Moving your store from one platform to another
Owners often expect a move between platforms to be a copy and paste. It is closer to moving house: the belongings travel, the walls do not. If you plan to migrate an online store to a new platform, here is what to expect.
What usually moves?
Your data. Products with their names, descriptions, prices and photos, your categories, and your customer list can usually be exported from one platform and imported into another, sometimes cleanly and sometimes with tidying by hand. Past orders can often be carried over as records. How smooth this is depends on the export the old platform offers and the import the new one accepts, so look at both before you commit to a date.
What gets rebuilt?
Everything that is not data. A theme from one platform does not run on another, so the storefront is built again, whether to the same design or a new one. Apps and add-ons are replaced by their equivalents on the new platform, or dropped. Payment, delivery and tax settings are entered afresh, and the accounts with payment and shipping providers may need new connections. This is the larger part of the work.
What may not move at all?
Customer passwords, as a rule. They are stored in a protected form that one platform cannot hand to another, so customers are normally asked to set a new password the first time they return. Reviews, discount codes, gift balances and saved carts may or may not transfer, depending on how each was kept. Make a list of these before the move and decide, one by one, whether to recreate, replace or let go.
What happens to your links and your place on Google?
The address of almost every page changes, because each platform builds its addresses its own way. Links saved in search results, ads and social posts would then lead to errors. The fix is to map old addresses to new ones and set redirects, starting with the pages that receive the most visits. Done carefully, this protects most of what you have built up. Nobody can promise that rankings stay exactly as they were.
When should the move happen?
In your quietest period, never just before a busy season. Build and test the new store while the old one keeps selling. Shortly before the switch, stop changing products on the old store so the two do not drift apart, move the final data, and switch the domain. Keep the old store available to you, closed to the public, until you are sure nothing was left behind.
Is it a good moment to redesign?
Usually yes. Since the storefront has to be built again in any case, rebuilding the old design often takes no less effort than building a better one. It is also the moment to drop products that never sold, categories that confuse and pages nobody opens. Moving everything exactly as it was carries the old problems to a new address.
How I handle it
I build on Salla, Shopify and WooCommerce, so a move between them starts with what you will run afterwards and not with what I prefer. The new storefront is drawn in Figma and approved by you before the build. After the switch you manage products, prices, text and images yourself, with 180 days of support from the day the new store goes live. Tell me which platform you are on and why you want to leave it.
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