The 5 biggest pitfalls in a Magento migration
An e-commerce platform that has been running for years usually contains more than teams expect.
Features that were added quickly during a busy period. Small exceptions that were built for one single customer and never touched again. During a hectic quarter a price list gets copied for a large buyer.
A filter is still hanging on to code from an old build round. And somewhere there is a configurator running that fits that one key account exactly.
On its own it all looks manageable, until a migration comes up. That is when the voices of internal stakeholders suddenly get a lot louder
Sales shows how their biggest customers place orders. Customer service points at a field that was once added temporarily and is now a fixed part of their working day.
The scope of the project grows quickly.
Years of decisions do not fit into a project that has to be up and running within a few months. Certainly not when new requirements keep surfacing along the way and nobody knows exactly what is really needed for the first go-live.
So where do you start if you want to tackle a migration project effectively?
And which parts cause delays most often during a project like that?
In this blog we go through five pitfalls we regularly see in Magento migrations, whether you are moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2 or switching over from Shopify or Shopware. And how to keep them from delaying your migration.
The starting point differs per platform. If you are coming from Magento 1, end of life more or less forces your hand: no security updates have been released since June 2020. If you are coming from Shopify or Shopware, it is a deliberate choice. Whichever route you are on, the trade-off between rebuilding and keeping what works is covered in Magento migration: rebuild or retrofit.
Pitfall 1: A scope that grows too big before you start
In many migrations, tension builds up quickly on the triangle of scope, time and quality.
Companies that have spent 5 years building on a platform often want to take everything across to the new system. Solutions from peak weeks, custom work for large customers and logic that was temporary once but is now part of the daily routine.
It grows into a list that will never fit into a couple of months, while the request is usually to get a Magento migration in place in 6 months.
When the deadline is fixed and the scope keeps expanding, quality suffers. You see that in slow screens, errors during price updates, or integrations that were poorly tested and show incorrect information.
The only way to get a grip on this is to start with a feature audit.
Not building, but working out what is used every day. Which parts bring in revenue. Which order flows matter to key accounts. And which features were added as a quick fix once and are better picked up after go-live.
The must-haves stay in scope.
Everything that is not immediately needed you push out to after go-live. Once you are live, you prioritise again what should go into a V2. That keeps the first go-live light, and the platform processes whatever the ERP sends without delay.
Pitfall 2: An end goal that is not clearly defined
Migrations take significantly longer as soon as it is unclear where phase one ends.
Teams keep bringing in requirements, partners wait on decisions, and halfway through it turns out expectations were different than assumed. The planning slips as well, and nobody knows exactly what has to be delivered any more.
A migration only works effectively when it is clear where phase one ends.
Not in broad terms, but in parts you can actually check: uptime under pressure, integrations that respond correctly to the ERP, customer prices that match the source system, and accounts that can log in without any hassle.
Once that foundation is in place, you can safely keep building.
With a sharp end point, deadlines start to mean something.
Partners know what they are steering towards, internal teams can see which decisions are no longer up for discussion, and dependencies between systems stay manageable. After that you can expand, with things like configurator logic, AI features, extra release capacity or new B2B flows.
Clarity at the start prevents course corrections at the end.
Pitfall 3: Data migration that is only picked up at the end
Data migration looks straightforward as long as you only look at the front end.
That goes for a move from Magento 1 to Magento 2 just as much as for a switch from Shopify or Shopware: the source differs, the underestimation is the same.
You only see the real size of it once you line up the layers.
The first layer is about access.
Email addresses are easy to move, but passwords are encrypted and often cannot be transferred one to one. A buyer who places large order volumes every year does not want to see a message saying the account has been deleted on their very next visit. You need a plan for that up front.
Below that sits scale.
Many B2B shops work with hundreds of thousands of customer records and an assortment heading towards half a million products. Key accounts have their own price lists, which quickly adds up to millions of rows. Organisations often assume that data is up to date, but discover during the migration how limited the quality and the frequency sometimes are.
The third layer is product data.
Inside Magento, SKUs, attributes and relations end up in a different place. As soon as the mapping starts to chafe, stock levels come out differently, products drop out of categories or filter results change. URLs shift along with it, so pages get a different route or internal links end up in unexpected places.
You avoid this pitfall by starting the data migration early. Decide per customer group which data comes along, choose how existing customers log in on their first visit, and test that with real data well before the actual go-live.
That brings calm, continuity and far less customer contact in the first weeks after the switch.
Pitfall 4: Colleagues who join in too late
In almost every organisation there is a group that knows the current e-commerce platform inside out.
They know which fields to skip, which sequence pulls an order through the afternoon and which workaround prevents an error. To them, a new Magento environment feels like a disruption of something that has been working for years.
That group often joins in late.
They stick to their current way of working, keep their cards close to their chest and turn up just before delivery with requirements that could have been discussed months earlier. That puts the planning under pressure and creates extra work in a phase where you need pace.
The tension disappears when you involve these colleagues early.
Sit down with them in the first few weeks. Let them walk you through their daily routes across the screens and listen to the points where it pinches. Those are exactly the insights you need to set a realistic scope and prevent surprises at the end.
As soon as they see their input coming back in the project, the resistance drops.
The rest of the team then follows along by itself, and internal continuity stays intact.
Pitfall 5: Risks that come into view too late
A migration touches systems that all do something different.
The ERP sends prices and stock. The PIM delivers product data. Logistics software passes on statuses. As soon as one link in the chain is brought in late, problems show up that would have been simple to solve earlier.
Then it turns out an integration partner calculates with different values.
Or that an integration needs extra checks.
Or that an external system passes on information that Magento reads differently.
If the planning is already full, there is hardly any room left for that.
The solution mainly takes discipline: map the entire chain early.
Determine per partner what changes, which dependencies there are and what counts as an acceptable risk. You cannot rule out every risk, but you do need to know where your limit is.
Make sure you test the chain from start to finish on a regular basis.
Not just individual integrations, but complete routes from login to delivery.
That keeps you from discovering a week before go-live that everything works separately but not as a whole. This is exactly why elgentos works with periodic chain tests and short sessions with all parties involved as standard.
The sooner you have the chain mapped out, the smaller the risks at the end.
Working on a migration?
A migration stays manageable as soon as three things are clear early on: a scope compact enough to keep up the pace, data migration that is taken along right away, and colleagues who share their concerns and essential functionality in the very first weeks.
That way you avoid the delays and small mistakes that only become visible at the end in many projects.
Want to know how elgentos approaches this technically and organisationally in a migration to Magento 2, whether you are coming from Magento 1, Shopify or Shopware?
Feel free to send us a message.
