How to Change Your e-Commerce Platform Without Losing Money?

Migrating an online store from one platform to another seems simple. After all, you’ve already set up your e-store once, so doing it a second time shouldn’t be difficult. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Changing your e-Commerce platform carries significant financial risks. We’re not just talking about a failed implementation or choosing the wrong platform (although those can hurt, too), but the risk of revenue loss—a factor that can determine the survival of your business. So, how can you switch your e-Commerce platform without losing revenue?

The Risks of e-Commerce Platform Migration

When your current e-Commerce engine can no longer handle the increasing traffic, growing data volumes, or new functionalities, every store owner or e-Commerce manager faces the same question: “Can we improve the current e-store, or is it time to scrap everything and migrate to a more efficient e-Commerce platform?”

Making the final decision to migrate is challenging, as the process can be both tedious and risky.

Many things can go wrong when implementing an e-Commerce store, whether it’s your first attempt or your tenth. The process might take longer than expected, costs could spiral out of control, the development agency might fail to deliver the project, or the chosen platform might not suit your business needs at all. While you can never eliminate these risks, you can minimize their likelihood and impact by preparing thoroughly for the implementation process. In other blog posts, we’ve extensively covered the steps you should take in such situations.

In this article, however, we want to highlight a specific risk associated with e-Commerce platform migration: the potential loss of revenue. This is a fear shared by every e-Commerce manager, and for a good reason. You don’t migrate your store to lose money; you do it to make more.

Migrating to a new platform is a complex, multi-dimensional project. It’s not enough to replicate your existing store on the new engine and call it a day. For the migration to be successful, you need to do much more.

7 Steps to a Smooth e-Commerce Platform Migration

Assuming you’ve carefully chosen the platform to which you want to migrate your online store and the project team to handle the process, your e-Commerce migration should go smoothly.

However, even if the development of your store on the new engine goes as planned, it doesn’t necessarily mean the migration will be successful. Changing an e-Commerce platform involves much more than just coding. Beyond the technical work, there are several areas that you must address to consider the migration a success. If you do this correctly, your business revenue will soar instead of dropping. What are these areas?

Proper SEO Migration

Without traffic, there are no sales. If nobody visits your website, nobody will buy from it. Ensuring organic traffic is, therefore, the foundation of any e-Commerce. Achieving high search engine rankings takes months or even years of work, and neglecting SEO during the migration can undo all that effort. Lack of on-site optimization, incorrect or missing redirects of old URLs, failure to transfer content, or drastic reductions in the category tree can significantly lower organic traffic on the new platform. This, in turn, will result in much lower revenue.

Let’s face it: a drop in organic traffic is inevitable during an e-Commerce migration. You must accept this reality. However, you can’t sit still. You need to ensure that these declines don’t last long. How? By properly migrating your SEO from the old platform to the new one.

Key Steps for Effective SEO Migration

1. Transfer key elements from the previous version of the store to the new one.
2. Move all content from the old platform to the new one. Fill in any gaps if necessary.
3. Preserve meta titles and meta descriptions, particularly for the homepage, category pages, product pages, and blog posts.
4. Optimize the code. Check internal linking, H1-H3 headers, structured data, and image alt tags.
5. Design a well-structured sitemap to allow Google bots to discover new URLs quickly.
6. Remove Google bot restrictions if you blocked them during the implementation phase, as you should. Ensure bots can access your site after migration.
7. Verify the configuration of your robots.txt file. Use the noindex directive and canonical tags where appropriate.
8. Ensure the new platform loads quickly and that the mobile version works seamlessly.
9. Set up 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones.
10. Maintain Google Search Console access. Make sure your chosen verification method works with the new site.
11. Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console to notify Google about the updated structure.

These steps will ensure a smoother SEO migration and minimize traffic and revenue losses.

Proper Configuration of Google Analytics

If you want to evaluate whether your migration was worthwhile and delivered satisfactory results, you need data—there’s no way around it. However, if you misconfigure your analytics tool or, worse, forget to integrate your store with Google Analytics, you won’t have the information needed to draw meaningful conclusions. After all, comparing data from your previous platform to… well… data you didn’t collect or collected incorrectly is complex. This is why integrating Google Analytics and configuring it properly is one of the most critical steps when migrating your store to a new e-Commerce platform.

The Internet is full of articles on how to set up Google Analytics. These were written by experts smarter than us, so we recommend you check them out. Professionals like Martyna Zastrożna, Maciek Lewiński, or Karol Dziedzic are worth following for insights into web analytics. We rely on their knowledge by listening to podcasts and reading their newsletters in our own work.

From a more implementation-focused perspective, we recommend setting up alerts in Google Analytics during your e-Commerce platform migration. These alerts can notify you of dangerous changes in key metrics for your online store. Significant drops in conversion rates, extended page load times, or high bounce rates can indicate that something isn’t working correctly on your migrated platform. Configuring alerts for these metrics in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a good idea.

Only by collecting and analyzing reliable data can you determine whether your e-Commerce platform’s migration was worth it. If you notice a decline in revenue, the data collected in Google Analytics will help you identify the cause and allow you to resolve any issues quickly.

Adding Marketing Tags

There’s a high likelihood that your previous online store was integrated with Google Tag Manager. Even if you weren’t actively using it, your e-Commerce platform’s code likely contained manually added marketing tags, such as Google Ads, Facebook Pixel, and more. Proper integration of these tags allows for accurate data collection from these sources.

As you might expect, these marketing tags should also be transferred to your new, migrated e-Commerce platform. Failing to do so could result in lost data about specific traffic sources—something you want to avoid.

We recommend using Google Tag Manager to connect and configure marketing tags. This tool consolidates all the marketing scripts (tags) you use in one place, giving you greater control and efficiency.

Key Advantages of Google Tag Manager

1. Improved Website Performance
   With Google Tag Manager, only one tag (the GTM script) appears in your website’s code. The tool loads individual scripts asynchronously, maintaining your store’s performance.
   
2. Ensured Comprehensive Tagging
   GTM ensures that all pages are correctly tagged. When manually adding scripts, you must paste the appropriate code on each page—a process prone to errors or oversights.
   
3. Streamlined Tool Integration
   When implementing a new tool that requires a marketing tag, you can bypass your IT department by logging into Google Tag Manager and configuring it yourself. This saves time and simplifies the process.
   

Properly configuring Google Analytics and transferring your marketing tags to Google Tag Manager will ensure accurate data collection and a smooth transition to your new e-Commerce platform.

A Well-Designed Store

Migrating an online store is a fantastic opportunity to enhance the user experience on your website. There’s little sense in transferring your e-Commerce platform without making any changes. Sure, it might lead to slightly happier customers because your store will likely run faster, but that’s about it. Don’t expect your revenue to suddenly skyrocket by creating an identical store on a new platform. That’s not going to happen. In fact, judging by market trends, the opposite is often true.

When moving your store to a new platform, take the opportunity to refine its design, improve the conversion path, and perfect the product page. Do everything you can (within your budget) to make your new website better than the old one. Take a close look at your current store and make sure the new one is an upgrade. This is the only way to ensure the conversion rate on your new platform will be higher, translating into greater (rather than reduced) revenue.

The Full Product Catalog

Many businesses migrating their online store to a new e-Commerce platform make one critical mistake: they launch their new platform with only a portion of their product catalog, planning to add the rest later. While this might seem reasonable, this approach has a few significant problems.

First, generating the same (or higher) sales with a significantly reduced product range is difficult. It simply doesn’t add up. If you offer fewer products, your users have fewer options, so they’ll buy less. For instance, if a customer used to purchase shampoo, conditioner, and styling cream from you, in your new store, they might only buy the first two because the third isn’t available. It’s no surprise, then, that your revenue drops after migrating your e-Commerce platform.

Second, if you migrate only part of your product database, comparing the revenue from your new platform to that of the old one becomes impossible. Well, you could try, but such analysis would be far from accurate or meaningful.

For these reasons, when migrating your online store to a new platform, remember that the go-live should include your entire product catalog.

Of course, there are exceptions, e.g. when Black Friday or another major sales event is approaching, and you know you won’t have time to transfer all products. In such cases, the cost of missing out on a key sales opportunity is typically more significant than the cost of launching a new version of your store with a limited product range. In these scenarios, a go-live with an incomplete product listing makes sense.

Automated Testing at Launch

When implementing an online store, there’s no need to emphasize the importance of testing—it’s one of those fundamentals everyone agrees on. Unfortunately, testing often ends the moment the migration is complete. The work is done, and the store on its new platform is live, so there’s nothing left to check—right? Wrong. At this stage, there’s still plenty to monitor and verify.

There’s no such thing as a flawless deployment. No matter how much we perfect a platform, issues inevitably arise once it goes live. Sometimes, there are many; sometimes, just a few—but they’re always there. That’s why it’s crucial to implement automated tests that run daily to ensure all scenarios function correctly. Sometimes, the search engine fails; other times, products can’t be added to the cart, or the payment method selection doesn’t work. There are numerous issues, and all of them obstruct order completion. This means these errors effectively “steal” your revenue. The faster you detect them, the less you’ll lose.

That’s why we implement automated tests right after the go-live phase and actively monitor the platform’s performance. It’s far better to invest money in creating automated tests than to lose much later.

Service Migration Checklist

As we mentioned at the start of this article, migrating an online store is a complex process. You cannot do it on a whim, spontaneously, or without a plan. After all, switching an e-Commerce engine is essentially deploying an entirely new platform.

When you begin this process, you’ll have a plan or vision for your platform that you want to execute—and that’s great! At the end of the process, it will be easier to assess whether everything was completed as intended. Preparing a checklist to tick off individual items as they’re completed will be even easier.

AI Search ✅
PayU Integration ✅
Compliance with Omnibus ✅

Remember, however, that implementation isn’t just about completed features and integrations. It also involves setting up production environments, configuring servers, and even preparing technical documentation. When creating your checklist, include everything that should be checked before publishing your website. If something isn’t functioning correctly, it will affect your revenue.

They likely have their project completion checklist if you’re working with an implementation agency. However, we always recommend creating your own. Why? First, for peace of mind—your software house might overlook something. Second, for control, a checklist makes verifying whether your project team has implemented everything as planned easier.

Pro Tip: Double-check whether production account data has been correctly configured, whether integrations with couriers and payment systems transmit accurate information, and whether any test data has been left behind.

A service migration checklist will give you peace of mind. It ensures everything is properly prepared for your new platform’s go-live.

Migration Without Revenue Drops—Is It Possible?

Absolutely, but only if you approach the entire process holistically. Simply implementing the platform isn’t enough. SEO migration, integrating analytics tools and marketing tags, transferring the product catalog, and designing the store appropriately—all these elements are essential for your new store to generate satisfactory profits from day one.

Don’t focus solely on development tasks. If you take care of all the aspects mentioned in this article, your new online store will earn solid revenue from the first day.