Every platform migration is pitched as a technical exercise: export the catalogue, map the
fields, cut over DNS. That framing is why so many of them deliver a site that works exactly as
well as the one it replaced.
The platform is rarely the constraint
A store underperforms for reasons that follow it across platforms. Product photography that
does not match the brand. Navigation built around internal categories rather than how people
shop. Everything crammed onto one page because adding a page was hard on the old system. None
of that is fixed by the migration itself — but the migration is the only moment when fixing it
is cheap, because you are rebuilding the templates anyway.
Teams that treat replatforming as a lift-and-shift spend the budget and keep the constraint.
Teams that treat it as the occasion to rebuild the storefront get the traffic.
What to decide before you export anything
Three things, in this order. What the brand should look like on a screen, which is a design
question and not a platform one. How the catalogue should be structured for a shopper rather
than for your ERP. And which pages need to exist that could not exist before — because the
answer is usually "several", and that is where the traffic comes from.
Only then does the platform choice matter, and by then it is mostly a question of what your
team can operate without a developer on call.
The evidence
Loco Tequila moved from VTEX to Shopify and rebuilt the storefront around its brand identity at
the same time. Since the relaunch the site has added 4,386 monthly visits, with more new
users and better exposure to its calls to action. What was rebuilt, and in what order, is in the
Our HubSpot support plans publish what this kind of work costs, and there
are more results in our case studies.