Ecommerce migration checklist

List products, variants, categories, media, redirects, customer records, order history, discounts, gift balances and subscriptions that actually exist. Identify the owner and destination of each category. Record integrations with accounting, stock, fulfillment and customer support. Decide which historic records need to be usable in the new store and which may remain in an accessible archive. A catalog import can look complete while the business has lost the information needed to answer a return or reconcile an outstanding order.

Check how customers will sign in after the move. Shopify documents that customer passwords cannot be moved from another store through its customer CSV import; choose and explain the supported account-access path instead of promising an invisible transfer. Stored payment methods and subscription relationships require their own provider-supported investigation. Do not treat a payment token as an ordinary product field. Confirm what transfers, who must coordinate it and what customer action is needed before deciding the launch sequence.

Run controlled imports and compare both counts and representative detail. Check variant combinations, stock units, prices, currencies, tax settings, images, shipping restrictions and product availability against approved business rules. Counts alone cannot reveal that a variant image belongs to the wrong size or that a decimal value was interpreted in another unit. Keep the transformation rules and correction log, then repeat the import from a known starting point. The final migration should reproduce a verified process rather than rely on a sequence of undocumented manual repairs.

Consider a store with orders placed before cutover that will ship afterward. Decide whether the old system will finish those orders or whether their operational state will move. If they remain in the old system, staff need a reliable lookup route and a clear rule for returns and refunds. If they move, reconcile payment and fulfilled quantities without triggering another charge or shipment. Assign each order to one operational owner during the transition; running two independent fulfillment processes creates a business risk even if both systems are individually healthy.

Use controlled provider environments to verify product discovery, cart changes, checkout, confirmation and downstream fulfillment. Then exercise a failed payment, a cancellation, a partial refund and customer access where those functions are in scope. Verify notification recipients and prevent test messages from reaching customers. Include mobile interaction and relevant accessibility checks. Prepare redirects for changed customer-facing URLs and test the final destinations, rather than assuming the new platform’s default paths preserve existing links.

Agree when content and operational writes stop, what changes are synchronized last and who can reopen trading. Take recoverable records of the preceding state and define the observations that would stop release. Rollback must account for orders created on the new store; merely restoring yesterday’s database may discard legitimate business activity. After launch, compare real order and inventory outcomes within the agreed scope and resolve discrepancies promptly. Keep the old system available only as needed for the documented transition, with access and retirement ownership defined.