Ecommerce migration checklist: how product teams move stores safely

An online store move can hit your business as hard as a physical one, especially if you wing it. One broken redirect, and your bestsellers disappear from Google overnight.

But how do you replatform without losing momentum?

We made this eCommerce migration checklist — primarily for founders, product leads, and eCommerce managers — as a clear step-by-step plan:

“How to move an eCommerce site from one platform to another while protecting customer data and keeping teams aligned for growth”.

Key takeaways

• Run this eCommerce migration checklist as a product initiative with clear owners and scope.
• Map data before you migrate: products, variants, prices, inventory, existing customers, orders, content, and media.
• Safeguard rankings with redirects, canonicals, and a crawl plan. Verify results.
• Launch in phases, monitor, and iterate. Our 7-phase eCommerce migration checklist limits risk and helps you fix issues before they multiply.

Ecommerce migration checklist [one-page run sheet]

1. Goals and governance agreed, right eCommerce platform selected, risks logged
2. Full data and content export, redirects planned, permissions set
3. Architecture defined, integrations scoped, performance budget set
4. Designs approved, templates built, sandbox import ready
5. SEO parity checked, 301s mapped, tracking validated
6. Quality assurance testing complete, accessibility verified, UAT (user acceptance testing) sign-off
7. Launch plan executed, monitoring dashboards live, iteration backlog groomed

7 phases of an eCommerce migration

Phase 1 — strategy, scope, and governance

Before touching a line of code, align on why you’re moving to a new platform and what success looks like.

• Define outcomes. Conversion targets, ops time saved, and technical debt eliminated. Tie the eCommerce migration strategy to measurable business growth.
• Pick the right eCommerce platform. Compare platform features, extensibility, and third-party apps you rely on today. Document gaps and the plan to close them.
• Name the owners. Product, engineering, content, and SEO each own parts of the migration process. Assign a project manager to run the timeline, risks, and comms.
• Decide the cutover model. Big-bang vs phased migration (category-by-category or region-by-region). Phasing reduces risk for complex catalogs.
• Plan for data security. Determine who can access exports, how you’ll encrypt files, and where you store working copies to protect customer information.

🔍 Smooth transition begins with clarity: goals, roles, and a single comms channel keep noise out as the work scales.

Phase 2 — inventory, audit, and mapping

Map the existing data so eCommerce data migration is predictable.

• Product and catalog. Titles, descriptions, options, SKUs (stock keeping units), pricing, inventory rules, bundles, and media. Add units, locales, and tax logic.
• Content and URLs. Blog, PDPs (product detail pages), PLPs (product listing pages), static pages, and microcopy. Export current slugs and compile a redirect list from the current platform to the new site.
• Customers and orders. Customer data (profiles, addresses, preferences), order history, refunds, store credit, and loyalty flags.
• Integrations. Payments, shipping, tax, ERP (enterprise resource planning), PIM (product information management), and third-party tools (reviews, search, personalization).
• Analytics baseline. Note current conversion, top pages, and speed. You’ll need this to prove a successful migration later.

🔍 The goal here is data integrity: when you know exactly what exists, you can move it without guesswork.

Phase 3 — platform architecture and extensions

Design the backbone of your eCommerce website before you import anything.

• Information architecture. Collections, filters, search logic, and how merchandisers work in the new system.
• Data model. Map product types, attributes, and variant logic from the existing eCommerce platform to the new eCommerce site.
• Permissions and workflows. Who can publish, discount, or approve inventory updates? Align governance with your eCommerce business needs.
• Extensibility plan. Shortlist must-have eCommerce tools and third-party migration apps; confirm SDKs (software development kits), webhook limits, and rate policies with your platform provider.
• Performance foundation. Set expectations for site speed, caching, and image handling across desktop and mobile optimization.

🔍 With structure in place, designers and developers can build screens and flows that match how teams actually work.

Phase 4 — design and development

Build for clarity and control, then verify with working data.

• Design system. Establish tokens, components, and states that scale.
• Templates that sell. PDP, PLP, cart, checkout, account, and support pages. Keep key actions visible for a user-friendly experience.
• Content pipeline. Rewrite low-performing copy and align tone with brand. This is a good moment to clean legacy cruft.
• Integrations. Payments, shipping, tax, CRM (customer relationship management), ESP (email service provider), PIM (product information management), and search. Confirm auth scopes and webhooks early.
• Sandbox imports. Load a safe subset of catalog and eCommerce store data so QA happens against real-world cases.

🔍 Build with the future in mind: a robust platform makes adding new features cheaper and safer.

Phase 5 — SEO and redirect planning

Protect visibility while moving your online store.

• Crawl and compare. Export all indexable URLs from the current eCommerce platform and stage their matches on the new eCommerce build.
• Redirect map. One-to-one 301s from old to new; consolidate only when intentional. Keep hreflang, canonicals, and pagination consistent.
• Content parity. Preserve top assets and metadata; plan 404 handling that helps users recover.
• Tracking and events. Keep analytics tools consistent across environments; validate purchase, add-to-cart, and search events.
• Pre-launch checks. Robots, sitemaps, structured data, and on-page elements. A quick SEO audit before go-live prevents rework.

🔍 You’re aiming for a successful eCommerce platform migration that sustains traffic while your team iterates.

Phase 6 — quality assurance testing

Confirm that the eCommerce replatforming works both for people and machines.

• Functional QA. Add-to-cart, checkout, discounts, refunds, subscriptions, and account recovery.
• Data QA. Validate prices, variants, availability, tax, shipping rules, and promotions after data migration.
• Performance and reliability. Monitor time to first byte, image weight, and error budgets under load.
• Accessibility. Keyboard paths, focus management, and readable labels; improve outcomes for all users.
• Cross-device review. Real devices across major browsers; record defects with screenshots.
• User acceptance testing. Merchandisers and support agents verify flows; capture customer feedback scripts for launch week.
• Quality assurance testing sign-off. One source of truth with blockers, owners, and ETAs.

🔍 Give teams a date to beat. Clarity speeds the last mile.

Phase 7 — launch, monitor, and iterate

Cut over with discipline, then watch metrics closely.

• Content freeze and backups. Lock writes on the old eCommerce store; export one final snapshot.
• DNS and go-live. Coordinate TTLs (time to live), certificates, and cache rules; deploy redirects and sitemaps.
• Post-launch watch. Validate orders, payments, and tracking; monitor 404s and redirect chains; check indexation and positions for priority pages in your search engine tools.
• Operational playbook. Runbooks for incidents, rollbacks, and hotfixes.
• Iteration cadence. Fix critical issues fast, then schedule improvements aligned with your eCommerce migration goals.

🔍 A smooth transition is measured in stable revenue, healthy crawl stats, and fewer tickets week by week.

Bonus example: Migration metrics to track

‍

Planning an eCommerce replatforming?

Let’s scope your eCommerce migration together!

We, as a top AI UX UI design agency, can guide the design and development phase, run your eCommerce migration checklist, and ship a new eCommerce experience that wins customers and keeps search engine rankings intact.

You can also:

• Explore our UX/UI design services if you want a partner who can plan, design, and guide eCommerce platform migration with product-level rigor.
• See our approach to high-stakes redesigns in the complete website redesign guide — how we protect rankings, speed, and UX during complex changes.

Review our eCommerce website redesign insights to rethink your own catalog UX and checkout.