How to migrate an online store without losing orders or your catalog

What should you inventory before migrating?

This inventory determines what migrates automatically, what is loaded by hand, and what stays only as a historical archive.

What happens to your URLs and rankings?

Every platform builds product and category addresses its own way. If they change, each old URL needs a permanent 301 redirect to its equivalent, as Google recommends when moving a site (Google Search Central; redirects).

For a store, that includes products, categories, important filters, brand pages, and images that get traffic. Google also has a specific guide on designing a URL structure for ecommerce sites, which helps when deciding on the new format (Google Search Central).

Discontinued products are redirected to their category or the closest product; if there is no equivalent, they return a 404 or 410.

How are payments handled?

Payment methods are set up again on the new platform using your account credentials with each processor. Before the switch, it is worth:

• Confirming that your payment processor and shipping methods integrate with the platform you chose.
• Testing each payment method in test mode, then with a small real purchase that you refund afterward.
• Checking the processor’s automatic notifications (approved or declined payment webhooks), which often still point to an address on the old store.

Full card data should not be stored in the store or migrated: the processor handles it. The PCI DSS standards set out how merchants that accept cards must protect that data (PCI Security Standards Council).

What should you test before the switch?

The new store is built in a staging environment, blocked from search engines, with a recent copy of the data. There, you run through the entire flow:

1. Search, filter, and add products with variants to the cart.
2. Check out as a guest and as a registered customer, with every payment and shipping method.
3. Review automatic emails, invoices, and order statuses.
4. Test coupons, taxes, shipping rates by zone, and stock.
5. Review everything on your phone.
6. Test a broad sample of redirects.

Every bug caught at this stage is one a customer never sees.

How do you organize the cutover window?

The switch is scheduled for a low-sales time slot and shared with the team. A typical sequence:

1. Freeze catalog changes on the old store.
2. Run the final migration of new orders, customers, and stock since the last copy.
3. Point the domain to the new store and turn on the redirects.
4. Place real test orders in production.
5. Remove the search engine block and submit the new sitemap.

If the store has to go offline for a while, Google recommends that during very short outages the site return a 503 status code instead of empty pages (Google Search Central).

What goes into a rollback plan?

A rollback plan answers one question: if something critical fails, how do we get back to selling on the previous store within minutes? For that, you need to:

• Keep the old store intact and available for an agreed period.
• Have a full backup of the data and files from before the switch.
• Define which failures require a rollback (for example, payments not going through) and who makes the call.
• Know how to recover any orders placed on the new store in the meantime.

At AiDo Creative, as set out in the proposal, the inventory, testing, and rollback plan are agreed on before we touch the live store.

Frequently asked questions