It’s pretty wild when you think about it. In ecommerce we’re often asked to build a whole new house while making the existing house bigger and better at the same time. That’s what a replatform really is. You’re not pausing trade while you move across, you’re still trying to grow the business, hit the numbers and run the sales, all while shifting the entire thing onto a brand new site. It’s a delicate balance, and it’s a lot harder than the project plan ever makes it look.
The trap is almost never the technology. It’s trying to squeeze a build this big in around the day job, with the same people who are also holding up the numbers.
Four Months, Off Magento, Live in a Flash Sale
The anchor for this one is a conversation with Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital at Kathmandu. A year ago his team moved the whole business off Magento onto Shopify Plus in four months, including a full front-end redesign, then went live right in the middle of a flash sale, which their agency reckoned they’d never seen done before.
How they held that timeline is the lesson. Craig split the team in two.
We had our Shopify crew that were purely focused on the rebuild, and our trade crew, which made sure the business kept running, because we were still running a business at the same time. That gave a real clear direction for each team.
- Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital, Kathmandu
They were also ruthless about scope, holding tight to the MVP and pushing everything non-essential to a “later” list, and they brought their dev agency into the office to work as part of the team. Sales kept tracking through the cutover, and the SEO dip that always comes with a migration recovered quickly. Everything below is how other operators have pulled off the same thing.
Lesson One: Resource the Project, Don’t Squeeze It In Around Trade
The honest truth is it’s really hard to have the head space to do both, let alone the time. Building the shiny new tech and running the current business pull in completely different directions. So before you kick off, split the team into two crews, or at the very least carve out dedicated time and space where people own one or the other. The boundaries blur fast when it’s the same people trying to do both.
Lou Kendall‘s approach at Louenhide was a nice version of this. Rather than splitting the team, she resourced it up and brought in dedicated people just for the project.
We actually hired an external person, a third party we’d worked with before who was now independent. That was the game changer. She was our project manager, and we had two people in house who knew exactly how and why this was built.
- Lou Kendall, Co-founder, Louenhide
There’s a lesson we sometimes miss in retail. We can be hesitant to bring in outside people, especially to run a project like this. But when you look at the money already sunk into the build and the benefit you’re expecting on the other side, that window of getting it live is so critical that the extra investment in resourcing it properly is almost always worth it. Don’t be shy about bringing in the help.
Lesson Two: Go Live With Better, Not Perfect
The next one is worth repeating to yourself every single time. What you go live with does not have to be perfect. It just has to be better than what’s there today. Your website is the baby you never stop feeding, so what you launch with is not what you’ll have in six months. Don’t get too attached to how it looks on day one. Craig’s team were ruthless here, nailing the core the customer actually needs, the category pages, the product pages, the checkout, and everything else went on the later list.
Kira Macleod-Finke put this really well. She replatformed the whole Body Shop business in Australia onto Shopify in about ninety days, so she had to be brutal about what to hold and what to let go.
What are my priorities, what have I got to get done, and what am I willing to let go of in order to achieve what we need to achieve? It’s bumpy, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
- Kira Macleod-Finke, The Body Shop
Her actual cutover took thirteen minutes, because the whole thing was planned to within an inch of its life. That’s the mindset. Pick the pain you’re willing to accept, hold your date, and let the rest be a little bit bumpy. It doesn’t have to be perfect to go live. It has to be better than today, and it has to work.
Lesson Three: Keep Partners in the Room, Not the Ticket Queue
The last one gets a bit ranty. A ticket is often not the way a project should run day to day. It gets in the way of fast movement. The best collaboration nearly always happens in person, and on a good project the ticket becomes the record of the outcome, not the way you communicate to get there. Craig sat his agency, Dot Collective, in the Kathmandu office for weeks so the team could just turn to each other and solve things on the spot.
Silvan Baard, who leads ecommerce and tech at the clothing brand Ghanda, described what that kind of partnership actually gives you. A good partner isn’t just building what you ask for, they’re telling you the things you didn’t know to ask, because they do websites every day and you don’t.
They can say, this is what your design team wants, but here’s the piece of technology that’s going to make that happen. We do fashion on a daily basis, we don’t do websites on a daily basis, so we’re dependent on them to say, have you thought about this.
- Silvan Baard, Ghanda Clothing
That’s the difference between a partner who raises a ticket and one who says “have you thought about this.” One of them costs you weeks. So get them close, get them in the room, and let the tickets be the paper trail, not the conversation.
The Takeaway
A replatform is a people problem as much as a technology one. The platform is the easy bit. Keeping the business trading and growing while you build the new site is the real job, and you can’t wish it into happening. Don’t expect a magical miracle where the same people hold the numbers up and squeeze a build this big in around the edges. Be deliberate, resource it properly, protect the trade, and give the project the room it needs to breathe.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do ecommerce replatforming projects fail? Rarely because of the technology. They blow out when a team tries to build the new site while still running and growing the existing business with the same people. The projects that succeed resource the build separately, hold a tight scope and a firm date, and keep their delivery partners close rather than communicating only through tickets.
Should you split your team during a replatform? It’s one of the most effective approaches. Kathmandu split into a Shopify crew focused purely on the rebuild and a trade crew keeping the business running, giving each a clear mandate. If you can’t split people, carve out dedicated time and space so individuals own either the build or trade, because the priorities blur quickly when the same people try to do both.
How perfect does a new site need to be at launch? It needs to be better than what you have today, not perfect. Focus on the core the customer needs, category pages, product pages and checkout, and push everything else to a post-launch list. A tightly planned cutover can take minutes, and a slightly bumpy launch that works beats delaying indefinitely to chase perfection.
How should you work with a development agency on a migration? Get them in the room. The fastest projects treat in-person collaboration as the default and use tickets as the record of what was decided, not the primary way to communicate. A strong partner also acts as an advisor, flagging the things you didn’t know to ask because they build websites every day and you don’t.
This episode is brought to you by StudioHawk. Grab the Chosen, Not Clicked white paper, StudioHawk’s free eCommerce AI Visibility Toolkit and a personalised SEO & AI Search Masterplan for your brand at http://studiohawk.com.au/add-to-cart
Based on episode #651 of the Add To Cart podcast with Craig Mildenhall, GM of Digital at Kathmandu Join the Add To Cart community for free.
In this Playbook we cover three things ecommerce operators can take into their business:
- Resource the project properly, don’t squeeze it in around trade
- Go live with better, not perfect, and hold your date
- Keep your partners in the room, not stuck in the ticket queue
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