More and more Nordic merchants are migrating from Magento. Not because the platform lacks features — it can do most things — but because the cost of owning and running it has grown larger than the benefit. Every upgrade is a project, every new feature a consultant invoice, and the internal hours spent keeping the platform alive never show up on any budget line.
This article covers what you need to know before making the decision: what a migration costs, what the risks are and what a realistic timeline looks like.
Why merchants choose to migrate from Magento
Magento was built for a time when e-commerce required owning the whole stack. Today, the ownership itself has become the problem. The most common reasons we hear from merchants who want to switch:
- Upgrades and security patches require recurring consultant work just to stand still.
- The development cost per new feature is high, since even small changes require specialist skills.
- Third-party modules clash with each other and with the core at every upgrade.
- Hosting and operations are your own responsibility, with everything that entails during campaign peaks and incidents.
- B2B functionality requires expensive add-ons or an Adobe Commerce licence.
Notice that none of these reasons are about features. The decision to migrate from Magento is fundamentally a decision about ownership model: do you want to keep owning and maintaining a technical platform, or buy e-commerce as a service and spend the time on the business? For a point-by-point comparison, see HDL Commerce vs Magento.
The costs: what a Magento migration consists of
A migration has four cost blocks. Where the figures land depends on the size of the catalogue, the number of integrations and how much custom-built logic needs replacing — but the blocks are always the same:
- The project cost: analysis, setup of the new store, data migration and integrations. This is the one-time cost — and the item where ready-made integrations make the biggest difference.
- The new platform’s running cost: licence or monthly fee, operations and support.
- The parallel cost: during the project you pay for both the old and the new platform.
- Internal hours: your own time for decisions, data cleaning, testing and training. This one is usually forgotten in the calculation.
Put these blocks next to what Magento costs you per year today — upgrades, modules, hosting, consultant hours and internal maintenance. For many merchants, the migration pays for itself precisely because the running cost drops: HDL Commerce delivers up to 40% lower total cost of ownership than Magento, at a fixed price from SEK 10,000/month. The full pricing model is on the pricing page.
So what determines where the project cost lands? Three things, in descending order: how much custom-built logic needs replacing or retiring, how many integrations lack a ready-made equivalent, and how much data cleaning has been postponed over the years. All three can be influenced — above all by daring to leave old complexity behind instead of recreating it.
The risks — and how to manage them
The risks in a Magento migration are known and manageable, but only if they get a place in the plan from the start.
The data risk
Magento’s data model with attribute sets, configurable products and customer groups is flexible — and precisely for that reason it looks different in every installation. The mapping from your structure to the new platform’s must be done field by field and verified with test migrations. Expect part of the job to be cleaning: years of quick fixes always leave traces in the data.
The SEO risk
Magento stores often have deep URL structures with layered filters and category paths that have accumulated link equity for years. Every old URL must be 301-redirected to the right equivalent in the new store. Make the redirect map its own deliverable in the project, not an item on the launch-day checklist.
The integration risk
It is rarely the store itself that breaks the timeline — it is the connections to ERP, warehouse, payments and shipping. Inventory every integration early and check what already exists on the target platform. HDL Commerce has 200+ ready-made integrations, which in practice determines whether a connection is a configuration task or a development project.
The organisational risk
A team that has worked in the Magento admin for years now has to learn a new way of working. Schedule training before launch, and involve the people who work in the store daily in testing during the project — not only when everything is finished.
The timeline: the phases of a Magento migration
How long a migration takes depends on catalogue, integrations and how much custom work needs replacing — but the phases are always the same, and most projects are measured in months rather than weeks:
- Analysis: a review of data, integrations, custom features and SEO status. This is where scope and risk profile are set.
- Setup: the new store is built — design, pricing logic, payment methods, shipping methods.
- Data migration: test migrations in rounds until the result is verified.
- Integrations: connections to ERP and other systems are set up and tested with real flows.
- Testing and training: the team runs real scenarios in the new store.
- Launch: data freeze, final migration, DNS switch, redirects in place, monitoring.
Divide responsibilities clearly between you and the vendor as early as the analysis phase. The vendor owns the technology — setup, migration tooling, integrations. You own what only you can: which products come along, which customers and agreements apply, what is correct when the data contradicts itself. Projects that stall usually do so because that division was never spelled out.
The most important decision in the timeline is not to force the end. The cost of moving the launch two weeks is low. The cost of launching with incomplete data or untested integrations is not.
Next steps
HDL Commerce is built for merchants leaving exactly this situation: a Swedish platform with B2B and B2C in one core, built-in PIM, hosted and operated in Sweden with 99.3% uptime — without upgrade projects and without you having to own the technology. For larger catalogues and complex flows there is Enterprise from SEK 65,000/month.
Start with a free migration analysis: we go through your Magento installation, your data and your integrations and give you a concrete picture of cost, risk and timeline for your specific store. Book the analysis here — reply within 4 hours (weekdays).
