Replatforming to Centra is three migrations in one: data through the APIs, rankings through 301 redirects, and the integrations rebuilt around a new frontend. Brands budget for the first, worry about the second, and forget the third until it breaks.
This post is about the how: what a move from Shopify, or a custom stack, to Centra involves. The whether is a different question with its own post, and from here on we assume the decision is made or close to it. What follows is the whole job, the part a proposal shows you and the part it does not.
What moves, and through which door
Four things carry over: the product catalogue, customer accounts, order history and gift card details. That's the scope Centra itself documents, and it matches what we see in practice. Everything else is a rebuild, not a transfer.
Catalogue and customers come across through Centra's GraphQL Integration API. It's the same surface ERP integrations use to manage products, inventory, orders and customers. There is no one-click migrator. Beyond Centra's flat-file product imports, someone writes scripts that read from Shopify's API or your database, reshape the data into Centra's model, and write it in. The reshaping is where migration projects earn their keep. Shopify variants don't map one-to-one onto Centra's model, and market pricing that lived in apps or duplicate stores has to be designed into pricelists rather than copied.
Order history has its own door. Orders created outside Centra can be imported through the Order API, order by order, behind a plugin setting called "Allow Order Create". The caveat that matters: Centra will not handle payments for imported orders. History imports as record, not as live transactions. Refunds on pre-migration orders still run through the old payment provider, so keep that account open and decide who owns those refunds before cutover, not after.
Content does not migrate. There is no theme to port and no page importer on the other side. Editorial pages, lookbooks and campaign content get rebuilt in whatever CMS the new storefront uses. If your content lives in a structured CMS, that's an export-and-reshape job. If it lives in a theme customizer, it's re-entry.
One more thing worth knowing early: the division of labour. Centra handles platform setup and trains your team. Your frontend partner plans the migration and builds the storefront. The data scripts, the redirects and everything the customer sees are agency work, and choosing that partner is a decision of its own.
The redirect work is the rankings work
Most replatforming SEO advice is folklore. The primary source is Google's own site-move documentation, and it says four useful things. 301 redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank. Rankings fluctuate temporarily while Google recrawls, and on a medium-sized site most pages move in the index within a few weeks. Redirects should stay in place for at least a year. And it recommends permanent server-side redirects, 301 or 308, over temporary ones for a permanent move.
The failure mode worth naming is the migration hangover: traffic that dips at launch and never recovers, because redirects were incomplete, wrong or removed too soon. It's avoidable with unglamorous work. Pull every URL that earns traffic from your sitemaps, server logs and analytics. Map the important ones first, page by page, to their new equivalents. Ship the 301 table the moment the new site goes live, submit the new sitemap, then watch Search Console for weeks rather than days.
Headless changes the math in your favour here. On a theme platform the URL structure is largely dictated to you. A Centra storefront has no theme, so the routing is yours to design. It can reproduce your existing URL structure exactly. Many migrations need far fewer redirects than brands fear, because /products/linen-shirt can stay /products/linen-shirt. Where you do change structure, change it deliberately and once.
Done properly, a migration can grow search traffic rather than survive it. Centra's case study on Ellis Brigham, who moved from Magento after deciding Shopify Plus wasn't flexible enough, claims organic traffic up 30% after the move. Treat the number as marketing, but the direction is credible: replatforming is a chance to fix years of accumulated URL and content debt.
The no-theme reality
Every Centra storefront is a custom frontend, typically Next.js against the Storefront API, which handles customer-facing sessions, carts and checkout. The frontend build is part of the migration's price. It is also part of the payoff: the frontend is the one system you fully own at the end of this, and because it is custom, the migration and the redesign can be one project instead of two. Just be careful about changing platform, design and URL structure in a single leap unless the redirect work is under control.
Re-wiring the stack
Integrations don't migrate. They reconnect, one by one, and each reconnection is a small project with its own edge cases.
Email and CRM hurt the most when forgotten. Klaviyo or Voyado flows are wired to platform events: abandoned carts, order confirmations, back-in-stock triggers. On the new stack those events come from Centra and your frontend, so every flow gets rebuilt and re-tested. A brand that discovers its abandoned-cart flow has been silent for three weeks has lost real money quietly.
The same logic runs down the list. Checkout moves to Centra's model with your payment service provider. Delivery checkout re-integrates against the new checkout. Search and discovery re-index from the new catalogue. The ERP connection, often part of why you're moving at all, gets built properly against the Integration API instead of the sync jobs someone has been babysitting.
What your team can prepare before an agency is in the room
The best migrations we've seen were half-done before we arrived. Not the technical half. The knowing half.
- A URL inventory. Export your sitemap, your top pages from analytics, your top landing pages from Search Console. This becomes the redirect map, and nobody knows which URLs matter better than you do.
- A cleaned catalogue. Migration copies whatever exists. Discontinued products, duplicate variants and inconsistent size naming cost the same to move as good data. Clean first.
- An integration census. Every tool that touches the store, what data it reads, what events it listens to, who owns the account. Include the ones marketing signed up for that IT has never heard of.
- A decision on order history. How many years do customer service and accounting need in the new system? Importing everything since the beginning is possible. It's rarely worth it.
- Wholesale requirements on paper. If wholesale is part of why you're moving, write down the order windows, price lists and stockist terms as they exist today. Including the parts that live in one person's head.
How long it takes: the shape of the cutover
Centra's own replatforming guidance says three to six months is typical, and its public case studies land around that range, some beyond it. Stronger went live about four months after signing, one week before Black Friday. Active Brands consolidated four brands from Salesforce Commerce Cloud onto Centra in seven months. Craft Sportswear folded a fragmented estate of EpiServer, Shopify Plus and Magento into one instance across 30-plus markets. The variable is mostly your data and your integrations, not the platform.
The cutover itself is a sequence, not a moment. The new storefront gets built and tested against a full catalogue sync while the old store keeps trading. Near the end comes a content and catalogue freeze. Then the DNS switch, with the redirect table live from the first minute. Then the order-history import into the now-live system. The weeks after go-live are part of the project: someone watching redirects, crawl errors, checkout conversion and every rebuilt email flow. Launch testing before the switch and a named owner after it are the difference between a dip and a hangover.
Wholesale changes what "migration" means
For DTC, replatforming is a transfer. The store exists and moves. For wholesale it's usually a consolidation, because the thing being replaced isn't a platform. It's a spreadsheet, a separate ordering portal and an inbox.
Centra runs DTC and wholesale from one catalogue and one pool of inventory, which is often the reason for the move in the first place. But it means the scope grows in a specific way. Stockist accounts get created rather than imported. Price lists and terms get designed into the platform, not copied from one. Seasonal order windows become configuration instead of email threads. Plan wholesale as a build phase with its own timeline and its own internal owner, not as a data-transfer line item. It's frequently the half of the project with the biggest operational payoff, and the half with no export button to start from.
What it costs
The cost has two parts and both are real: the migration work itself and the custom frontend that comes with the no-theme model. Nobody serious will quote either from a blog post, ours included. The real number depends on your catalogue, your integrations and your wholesale ambitions.
Who should not do this
Migrations run in both directions. Our comparison of Centra and Shopify covers the profile that should stay put, including one brand that went the other way. If that profile sounded like you, a migration buys depth you won't use at a price you'll keep paying. Decide slowly.
Start with the URL inventory. It's free, it's yours, and it's the one part of the migration nobody can do better than you.