Switching e-commerce platforms is one of the biggest technology decisions a commerce business makes. Done right, the switch delivers lower costs, faster development and a store that sells better. Done wrong, it costs you traffic, data and months of internal frustration. The difference rarely lies in which platform you choose — it lies in how you run the switch itself.
This guide walks through the whole process in seven steps, from business case to launch. It is written for you if you run e-commerce on Magento, WooCommerce or Shopify and feel the platform has started holding the business back rather than driving it forward.
When is it time to switch e-commerce platforms?
Most companies wait too long. A platform switch feels big, so you patch and mend for another year. But there are clear signals that it is time to at least run the numbers:
- Every new feature requires consultant hours and takes weeks to ship.
- Upgrades and security patches eat an ever-growing share of the budget.
- B2B and B2C run in separate solutions that don’t talk to each other.
- Product data is maintained in spreadsheets alongside the platform.
- The site slows down or goes down during campaigns — and no one can really explain why.
Recognise two or more of these? Then it is worth doing the maths on a switch. Here are the seven steps.
Step 1: Define why you are switching
A platform switch without a clear why becomes an IT project without an end. State the goal in business terms: lower total cost, shorter time from idea to campaign, B2B sales online, fewer operational incidents. Write it down on a single page and let it steer every decision later in the project.
This is also the document you evaluate platforms against — not the vendors’ feature lists. A platform can have a hundred features you will never use and still lack the one that matters to your business.
Step 2: Write the requirements list before you watch any demos
Demos are sales tools. The requirements list is your protection. Start from how you actually work today and split the requirements into three levels:
- Must have: anything that stops the business if it’s missing — customer-specific pricing, a connection to your ERP, your payment and shipping methods.
- Should have: anything that saves time every week — a built-in PIM, good campaign tools, self-service for B2B customers.
- Nice to have: anything that can wait until after launch.
Be extra thorough with the integrations. List every system the platform must talk to: ERP, warehouse, payments, shipping, finance, marketing. A platform with ready-made integrations to your systems cuts both cost and risk — custom-built connectors are often the line item that blows the budget.
Step 3: Calculate total cost of ownership, not licence price
The licence or monthly fee is rarely the biggest line item. Instead, calculate three years of total cost: licence, operations and hosting, development, upgrades, apps and extensions, plus internal hours. This is where open platforms often surprise you — low entry cost, high running cost.
Ask for a fixed price wherever you can. HDL Commerce, for example, costs from SEK 10,000/month plus SEK 50,000 one-time setup for Light, with operations, upgrades and support included. For many merchants that model delivers up to 40% lower total cost of ownership than Magento. The full pricing is on the pricing page.
Step 4: Evaluate a few platforms properly
Evaluate two or three candidates against the requirements list — not ten against gut feeling. Ask each vendor to demonstrate your actual scenarios: your pricing logic, your catalogue, your integrations. A demo on the vendor’s sample data says nothing about how the platform handles your reality.
If you want a straight comparison for the most common starting points, we have gathered it per platform: HDL Commerce vs Magento, vs WooCommerce and vs Shopify.
Step 5: Plan the data migration early
Data is the part of the switch that is most often underestimated. Products, variants, categories, customers, orders and customer-specific prices must be mapped from the old structure to the new — and the quality of that work determines how the store performs the day after launch.
- Take stock of the data: what exists, where does it live and what is actually current?
- Clean before you move: discontinued products and dead categories should not be migrated.
- Map field by field and document every deviation.
- Test-migrate a subset of the catalogue and review the result before moving the whole thing.
Step 6: Protect your SEO with a redirect plan
Your organic traffic lives on your URLs. When the addresses change with the switch, every old URL must point to the right new page with a 301 redirect — otherwise you lose rankings you have built up over years. Inventory all URLs, build a redirect map and test it before launch.
Treat the redirect work as its own workstream in the project, with an owner and a deadline. It is cheap to get right before launch and expensive to repair afterwards.
Step 7: Launch in a controlled way and measure from day one
Don’t launch on the Friday before the holidays. Pick a quiet period, freeze changes in the old store during the actual move, and set a clear point where you decide go or no go. After launch: monitor crawl errors, conversion and order volume daily for the first weeks, and keep the old platform readable until you have verified that all the data made it across.
Plan for life after the switch too. A modern platform is not a finished state but a way of working — the merchants who get the most out of a switch are the ones who keep improving the store every week instead of rebuilding everything every five years.
Next steps
A well-planned platform switch is nothing to fear — it is a project with a known methodology. HDL Commerce is a Swedish platform with B2B and B2C in one core, built-in PIM, 200+ ready-made integrations and hosting in Sweden, built for merchants who want to own their growth without owning the technology.
We always start with a free migration analysis: we go through your current solution, your data and your integrations and give you a concrete picture of what a switch would involve. Book the analysis here — reply within 4 hours (weekdays).
