Platform migrations get pitched as a data-export/data-import job. They aren't. The data transfer is the easy 20% — the other 80% is everything that breaks silently if you're not watching for it: URL structure, review verification status, and years of accumulated SEO equity.
The scope
This project moved 140+ products, 6,300+ customer accounts, and 17,500+ historical orders from BigCommerce to Shopify, with a hard requirement of zero data loss. Order history matters for lifetime-value reporting, tax records, and customer trust — customers expect to log in and still see their past orders.
Where the real risk was
BigCommerce and Shopify structure product and category URLs differently by default. Migrate naively and every indexed page 404s the day you cut over, taking years of accumulated rankings with it. We built a full redirect map — old URL to new URL, for every single product, collection, and blog page — before touching DNS.
The second risk was reviews. The store had 800+ reviews, many marked as "verified purchase." That verification is tied to an order record in the original platform. Migrate the review text without preserving the link to a real order, and you either lose the badge (hurting conversion) or fake it (a trust and platform-policy problem). We mapped each review back to its original order before import so verification status carried over intact.
What we would tell anyone planning one
Treat the redirect map as the deliverable, not the data export. Test the migration on a staging domain with real crawler tools before cutover, and keep the old platform read-only (not deleted) for at least 30 days after launch as a rollback safety net.
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