How (and Why) to Migrate from Shopify to Commerce Cloud

Your ecommerce platform is make-or-break technology that should give you freedom to innovate and build experiences that truly differentiate your business. But if your platform is holding you back, it might be time to migrate. Commerce Cloud is trusted by leaders in every industry because it’s the most complete, configurable, AI-powered commerce platform on the planet.

If you’re planning to replatform from Shopify to Commerce Cloud, here’s a step-by-step guide and important considerations for your migration process.

Add-ons and integrations are increasing your TCO. It’s a common story: You were initially comfortable with the price of your platform, but ongoing expenses after setup are driving up the cost. This is especially true when your platform doesn’t come with all the out-of-the-box tools and integrations necessary to run your business as it grows. Every customization, integration, and new capability adds more to your total cost of ownership.

It’s difficult to connect commerce to other critical business systems. Commerce shouldn’t be an island; Your platform should be connected to other back-end systems and make it easy to access data from around your business. If not, your customer experience suffers (and so does employee satisfaction).

Your ecommerce experience relies heavily on third-party integrations. If your platform is not complete, you’ll need to depend on third parties for necessary capabilities (like inventory and order management, payments, and more). And that means taking on risk. Reliance on third-parties can lead to potential issues like slower page load times, customization limitations, and data privacy concerns.

Your teams have no single source of truth and lack of control over data. Without centralized data, different teams (like commerce, marketing, sales, and customer service) may operate with conflicting information. This leads to a poor, inconsistent customer experience — and ultimately, customer retention issues. Inaccurate customer insights and decisions made with outdated customer data can also result in misguided marketing campaigns or misaligned product offerings. But your customers aren’t the only ones affected by data mishaps. Your teams might waste time reconciling discrepancies or duplicating efforts, which can hinder productivity, slow down decision-making processes, and lead to dissatisfaction.

Scalability and uptime don’t meet expectations. There are many ways to grow a business: You can enter new markets, expand your product catalog, target new audiences, and more. Regardless of your growth strategy, your platform needs to enable the tactics you choose. Often, growth strategies involve new integrations to expand feature functionality, extensive data management to ensure accuracy and insights, and customizations to tailor the platform to specific business needs — all of which can be complex and resource-intensive. If your platform makes this costly and difficult, it’s time to consider replatforming.

International commerce is clunky and difficult. Foreign sales drive an estimated 39% of revenue, on average, at companies that sell internationally. That’s why global expansion is a major part of many companies’ ecommerce growth strategies. But if your commerce platform doesn’t make it easy to set up and manage multiple currencies, automate currency conversion and exchange rates, or navigate international tax laws and regulations, it can be daunting.

You keep running into limitations when you want to customize. Do you find that new innovations are often squashed because your platform doesn’t offer enough agility? When you are able to innovate and build new features, lack of flexibility causing delays in your time to market? These are all signs you should prioritize replatforming sooner rather than later. The sooner you make the switch, the faster you improve your bottom line.

First things first: What are your goals? You can probably list the features and capabilities your platform lacks, but it’s just as important to know what you want out of your next platform. When you have defined goals, it’s easier to have transparent, direct conversations with your next platform partner.

Define your minimum viable product. One of the best (read: fastest) ways to get your new platform up and running is to take an MVP approach. This means focusing your early efforts on major features necessary for your business to operate ecommerce. For some brands, an ecommerce MVP might simply be a customer portal and the ability to track orders. For others, an MVP will include storefront, product search, payments, and order management.

Align on KPIs to measure success. Key performance indicators will help you steer the ship during (and after) the replatforming process. For example, you can track time to market to gauge how quickly your teams can launch features or products on the new platform. Monitor metrics like page views, session duration, and bounce rates to gauge user interaction with the new platform. You can also measure conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and load time and performance. It’s important to track your new platform’s total cost of ownership (TCO) to ensure cost efficiency.

Decide on your implementation strategy. Replatforming isn’t one size fits all. You’ll need to determine whether your in-house team will handle the implementation or if you will partner with a third-party systems integrator (or a combination of the two). Consider the roles and experience of your current IT and development teams. Will you need to add headcount and find talent with expertise in relevant areas like javascript development, DevSecOps, and API integration?

If you’re working with an SI, identify one based on project size & complexity. Request case studies and references from previous clients. This will give you insights into their capabilities, project management style, and the results they achieved for other businesses. Evaluate whether the integrator can design solutions that scale with your business growth and adapt to future technology changes, ensuring long-term viability. Commerce Cloud has an extensive ecosystem of experienced, trustworthy systems integrators to choose from.

Identify, map, and clean the data you intend to migrate. Conduct an inventory of all your data sources (including customer information, product details, inventory data, and sales history). Then, determine the quality of your data. Identify any issues such as duplicates, incomplete records, outdated information, or inconsistencies. Come up with a plan to clean data, which may include deduplication, standardization, and validation.

Create a plan for content migration. Data isn’t the only thing that you need to migrate. Your replatforming process should also involve creating a comprehensive list of all existing content, including product descriptions, images, videos, blog posts, and customer reviews. You should plan how categories, tags, and product attributes will be organized. Preserve existing SEO rankings by mapping old URLs to new ones and maintaining metadata (titles, descriptions) during the migration.

Identify priority pages. Analyze traffic data, conversion rates, SEO performance, engagement and more for product pages, checkout pages, and landing pages. Engage cross-functional teams (like sales, service, and marketing) to gather insights about which pages are most critical for business success. Create a prioritized list of pages and ensure responsible teams have clarity on why each is essential during the migration process.

Update Domain Name System (DNS) settings. To avoid any downtime or loss of business during your migration, this is a critical step. If your site’s DNS records are not updated correctly, users may encounter 404 errors or be unable to access your storefront entirely.

Have a plan for business user training and change management. It’s not just your IT and development teams that are affected by changes to your ecommerce platform. Each team and role, from merchandisers to marketers, will need to be trained on the new platform. Trailhead can help here. This is a free resource for Commerce Cloud customers to get specific training on various aspects of the platform. Before implementation, it may also be helpful to review and realign your organizational structure accordingly.

Review code to mitigate bugs and vulnerabilities. Check and double-check your code quality and structure, security practices, error handling and logging, and your documentation.

Test (and retest) website functionality, links, checkout experience. Perform functional testing of your entire site. This includes validating search functionality to ensure proper filters and sorting options. Make sure that product details, images, descriptions, and pricing are accurate and load correctly. Ensure that users can add and remove items from the cart without issues and that items remain in the cart after logging in and out.

Black Rifle Coffee Company

If you’re a coffee connoisseur, you’ve likely heard of Black Rifle Coffee Company. If you haven’t, let us introduce you: Black Rifle is a veteran-founded coffee company — well-known and beloved for its online, direct-to-consumer coffee subscription services.

On Shopify, Black Rifle often relied on developers for changes to marketing pages and promotions aimed at driving revenue. “Any time we wanted a marketing or splash landing page for a sale, developers had to be involved in the planning a week in advance. Unfortunately, this took a lot of time away from moving our platform forward and doing unique things that really benefit the company and the customer.”

Rather than scaling with Black Rifle’s rapidly growing business, the platform highlighted gaps in infrastructure and necessitated a dedicated order management system to streamline operations, automate order routing, and enhance fulfillment efficiency.

By migrating to Commerce Cloud, Black Rifle gained full control over its operations and has significantly reduced manual processes through automated order routing, improved promotional offerings, and enhanced subscription management. With ambitious revenue growth goals, a strong commitment to omnichannel strategies, and the need to decouple order management from their ERP, the combination of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Order Management provided the ideal solution. Now, teams benefit from headless capabilities, a comprehensive cross-cloud vision that includes Service Cloud, and a robust order management system.

And the results speak for themselves: On Commerce Cloud, Black Rifle Coffee Company benefits from 30 times faster site speed and a 31% increase in average order value.

Replatforming with Commerce Cloud means that you’ll have ongoing support and intuitive, out-of-the-box tools to help you grow your business. These functionalities help scale your business with AI, automation, and personalization.

Commerce Agents: AI-powered assistants make ecommerce easier for both business users and customers. Agentforce Merchant Agent enables your teams to use a conversational interface to create promotions and get recommendations to improve specific KPIs.

Insights and Actions: This functionality that gives you tailored advice specific to your store to help you achieve your goals.

Product Intelligence: Get a comprehensive view of category and product performance with an intuitive dashboard that highlights key metrics to help you make informed decisions, fast. You can easily access product insights for strategic actions like bundling and targeted promotions.

Shopper Intelligence: At any given time, this dashboard allows you to track repeat purchasers, active, and at-risk shoppers. These insights help you make strategic decisions for optimizing lead generation and balancing customer acquisition costs.

Inventory Intelligence: Commerce Cloud makes it easy to track, analyze, and act on your current stock levels. Inventory Intelligence gives you a comprehensive view of your products’ inventory health across locations and location groups. This helps you streamline inventory operations, ensure timely reorders, and prevent stock shortages.

After you launch your new site, keep a close eye on the following aspects to ensure ongoing success.

• Time to market for new features: Tracking this ensures that your business can quickly adapt to customer needs and market trends. The faster you can roll out new features, the more competitive and responsive your business will be.
• Conversion rates: This is a direct measure of how well your site turns visitors into paying customers. High conversion rates indicate that your site is effectively persuading visitors to complete purchases, which is critical for revenue growth.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Happy customers are more likely to return and recommend your store. Measuring CSAT gives you insight into areas of improvement and helps maintain a loyal customer base, which is vital for long-term success.
• Uptime and reliability: If your site is frequently down, customers can't make purchases, leading to lost revenue. Monitoring uptime ensures your store is consistently available, minimizing disruptions and providing a better shopping experience.
• Load time and performance: Slow load times can frustrate customers and cause them to leave before completing a purchase. By monitoring performance, you can ensure that your site runs smoothly, improving user experience and conversion rates.
• Cost efficiency: Tracking costs against revenue ensures you're operating within budget and maximizing profitability. Understanding cost efficiency helps identify areas to streamline operations and reduce waste, improving margins.
• User engagement: High engagement indicates that users find your content and products interesting. Tracking engagement helps optimize your marketing strategies and tailor the shopping experience to your audience’s preferences.
• Error rates: A high error rate can hinder user experience and lead to lost sales. By tracking and fixing errors, you ensure customers can easily navigate your site, reducing friction in the purchasing process.
• SEO performance: SEO drives organic traffic to your store. Monitoring SEO performance ensures your website is ranking well on search engines, which can lead to more visibility and customers without the need for paid ads.
• Revenue growth: Ultimately, revenue is the bottom line. Tracking revenue growth allows you to evaluate the overall health of your business and identify trends, enabling you to make strategic decisions that support sustainable expansion.