What Ecommerce Replatforming Services Include
Ecommerce replatforming services are sold under one name and delivered in wildly different sizes. One quote is a theme install and a product CSV import. Another is seven workstreams running for two months. The gap between them is not a discount — it is a difference in what you are actually buying, and it usually surfaces in week six.
A complete replatforming engagement covers seven things: discovery and information architecture, design, front-end build, data migration, integrations, search-equity preservation, and launch. Most quotes cover four or five of them properly and quietly leave the rest with you. This is what belongs in each workstream, which items are legitimately quoted separately, and how to read a proposal so you know which version you have been handed.
What ecommerce replatforming services actually cover
Replatforming is not a redesign with a new logo on it. As our glossary entry for replatforming puts it, you are changing the foundation the business runs on. That makes the scope wider than most first-time buyers expect, and the widest parts are the ones nobody demos.
| Workstream | What a complete scope contains |
|---|---|
| Discovery & IA | Catalogue and integration inventory, a full crawl of every existing URL, a ranking and traffic baseline, the new navigation and filtering taxonomy, a launch window and a rollback plan. |
| UI/UX design | A design system and every key template designed for desktop and mobile — home, collection, product, cart, account, checkout-adjacent pages — with at least one revision round written into the scope. |
| Front-end build | Templates built to the design, feature parity for the things the business actually sells with (filtering, search, bundles, subscriptions, multi-currency, RTL where relevant). |
| Data migration | Products and variants, collections, customer records with a password-reset flow on first login, order history, reviews, blog content with internal links rewritten. |
| Integrations | Payments, shipping, tax, email and SMS flows, loyalty, reviews, ERP or PIM connections, analytics and pixels — each reconnected and verified with real test transactions. |
| Search equity | A URL-level 301 redirect map, title and heading parity, structured data rebuilt, canonicals planned, sitemap resubmitted, and a monitoring window after launch. |
| Launch & handover | A staging environment, full cross-device QA, a soft launch in a low-traffic window, monitoring through the first days, team training and documentation. |
Four of those seven are invisible in a demo. You can look at a beautiful staging store and have no idea whether the redirect map exists, whether order history imported, or whether the tax rules were re-tested. That asymmetry is exactly why thin scopes sell well.
What gets quoted separately — and why that is fair
Not every exclusion is a red flag. Some line items genuinely cannot be priced until someone has looked at your data, and an agency that pretends otherwise is guessing at your expense. In our own proposals, data migration sits as an optional add-on priced against volume, precisely because migrating 400 products is a different job from migrating 40,000 with fifteen years of orders behind them.
The items that reasonably sit outside a fixed build price:
- Historical data volume. How many years of order history you keep is a decision with a cost attached. It is worth making deliberately rather than defaulting to “all of it”.
- Custom integrations. A standard shipping app is scoped. A bespoke connector to your ERP or 3PL is a project of its own.
- Content production. Photography, copywriting and translation are real work. Migration moves what exists; it does not write what is missing.
- Feature parity for genuinely custom functionality. If your current store has a configurator someone built in 2019, rebuilding it is not covered by “migrate the catalogue”.
- Ongoing optimisation. Support after launch is not the same as a growth retainer, and the two should be priced separately so you can see what each one costs.
The distinction that matters: a fair exclusion is named in the proposal with the reason it is variable. An unfair one is absent from the proposal and asserted later. If you want to sanity-check the numbers you are being quoted before any of this, our breakdown of what a Shopify migration costs will put a range around the conversation.
How the phases actually sequence
Buyers usually ask how long replatforming takes and get a single number back. The number is less useful than the shape. Our own delivery template runs a full store build across seven phases in six to eight weeks — a figure that only works because the phases overlap rather than queue.
Two consequences follow from that shape, and both are worth checking in a proposal.
First, the redirect map is a week-one deliverable, not a launch-week one. It is built from a crawl of the old site while that site is still live and complete — which is why planning 301 redirects before you migrate is a scheduling decision as much as an SEO one. Agencies that leave it until the end are not disorganised so much as about to lose you rankings.
Second, overlap means dependencies. Design has to land before the build can finish; the data has to arrive before QA can be meaningful. A plan with no overlap is padded. A plan with total overlap is fiction. What you want to see is a sequence where each phase starts as soon as its input exists.
How to read a replatforming proposal
You do not need to interrogate the agency to find out which version of the service you are being sold. The document usually tells you, if you read it for absences rather than promises.
- Search the document for “redirect”. If the word does not appear, search-equity preservation is not in scope. This is the single fastest test.
- Look for the word “staging”. A replatform tested only in production is a replatform you find bugs in via customers.
- Check whether data migration is itemised at all. Silence here does not mean included — it usually means unquoted. Our write-up of what does and does not transfer in an ecommerce data migration covers the specific items that tend to fall through: passwords, subscriptions, gift-card balances, reviews and custom fields.
- Find the reconciliation step. Importing data and proving the import is correct are two different tasks. Only one of them is usually scoped.
- Read what happens after go-live. “Support” ranges from a warranty on bugs to months of monitoring. We include six months of post-launch technical support in our builds, and the point is not the number — it is that the number is written down.
If you would rather work from a list than a proposal, our 39-point Shopify migration checklist sets out the same territory in seven stages. Comparing a quote against it will show you the gaps faster than any meeting.
Before you buy the service, check you need it
Scope discipline is worth nothing if the project itself is premature. Replatforming is expensive in ways that do not appear on the invoice — team attention, deferred campaigns, a fortnight of everyone being slightly nervous. It earns that cost when the platform has genuinely stopped helping you sell, which is the test we set out in the seven signs it is time to replatform.
The picture also changes if you sell B2B. Account hierarchies, negotiated price lists, quote workflows and purchase-order terms are not a variation on a consumer storefront; they are a different data model, and they belong in the scope explicitly. We covered what shifts in B2B ecommerce replatforming. If you already know your destination, the platform-specific route — for example Magento to Shopify migration — will tell you which parts of the work are heaviest in your case.
Frequently asked questions
What is included in ecommerce replatforming services?
A complete engagement covers discovery and information architecture, UI/UX design, front-end build, data migration, integration reconnection, search-equity preservation via a URL-level redirect map, and a tested launch with training and handover. Anything missing from that list is not free — it moves to your team.
Is data migration always included in the price?
Often not, and that can be legitimate. The effort scales with catalogue size, years of order history and how much custom data lives in fields the platform’s own export ignores. What matters is that it appears in the proposal as a named, priced line rather than an assumption.
How long do replatforming services take?
A full store build typically runs six to eight weeks across seven overlapping phases. Large catalogues, custom integrations and content production extend that; the phase sequence stays the same.
What is the most common gap in a replatforming quote?
Search-equity preservation. Design and build are visible and easy to sell, so they get scoped carefully. The redirect map, metadata parity and post-launch monitoring are invisible until traffic drops, which is usually several weeks after everyone has agreed the project went well.
The short version
Ecommerce replatforming services are not a commodity, and the price differences between quotes are mostly telling you the truth about scope. Read proposals for what is missing rather than what is promised: redirects, staging, itemised data migration, a reconciliation step, and a written definition of post-launch support. Get those five in writing and the rest of the project is craft. Leave them out and you have not bought a cheaper replatform — you have bought a smaller one, with the remainder invoiced to your own team in the weeks when they can least afford it.
Current store performance