What switching ecommerce platform actually costs

The question always comes, and it almost always comes in the wrong shape: what does it cost to switch ecommerce platform? The answer being asked for is a number. The answer that is useful is a list.

Because the cost of switching is not one line item. It is five, and three of them are usually missing from the calculation.

The two everybody counts

The platform. Licence or subscription, and hosting. Easy to compare, because it is written in a price list.

The build. Design, setup, configuration. You can get a fixed price for it, and most proposals are about precisely this line.

The three that are missing

The data migration. Products, customers, orders, price lists, customer agreements. This is the line that blows up timelines, because its full extent is rarely discovered until somebody starts looking inside the old system. A catalogue of 12,000 articles with variants is not 12,000 rows — it is 12,000 articles with attributes that mean different things in different places, because fourteen people have filled them in over nine years.

The integrations. The ERP, the warehouse, shipping bookings, payments, accounting. Every connection that existed has to exist again, and the old code rarely moves across as it is.

Your own time. The largest line, and the only one nobody invoices. Somebody internally has to decide, test, approve, proofread and answer questions for six months. Budget for a half-time role for the duration.

And the line nobody counts: not switching

That is usually the one that decides it. What does it cost to stay put for another three years?

• upgrade projects at regular intervals, costing more each time because more is custom-built
• licences for extensions that each do one thing
• agency hours for maintenance that adds nothing new
• sales time spent managing prices in a spreadsheet beside the shop
• the orders that were never placed because the customer could not get through checkout

That last line is impossible to calculate precisely and almost always the biggest.

What actually brings the price down

One thing, more than anything else: the migration being a run rather than a project.

If product data, customers, orders and price lists are moved by an engine you can run again, then you can test the migration ten times before doing it for real. Each re-run costs almost nothing. What is normally the project’s largest risk becomes a routine, and the part of the budget that normally overruns becomes predictable.

It is also why we do a dry run before handing over a timeline. We want to see what is actually in the catalogue, not what somebody believes is in there.

We have written a longer guide to switching ecommerce platform that walks through the whole order of operations — what to do when, and what breaks if it is done in reverse.