needing password data. Later, we can connect accounts with a custom [identity provider](https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/customers/customer-accounts/new-customer-accounts/identity-provider) if needed.
* Shopify and the legacy platform are tightly integrated. Products and collections sync from the legacy platform to Shopify, preserving PIM processes. Orders placed on Shopify sync back to the legacy system or a shared OMS, so downstream integrations and operations (fulfillment, finance, support) remain unchanged.

This setup lets us test Shopify in a real-world environment without disrupting existing operations. If needed, rollback is simple: we redirect traffic back to the legacy platform without affecting back-office systems.

## Phase 2: Scale Up, One Market at a Time

The second phase is about expanding Shopify’s footprint through multiple, incremental iterations.

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/ad05fda4084d4ded3afcb43eab002a0db60c5252-2558x1442.png?fit=clip)

We do this by:

* Selecting the next market or sales channel with lower business impact.
* Identifying gaps between current Shopify features and that market’s requirements—such as shipping methods, currencies, or languages.
* Filling those gaps to prepare Shopify for increased traffic.

For example, we might help a brand expand from a single EU market to several, simply by iterating on localization and shipping options. As each iteration proves successful, we redirect traffic and repeat the process, steadily building confidence.

Eventually, all segments are running on Shopify—a sign that the migration is functionally complete.

## Phase 3: Shut Down the Legacy Stack

Now that all traffic has moved to Shopify, we begin dismantling the old platform.

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/e2a91030b561cf780cfba72648c210221d07946f-1874x1438.png?fit=clip)

This phase is essential for reducing technical overhead and cost. Rather than replacing all integrations at once, we decouple each one individually, each with its own rollback plan. This reduces the risk of introducing widespread issues.

A typical sequence might start with analytics, followed by CRM and other integrations. Each step gives us a chance to verify behavior and performance before moving on to the next.

By the end, every integration runs directly through Shopify, and we can fully decommission the legacy system with confidence.

## What This Looks Like in the Real World

With a parallel architecture in place, we expand Shopify’s role country by country, channel by channel. Each new launch is reversible. If issues arise—UX bugs or operational hiccups—we simply reroute traffic to the old system.

In one recent project, we started with a few low-impact countries. The initial Shopify build handled basic operations but deliberately omitted full feature parity. This allowed rapid testing and iteration. As each market validated the setup, we introduced localized features and content. Eventually, the platforms became so similar that migrating the core markets felt like a natural final step.

Another client, using a headless setup, took a slightly different route. They began by migrating their image CDN—a feature included in any Shopify plan. This alone offset the cost of their plan. Next, they moved PDPs to Shopify’s Storefront APIs. PLPs are next, still powered by Algolia, which remains synced with the old platform. Bit by bit, they’re building a safer, modular migration path.

## When Is a Phased Rollout Worth It?

This phased, dual-system approach is ideal for large, complex e-commerce operations. A full cutover is too risky: even a single hour of downtime can cost tens of thousands and cause long-term brand damage. With deep integration needs across ERPs, OMSs, CRMs, and analytics platforms, maintaining operational continuity is non-negotiable.

Running both platforms in parallel creates a safety net that justifies the extra engineering effort.

One important tradeoff to consider: while this approach may slightly extend the overall project timeline, it significantly shortens your time-to-value. Because you're launching a lean implementation early, your team starts learning, iterating, and delivering value much sooner than with a traditional big-bang launch.

Smaller brands may not need this level of complexity. If your tech stack is simpler, with fewer integrations and lower order volume, a direct switch might be more efficient. At Nebulab, we help clients choose the right strategy based on their scale, risk tolerance, and operational maturity.

## Replatforming Without Regret

Traditional replatforming aims for full feature parity before launch. That usually leads to long timelines, bloated requirements, and fragile go-lives that can’t be reversed.

Our approach is different. We start small, test early, and scale with intention. With robust data sync, meticulous planning, and real-world validation, we make each phase of migration safe, reversible, and rooted in operational reality.

Enterprise replatforming doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing gamble. With the right strategy, you can migrate to Shopify Plus in a safe, phased, and fully reversible way. [Let's do it together!](https://nebulab.com/contact-us)

A Dual-Run Strategy for Zero-Downtime Shopify Replatforms

Alessandro Desantis

As executives at enterprise and mid-market brands increasingly turn to more modern commerce platforms for their flexibility and ecosystem advantages, the stakes have never been higher. A failed replatform doesn't just mean cost overruns—it means lost revenue, damaged team morale, and potentially catastrophic business disruption.

The solution isn't more sophisticated technology or larger budgets. It's a disciplined approach to discovery that surfaces what truly matters before a single line of code is written.

## Why Most Agencies Get Discovery Wrong (And Why That's Expensive)

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most agencies treat discovery as a checkbox exercise. They'll send a brief questionnaire, schedule a few calls, and call it done. The reason is simple—*thorough discovery doesn't scale*. It requires senior talent, takes weeks to execute properly, and can't be easily templated across clients.

But this shortcuts approach creates predictable problems:

- **Misaligned stakeholders** discover fundamental disagreements three sprints into development.
- **Hidden technical debt** surfaces when legacy systems refuse to integrate cleanly.
- **Scope creep** becomes inevitable when requirements weren't properly captured upfront.

The financial impact is severe. We've seen brands burn through millions (yes, really) in development costs before realizing their initial assumptions were wrong. One client came to us after three failed projects in which different agencies had attempted to migrate the brand's custom subscription model to Shopify—failures that could have been prevented with a proper discovery process.

## The Executive Case for Deep Discovery

Consider discovery an insurance policy for your replatforming investment. A properly executed discovery workshop costs 5-10% of your total project budget but can prevent 50-80% of the risk factors that typically derail implementations:

- **Risk mitigation** is the primary value proposition. Discovery workshops identify integration challenges, stakeholder misalignments, and technical constraints before they become expensive problems.
- **Accelerated time-to-market** follows naturally. Teams aligned on clear requirements move faster than teams constantly having to change course.
- **Improved team dynamics** emerge from collaborative planning. Discovery workshops reveal communication patterns, decision-making processes, and internal politics that will impact your project's success.

## Nebulab's Discovery Framework: A Five-Phase Approach

Our discovery process has evolved through countless replatforming projects over the years. It's designed to surface critical information and design an implementation plan that minimizes risk and maximizes alignment.

### Phase 1: Stakeholder Alignment and Baseline Setting

Before any workshop begins, we identify the right participants. This isn't about including everyone—it's about including the *right* people. We need at least one representative from each department that will either execute the replatform or be impacted by its results.

**The stakeholder selection process matters more than most teams realize.** Include too few people, and you'll miss critical requirements. Include too many, and the workshop becomes unwieldy. We typically aim for 6-8 participants maximum.

Each stakeholder receives a comprehensive questionnaire covering their role, current systems, performance metrics, and concerns. The survey is tailored to uncover the specific information we'll need for productive workshop discussions.

The questionnaire serves two purposes: it gives us baseline context and starts stakeholders thinking strategically about the project. When people arrive at the workshop, they're already mentally prepared for deeper discussions.

### Phase 2: Envisioning Success and Failure

Every workshop begins with alignment on what we discovered during stakeholder interviews. We present our findings and ask: "Does this accurately reflect your situation?"

**If everyone agrees, we proceed. If there's disagreement, we've identified a critical issue.** Internal misalignment often masquerades as technical complexity. Better to surface and resolve these conflicts in week one than discover them in month six.

Our first collaborative exercise involves **envisioning success.** Each stakeholder writes down what their ideal end state looks like—not just technical specifications, but business outcomes. Fast-forward to six months post-launch: what does success look like for your specific role and responsibilities?

**The counterpoint exercise, a Pre-Mortem, follows immediately:** if everything goes horribly wrong, why did it fail? This approach consistently surfaces risks that wouldn't emerge through traditional requirements gathering.

These exercises reveal stakeholder priorities and potential conflicts. When the marketing director envisions "flexible campaign landing pages" but the IT director fears "maintaining custom functionality," we know there's a conversation to be had.

### Phase 3: Architectural and User Journey Mapping

**Understanding your current state is prerequisite to designing your future state.** We map your existing technical architecture, focusing on data flow and system integration. We answer questions such as:

- What are the third-party systems you integrate with?
- How do inventory updates flow between those systems?
- What happens when a customer initiates a return?

We then conduct a user journey mapping exercise, **giving equal dignity to both customers and internal users.** Your operations team, customer service representatives, and marketing coordinators all have their own user journeys, with their own points of friction that impact business performance. A replatform that optimizes for end-customer experience while creating (or failing to address!) friction for internal users is a failed replatform.

The architectural and journey mapping exercises run in parallel, with insights from one informing the other. Technical limitations often explain customer experience friction, while user behavior patterns reveal why certain integrations are critical or what integrations are missing that would facilitate the user's life.

### Phase 4: Solutioning

In the fourth part of the workshop, we move into solutioning, where we design the new reality.

**In doing this, we typically aim to be very conservative with the consumer's user journey:** unless there's compelling business justification for dramatic change, the post-replatform consumer UX should closely mirror the existing one. This might seem counterintuitive: after all, isn't the whole point of the replatform to _improve_ the user experience?

While the answer is yes, that doesn't mean you should do it immediately. Postponing the UX improvements reduces development complexity, contains implementation costs, and minimizes the risk of alienating your users with a completely new UX. We've discussed this (somewhat counterintuitive) approach at length in [our article about replatforms:](https://nebulab.com/blog/ecommerce-replatforms) **time and time again, we've seen a more conservative approach outperform big-bang replatforms.**

Architectural changes, however, can and should be more transformative: during this phase, we redesign your e-commerce infrastructure to support your business objectives and enable future evolution. This means dropping legacy tools, improving how you use them, or adopting new ones, with the two-fold goal of streaminling your internal operations and enabling future evolution for your consumer UX.

### Phase 5: Launch Strategy and Risk Mitigation

In the fifth and final stage, we have a good understanding of where you are and where you want to be. All that's left to figure out is how to get there.

To do that, we design your launch strategy, and we do it **based on your scale and risk tolerance.** While smaller brands might opt for a coordinated launch across all channels and markets, enterprise clients typically require phased rollouts, beta testing with select customer segments, or market-by-market deployment.

The launch strategy is usually a mix of business considerations (e.g., will team members have to operate two systems until we're fully switched over?) and technical considerations (e.g., how are we going to keep data in sync between different systems during the interregnum?).

We also go deep on risk mitigation: what can go wrong at different stages of the project, how are we going to minimize that risk, and what is our recovery process for the worst-case scenario?

This phase concludes the workshop and produces your implementation roadmap, complete with timeline, resource requirements, and risk mitigation strategies.

## What Discovery Workshops Do (And What They Don't)

As you have seen, discovery workshops have several benefits:

- **They set the stage for a successful replatform.** Clear requirements, aligned stakeholders, and realistic timelines create conditions for successful partnerships, preventing friction and second-guessing.
- **They generate returns that extend far beyond replatforming projects.** The architectural diagrams, user journey maps, and stakeholder alignment achieved during discovery become valuable assets for future initiatives.
- **They improve your internal communication and decision-making processes.** The skills and frameworks learned during discovery transfer to other strategic projects.

However, a discovery workshop is not a panacea! No matter how thorough your workshop, you will never be able to capture your full spectrum of requirements, and you will still be left with unanswered questions. That's alright: the purpose of the workshop is not to eliminate uncertainty, but rather to identify the areas of biggest uncertainty so that you can adress them head-on during the project rather than pretend they don't exist.

If you're looking to replatform and could use some help running a discovery workshop, [reach out!](https://nebulab.com/contact-us) We've run countless workshops over the years and would love to help make your replatforming project a success.


Better E-Commerce Replatforms Require Better Discovery Workshops

Stefano Sarioli

For an eCommerce brand, replatforms are always exciting projects that hold a lot of promise: a replatform can come with increased flexibility, lower maintenance costs, and a better customer experience that can significantly impact your top-line growth.

However, replatforms are also incredibly stressful and can quickly become a nightmare when they’re not planned or executed appropriately: because they’re large and irreversible projects, it’s easy to miss something important and only realize it too late. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a growth driver for your business turns against you, leaving your board, team, and customers unhappy.

In this article, we will share some strategies we follow when guiding our clients through a replaform, from picking your new eCommerce platform all the way through implementation and launch. Hopefully, we can help make your next replatform a bit less scary!


## 1. Start With the Why

This one should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how many store owners cannot clearly articulate why they are executing a replatform.

A replatform project is a big undertaking from many perspectives:

* **It takes time**: replatforms will take up a lot of your team’s time and energy. In our experience, most re-platforms take anywhere between 2-5 months, depending on the complexity of your online store. Enterprise replatforms can take years!
* **It’s expensive:** replatforms are expensive projects, no matter whether you use your internal team or work with an agency. Trying to cram a replatform into a tight budget is a recipe for disaster, so make sure you can allocate the right resources.
* **It’s risky:** re-platforms are inherently risky. While most software projects can be approached incrementally, re-platforms require a big-bang transition, dramatically increasing the likelihood of something going wrong.
* **It impacts morale:** for some of your team members, the replatform will come with a steep learning curve, considerable disruptions to their existing workflows, and even fears about their career opportunities (“Will this new skillset make me less relevant?”).

With all that is at stake, you want a crystal-clear understanding of why you need to replatform: you owe it to your team, your customers, and yourself. Some of the most common scenarios in which it makes sense to do a replatform are:

* **To increase flexibility.** If your platform is consistently preventing you from executing your digital roadmap, then it’s time to look for more advanced vendor–that is, provided that your roadmap is the result of an [intentional, data-informed product management workflow.](https://nebulab.com/blog/ecommerce-product-management)
* **To support growth.** If your existing platform is having growth pains, then you might want to switch to a more scalable solution that will support your brand’s long-term plans.
* **To reduce maintenance costs.** Some platforms are more expensive than others to keep up and running. Sometimes, this is an acceptable cost to pay for certain benefits (such as additional features), and sometimes it’s a non-justifiable expense.
* **To access a larger ecosystem.** If you can’t find any partners or system integrators willing to work with your current setup, and this is preventing you from reaching your business objectives, then it might be time for a change.

There are also many _bad_ reasons to do a replatform, such as your team only having experience with a specific stack (they can learn a new technology), fear of missing out because everyone else is using a different solution (they are not you), or an investor pushing you hard to make the switch (it’s unlikely they fully understand your business needs).

We suggest writing a [Request for Comments](https://nebulab.com/blog/driving-organizational-change-with-rfcs) about the replatform. This will help you analyze your motivations and assumptions, evaluate potential alternatives, and ensure that a replatform is the right move for your eCommerce store.

RFCs have the added benefit of helping you build commitment and create alignment on the project internally–and believe us, it’s something you will need badly if you move forward.


## 2. Think Brand First, Not Vendor First

So, you wrote an RFC, you discussed it with your team, and you’re all aligned on your motivations. The next question is, how do you compare the capabilities offered by different vendors?

Nowadays, there are tens of eCommerce platforms to choose from. As in most crowded software categories, they all offer a base layer of foundational functionality and a certain number of differentiators that make them stand apart. Some of these differentiators will be useful for your specific needs, while others are just marketing stunts that will lure you in but ultimately prove irrelevant.

When approaching a replatform, we typically categorize business requirements in one of three buckets–Big Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand:

* **Big Rocks:** these are major pieces of functionality. They are highly specific to your brand promise and business model. For membership-based brands, for instance, the #1 Big Rock is their membership billing engine.
* **Pebbles:** these requirements are still important but not unique to your brand. An example would be your average ERP or 3PL integration. For most brands, there’s not a lot of innovation involved in these foundational eCommerce features.
* **Sand:** these are minor requirements that can be taken more or less for granted. Most cosmetic improvements, such as the image carousel on your PDP, fall into this category.

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/ee19cec17172531bd1e236882c503471ca249262-3200x2104.jpg?fit=clip)

Once you have this mapping, you can understand how the platforms you’re evaluating will solve your requirements, prioritizing each requirement depending on how it’s been categorized. Feel free to ask the vendors you’re considering for help during this phase: after all, they know their own solutions inside out. However, you should always double-check their claims, as they are bound to be biased.

Whatever you do, make sure you base your comparison on your actual requirements–not on the narrative each vendor tries to push, nor on the hype around their product. It is ultimately irrelevant how many features or apps an eCommerce solution offers if you only use a tiny fraction of them. **Technology is just a tool: your platform should fit your brand, not vice versa.**

A platform-agnostic agency is the best partner for this kind of project: they have the expertise to advise you, but they are not married to one specific solution, which gives them the freedom to offer you what they genuinely believe to be the best path forward.


## 3. Account for All the Expenses

Platform and transaction fees are a _significant_ part of any eCommerce brand’s P&L statement. When replatforming, you should clearly understand the costs you’ll incur under the new tech stack if you don’t want any unpleasant surprises.

Unfortunately, many brands jump the gun here and only account for the most apparent and immediate costs, such as their platform’s transaction fees in the first year. As a result, they neglect other variables that are not as visible but equally important, only to get burned by their new vendor once it’s too late to go back.

When approaching a re-platform, we typically categorize the costs as follows:

* **License fees:** this is how much you’ll pay your vendors for access to their services. Most brands only include the cost of their eCommerce platform here, but you should also account for any third-party apps and services you will need.
* **Transaction fees:** these are the fees you pay on your payments, and they typically have fixed and variable components. Some platforms have integrated payment gateways with lower transaction fees, while others will require you to work with a third party.
* **Maintenance fees:** we would all love to use an eCommerce platform that requires zero maintenance, but that is rarely the case. While you can’t calculate precisely how much design and development effort you’ll need with your new platform, you should make an educated guess and understand how that compares with your current setup.
* **Replatform fees:** how much will it cost to execute the replatform? Assuming that your goal is reducing engineering spend, how long will it take you to recoup that initial investment under the new platform?

When evaluating these costs, you also want to understand how they will change as your brand grows: what would they look like at 2X your current scale? Does pricing grow linearly, more than linearly, or less than linearly? Will there be room for negotiation, or are you locked into this commercial structure forever? Does the new vendor have any minimum commitments?

Every platform is unique, but do your best to make an apples-to-apples comparison that clearly outlines the total cost of ownership and any pros/cons associated with each option.

## 4. Approach the Work Incrementally

Switching over to the new platform will require a Big Bang Release, where you switch your brand to your new tech stack almost overnight. This approach is typically frowned upon in software development: the more changes you’re introducing simultaneously, the more you increase the chance that something will go wrong.

The bad news is that Big Bang Releases are somewhat unavoidable with most replatforms. The good news is that there are several approaches to minimize the amount of uncertainty associated with them. In general, if you can do something _before_ you finalize your transition to the new platform, you should.

Here are a few techniques we typically adopt:

* Work closely with your in-house team or external partner to demo and test their work as often as possible. You don’t want the team to work in isolation for three months and then do your testing in one go: you’re bound to miss something or discover significant problems once it’s too late to do anything about them. Better yet, have your entire team do QA: you’ll be surprised how much more stuff you can find as a group!
* If you need to make any changes to integrations or external systems to make them compatible with your replatform, see if you can apply them beforehand in a way compatible with both the old stack and the new one. This typically applies to ERPs, WMSs, and 3PLs, but you can generalize it to other vendors.
* Test your data migrations ahead of time and continue to execute them continuously in the days leading up to the launch. That way, on launch day, you will only need to migrate a small portion of your data rather than all of it.
* Create checklists for what you will do before, during, and after the replatform. Launch day is incredibly stressful, so it’s essential your team doesn’t have to think too much about what they’re going to do.

These are just some ideas, and your mileage may vary depending on your setup and the complexity of your architecture. The rule of thumb is that you want to work in small increments and do the bulk of the work upfront, so you only need to pull the trigger on launch day.

You can also check out [this article](https://nebulab.com/blog/ecommerce-agency-productivity) we published about how to optimize your agency’s or digital team’s productivity. All of those strategies also apply to replatform projects!

## 5. Resist the Urge to Redesign

If there is one thing you take away from this article, let it be this: do NOT do a rebrand or redesign at the same time you’re doing a replatform. After over a decade of working with eCommerce brands of all sizes, we have witnessed so many failed attempts at this that we strongly discourage this practice.

There are several reasons why a redesign might be bundled together with a replaform. In our experience, it’s usually a combination of the following factors:

1. Most brand executives are visual people. During a replatform, they get understandably excited and come up with a million potential improvements to the customer experience, which often turn into a full-blown redesign.
2. The byproduct of #1 is that, in larger companies, the person sponsoring the replatform often feels the need to justify the investment to their boss through a tangible artifact, such as a rebrand/redesign. This gives them a clear “thing” to point to when someone asks them where all that money went.
3. Unfortunately, some eCommerce agencies do redesigns along with replatforms to increase the scope of the engagement, and so that the final result can be more easily turned into a compelling case study.

As we already mentioned, this is almost always a bad idea. Replatforms are complicated and risky, so you want to keep their scope as small and controlled as possible. Redesigning your website while uprooting its tech stack dramatically increases the risk of something going wrong during or after the launch. It also makes it much harder to isolate and measure the business impact of specific changes to the customer experience.

We suggest keeping the new website as similar as possible to what you had before. After you launch the replatform, you’ll have plenty of time to fully leverage the capabilities of your new tech stack, so there’s no reason to rush it.

## 6. Prioritize the Scary Stuff

Remember that Big Rocks, Pebble, Sand categorization we talked about earlier? That’s not just a way to map your business requirements, but it’s also an excellent mental model to keep in mind when prioritizing the different features involved in your replatform:

1. Big Rocks are the most critical problems to solve and carry the highest risk and uncertainty, so you want to get them out of the way as early as possible.
2. Pebbles are essential but less risky–you want to get them done and tested early, but not before you’re done with the Big Rocks.
3. Sand is irrelevant: while some of these features are important to your business, they’re also quick and easy to implement and can be left for last.

Unfortunately, we often see things being approached in the opposite order. Because it’s easier and faster to make progress on Sand than on Big Rocks, they focus on the lowest-hanging fruit while neglecting the big, scary problems screaming at them.

One brand we spoke with in the past, which was heavily subscription-based, reached the last week of their replatform without having done any work on their subscription engine yet. When they finally focused on it, they realized the provider they had picked wouldn’t be able to accommodate their needs, and they had to cancel the launch and go back to the drawing board.

To keep your team focused, it can be helpful to appoint a Product Owner/Project Lead. This person, who ideally has project management experience and understands your brand inside out, will be responsible for keeping track of the project’s progress and ensuring the team is prioritizing the work correctly.

One last word of warning here: remember that perfect is the enemy of good. Just like with the redesign, you’ll have plenty of time to improve your online store after the launch, so don’t get bogged down in pursuing tiny optimizations at the expense of bigger achievements.

## Launch and Celebrate!

If you follow the tips above, launch day should be much less stressful than it could have been. Just follow your checklists on launch day, sit back, and celebrate!

Besides that, now is the time you can fully unleash the true power of your new eCommerce stack. As always, make sure to move intentionally and be data-informed–[establishing a lightweight Product Management practice](https://nebulab.com/blog/ecommerce-product-management) can do wonders in ensuring you’re not getting ahead of yourself, but working on features that will actually move the needle.

We hope we managed to shed some light on what is typically a long and confusing process for any brands that go through it!

If you need additional help with your replatform, [don’t hesitate to reach out!](https://nebulab.com/contact-us) Our team works with a variety of eCommerce platforms. They would be more than happy to advise you on the best choice for your brand and guide you through the entire implementation and launch process.

The Nebulab

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