2025 Fraction Studio Ecommerce Replatforming and Migration Guide

Planning and Scoping

Before you touch a line of code or start arguing about platforms you need to know what you're actually working with. Let me repeat that because it is the NUMBER ONE mistake we see brands make daily. DO NOT begin solution engineering your platform selection before you have a proper inventory of your existing platform or success criteria from the business. Full stop.

Think of this as the moving week walk-through where you open every closet and look under every rug. You can't plan a clean migration if you don't know what you have, what's worth keeping, and what can be tossed.

Start by inventorying everything.

Products, categories, content pages, blog posts, media assets, customer data, order history, platform integrations, automations / cron jobs, all of it. For each item, figure out how important it is to the business and whether it needs to come over exactly as-is, be rebuilt, or be left behind. You'll be shocked how much dead weight a store can carry. Especially your legacy automations and platform integrations. Those tend to be a minefield of lost logic dragging down performance.

Once you have the lay of the land decide what kind of migration you're doing.

Is this the bare-bones "just get us off the old thing" lift-and-shift or a full modernization with new features, user workflows, internal processes and integrations?

" Before you touch a line of code or start arguing about platforms, you need to know what you're actually working with. "

Be honest about your budget, your team's bandwidth, and your appetite for change. Every feature you carry over adds time, complexity, and risk. Sometimes less really is more.

This is also the time to map out who's responsible for what. Assign clear owners for SEO, data migration, integrations, technology, content, merchandising, QA, comms and a whole slew of other potential priorities. Put their names on a RACI now, and confirm leadership buy-in so there's no confusion later. Even the most well-intentioned teams with well thought out migration plans will lose their way without well-aligned stakeholders and a commitment from the business.

A good migration team looks like a mix of people who know the current platform inside-out and folks who can think through the future setup without dragging old bad habits with them. This is a delicate dance. Many of your current power users will likely be hesitant to make major changes to workflows. After all, your team is running a major portion of your business through the existing platform, and who has time to massively overhaul processes?

Don't fall into this trap. Now is the time to put all your cards on the table and be radically candid with the teams. Everyone will feel strain throughout this process as you evolve workflows, migrate systems and build for your future. Don't let "because this is the way the team knows how to do it best today" get in the way of a real transformational shift for your business.

And finally, set your targets! Decide what "good" looks like at launch. That might be holding conversion rates steady, cutting page load time in half, cleaning up duplicate product data, or decreasing time-to-launch for new SKUs. Without clear goals you'll have no way to know if the migration was a success, and nothing to rally the team around when things get messy. And they will get messy.

Protect: Data and SEO Parity

If you skip this step you're in for a world of hurt. You'll wake up the day after launch with the hangover from hell. Wondering why traffic is tanking, customer support contacts are spiking, CAC is through the roof and orders are drying up before your eyes.

Protecting your data and search visibility isn't optional. It's the foundation of a smooth migration.

Start with your products. Every SKU, variant, option, and bundle needs a home. Either in the garbage or on the new platform. Either way, you need to bust out the big A word. It's time for an audit!

" Protecting your data and search visibility isn't optional. "

Price lists, inventory counts, warehouse locations, 3PL mapping — all of it has to map cleanly so you're not scrambling to fix oversold inventory or busted prices post-launch.

Then there's your content. Product pages, category pages, blogs, guides, size charts, FAQs, and anything customers touch needs to survive the move without breaking links or losing context. Media files matter here, too. Images, PDFs, videos… make sure they're optimized, named sensibly, and hooked into the right CDN.

This is an ideal time to review whether or not you will be looking for a third-party CMS integration as well. Many ecomm platforms have super extensible data models allowing you to cram all sorts of non-transactional data into the system, but you need to ask yourself two questions. Do I want that kind of vendor lock? And where else do I use this content? Both of those explorations will tell you if hosting your content and media assets on your new ecomm platform is the right move. Sometimes it's a slam dunk. Other times it's the beginning of a painful road.

Now let's talk SEO. SEO parity is non-negotiable.

Before any platform launch you should build a complete redirect map from every legacy URL to its new location. Match your title tags, meta descriptions, and schema markup. Keep canonical tags and hreflang rules intact. Update your XML sitemaps and submit them on launch day. A bulk crawl before and after launch will tell you if you've missed anything.

This is about making sure the lights stay on when you flip the switch. Your data and your SEO equity are the two things you can't afford to rebuild from scratch.

Build: Technical Implementation

This is where your migration goes from plan to reality, but keep in mind this is section three of eight. A lot of teams get distracted by shiny technical migration milestones and mistakenly equate implementation progress with project completion progress. Don't let your team fall into this trap.

Yes, technical implementation is critical for any platform migration, but it is FAR from the whole project. Neglect the rest of the project, and you may find yourself in a never-ending backlog of bug fixes and feature requests.

The work here isn't just "put the store on a new platform" either. It's about designing a setup that actually works for the way you sell now and leaves room for how you'll sell later.

Lock in your architecture choices first. Are you going monolithic, composable, or headless? Will you keep certain pieces from your old stack or replace them all? These decisions set the tone for every integration, workflow, and dependency that follows.

Map your integrations early. ERP, OMS, POS, PIM, CRM, ESP, CMS, analytics. A veritable alphabet soup of context mapping. Be sure to build with performance budgets in mind, too, so your fancy new setup doesn't slow to a crawl the moment you add a promo script.

" If you don't know what success looks like before you launch you're gambling, not migrating. "

While we're talking about technical implementation it's easy to narrow our focus onto software engineering and digital product, but be sure that merchandising, finance and business operations all have a seat at the table as well. Your finance team will thank you during month-end when you deliver polished financial reports to the accounting system rather than a lazy default order export from the ecomm platform.

Be sure to bake accessibility into your build instead of bolting it on at the end, too. Same goes for compliance. Get your consent banners, privacy policies, and data-handling processes live from day one on top of making sure your partners are SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant.

The goal here is simple. When you launch, your store should feel fast, reliable, and familiar in all the right ways, with the improvements baked in.

Train: Internal Change Management

Platform migrations aren't just tech projects. Ultimately, they're people projects. You can deliver the cleanest code, the most resilient system integrations and most polished storefront in the world, but if your team doesn't trust it or know how to use it then you've only done half the job. It's frighteningly common for teams to complete an entire platform migration only to linger on their legacy platform for months or years in the background because a proper change management plan was never put into place.

First, get real about training. Don't just hand out a login and a PDF. You need to build hands-on sessions where merchandisers, marketers, ops teams, finance users and customer service can practice in a safe sandbox. Let them break things in a fake environment before they have to do it with live orders on the line. Record these sessions so new hires and stragglers aren't learning the platform from outdated Slack threads and partially completed Notion notes.

Second, tackle change management head-on. People resist change not because they're stubborn, but because they're busy and change makes them slower at first. Acknowledge it. Show them how the new platform will make their work easier, not harder, and give them a clear timeline for when they'll start seeing those benefits. And most of all, be sure to align with leadership on timing. There will be a slowdown during training. Coordinate the best time to support this transition.

" The more you can wring out of the tool, the greater your ROI. "

Third, evolve your processes along with your tools. If you move to a platform with native scheduling, stop manually launching products at midnight. If you can run split tests without dev tickets, start making it part of your marketing cycle. Migrations are one of the few times you have permission to rethink "how we've always done it." Use it. Unlock the power of your stakeholder teams and get the most out of your new platform. There are fixed costs in adopting any platform, but the more you can wring out of the tool, the greater your ROI.

Finally, keep a feedback loop open. Create a central place for teams to log bugs, ideas, and workarounds. Review them weekly, and separate "we hate change" complaints from legitimate friction points that need fixes or better training. Frankly, this should be a permanent process within your organization, but at the very minimum you should keep this line of communication open for the first 90 days.

The tech change is just the trigger. The real transformation happens when your people and processes level up with it.

Measure: Analytics and Guardrails

If you don't know what success looks like before you launch you're gambling, not migrating. This is where you set your measurement contract.

First, make sure your analytics stack is ready. Map every important event from the old site to the new one. That includes ecommerce events like add-to-cart, checkout steps, purchases, promo code tracking and refunds. Don't assume "it's tracking". Verify it. Also, be sure to map any non-transactional engagement events between the two platforms as well. Newsletter sign-ups, scroll-depth and linger duration, and search activity are just as important to your funnel analytics as bottom-line conversion rate.

" Don't assume 'it's tracking'. Verify it. "

And don't forget to set your platform guardrails as well. This will be your safety net. Pick a small set of metrics that will tell you if something's wrong: organic traffic, conversion rate, AOV, error rates, site speed, you name it. Set thresholds that trigger an alert or even a rollback. Build playbooks off these contingencies as well. The only thing worse than having to use one of these playbooks during launch is needing it and not having one.

Build your dashboards now so you're not scrambling to piece them together after launch. Have a plan for how to track attribution across the cutover so you don't lose campaign performance data halfway through the month.

When the launch happens you want to be watching real data in real time, not waiting on a weekly report to tell you the ship is sinking.

Cutover: Rollout and Rollback

Your platform launch is not the time to wing it. Decide how you're going live, over what duration, with what tools and what you'll do if things go sideways.

There are three basic rollout patterns: Big bang, where you flip everything at once. Strangler patterns, where you migrate sections over time. Percentage-based rollouts, where only a slice of traffic sees the new store at first.

Pick the one that matches your risk tolerance, team needs and resourcing. Then don't look back.

Write your runbook like someone else will have to follow it without you in the room. Include DNS and TTL changes, who's in the war room, what gets tested and in what order, and the exact point where you call it a go or a no-go.

Rollback plans are often an afterthought — don't make that mistake. Decide ahead of time what would make you pull the plug and exactly how you'd do it. If your threshold is "conversion rate drops 40 percent for more than 30 minutes" then make sure everyone knows it.

A good launch is just as much about knowing how to stop as it is about knowing how to start.

Stabilize: Post-Launch

Going live is just the start. The first 90 days will make or break whether your migration actually delivers the value you planned for.

In the first few days, watch your redirects, crawl stats, and funnel metrics like a hawk. Fix 404s immediately. Check indexing. Make sure tracking hasn't broken. Cover your bases and avoid any major business milestones. Ideally, you will be launching into one of the quietest months for your shop.

" A good launch is just as much about knowing how to stop as it is about knowing how to start. "

At 30 days compare your KPIs to your pre-migration baseline. Are rankings holding? Is performance better? Has the conversion rate improved? Are we able to reduce engineering dependencies? Can products launch quicker? Use your support ticket data as a goldmine for what to fix next.

By 60 and 90 days you should be looking at the road ahead, not just patching holes. Tune your Core Web Vitals. Adjust merchandising based on search and sales data. Test your email and SMS flows now that they're running in the new setup. Now is the time to start building your roadmap for the future free from the shackles of your old platform limitations.

This is the point to shift from firefighting to improvement as quickly as possible. Get ready for a fun and wild ride ahead!

CX and Comms Pack

Most migration guides treat the customer experience like an afterthought. "Flip the switch, they'll figure it out." That's a great way to turn launch week into a support nightmare.

The simple truth is your customers don't care about your new tech stack. They care about whether the site works, their account still exists, and their order history hasn't vanished into the ether. You need to tell them what's changing, when it's happening, and most importantly, why it's good for them. Faster site, smoother checkout, better search, better product variety, more ways to pay… whatever the wins are, make sure they hear them before they feel them.

The same goes for your internal teams. Your support staff should not find out about a redesigned checkout because a customer calls in confused. Arm them with the information they need to draft pre-written macros for the top ten "What the hell is this?" questions you expect to see.

Give them screenshots, escalation paths, and a live feed of "fixes in progress" so they can actually reassure people with confidence. This is a perfect time to implement an internal changelog in Slack or Teams. Some place with up-to-the-minute notes on what's in flight.

Update your FAQs, help center, and any other self-service tools in lockstep with the launch. Don't make customers dig through outdated instructions that still reference the old navigation or a missing "Buy Now" button.

Think of this as the part of the migration where you actually protect the brand experience. A well-handled CX plan can make a major platform shift feel like an upgrade, not a disruption.

Appendix and Resources