A replatform is the rarest project a brand runs, and most teams face it without anyone who has done one before. We have. Samsøe Samsøe, Eton and Envii all changed platforms with us, and our role is the steady hand through the transition: we plan the move, protect what the store has earned, and rebuild the e-commerce from the ground up on the other side. When Nudie Jeans switched to headless with us in 2016, they saw an immediate average yearly growth of 24%.
The decision rarely arrives as one loud signal. It builds quietly, in workarounds that become routine and a roadmap that keeps bending around the platform instead of the customer.
Every store outgrows something. New markets, wholesale alongside DTC, a checkout that cannot be shaped, ideas that keep waiting for a feature that never ships. When the plans are ready and the stack is not, the platform has quietly become the ceiling.
Aging platforms rarely fail loudly. Support windows close, Magento 1 in 2020 and SAP's on-premise commerce in 2026, patches stop, and the team spends its weeks maintaining instead of selling. At some point the price of staying passes the price of moving, and that is the moment to compare honestly.
Not every frustration is the platform's fault. Slow pages, a dated design or a tangled app setup can often be fixed in place, and a move costs focus even when it goes perfectly. When an audit shows the problems are solvable where you are, we say so.
However the store gets there, a replatform carries the same four things: the data, the rankings, the integrations and the storefront itself. Each has its own way of going wrong, and most migration stories that end badly are about one of them handled late. We hold all four in one plan, with a migration strategy fitted to the store rather than a standard checklist, so the brand arrives with its history and its traffic intact, on a storefront rebuilt from the ground up.
The redirect work gets particular care, because organic traffic is the asset a move most often damages. Every page that earns visits or links is matched to a new address before launch: when Envii moved with us, product URLs from the previous platform redirected to their new addresses, down to individual color variants, and the replatforming cost nothing in links or rankings. Google's guidance is to keep redirects for at least a year; we keep them longer, and we stay through validation until search traffic, conversion and every connected system have settled.
Moves start in different places. Some brands leave a legacy platform like Magento or a WordPress build extended past its comfort, others move between modern platforms as the business changes shape, and a few arrive from custom stacks nobody wants to touch anymore. The starting point shapes the export work; the destination shapes everything else.
We take brands to the platforms we build storefronts on: Centra, Shopify and Brink. We have been a Centra Pro Partner since 2015 and work as a Centra agency, and we build both custom storefronts and Liquid themes on Shopify. For brands still weighing the options, we wrote down the anatomy of a Centra migration and compared Centra and Shopify after years of building on both.
The budget has two halves, the migration work and the storefront being built on the other side, and which half weighs more depends on where you are coming from. A clean catalogue and a short integration list keep the migration lean, while years of accumulated quirks push cost into the data work. We put numbers on both halves after an audit.
A full move takes months, and part of the timeline is set before an agency is even chosen. Brands that arrive with a cleaned catalogue, a list of every system connected to the store and their undocumented rules finally written down tend to move noticeably faster.
Rankings survive a move when the redirect work is treated as a core deliverable. Permanent redirects carry ranking signals to the new URLs, and a brief fluctuation while search engines recrawl is normal and recovers. Migrations go wrong when pages are missing from the redirect table, when old URLs point at the homepage instead of their real successors, or when the table is taken down too early: Google's own guidance is to keep redirects for at least a year, and we keep them longer.
The tools stay; it is the connections between them and the store that get rebuilt. CRM, email, delivery, search and the ERP all continue on the new stack, wired to new events and APIs. We list every connection before the move, so none are discovered missing after it.
A brand should stay put when the platform is not the bottleneck. Slow pages, a dated design or a tangled app setup can often be fixed in place, and a migration costs focus even when it goes perfectly. If an audit shows your problems are solvable where you are, we recommend staying and fixing the store instead.
We take brands to Centra, Shopify and Brink, since those are the platforms we build storefronts on. The source side varies more: a legacy platform like Magento or WordPress, a custom stack, or one of the modern platforms as the business changes shape.
It can, and most of ours are. The work is planning, code and data, and none of the three needs a meeting room. We work from Gothenburg and Oslo with brands selling across Europe and beyond, and launch day runs over a shared channel wherever the team sits.
