Overview

The biggest reason merchants stay on a platform they've outgrown isn't loyalty — it's fear of the switch. Lost orders, broken stock counts, downtime during a sale. Those risks are real, but they come from migrating in the wrong order, not from migrating itself.

Here's the seven-day plan we walk merchants through. It assumes you keep selling the whole time.

Day 1 — Inventory the truth

Before touching anything, write down what you actually have:

• Every product, variant, and SKU.
• Where each one is sold (website, social, marketplace, in person).
• Current stock counts, and who or what currently updates them.

You're not migrating yet. You're finding your single source of truth — and usually discovering you don't have one. That discovery is the real value of day one.

Day 2 — Export and clean

Pull your product, customer, and order data out of the old system. Then clean it before it moves, not after:

• Merge duplicate products.
• Fix inconsistent variant names ("M" vs "Medium" vs "med").
• Flag anything with missing prices or images.

Dirty data is the number one cause of "the migration broke." Clean data migrates boringly — which is exactly what you want.

Day 3 — Import into Stella (in parallel)

Load the cleaned catalogue, customers, and historical orders into Stella while your old store keeps running. Nothing is live yet. This is a dress rehearsal:

• Does every product map correctly?
• Do stock counts match your day-1 inventory?
• Do historical orders attach to the right customers?

Fix mismatches now, with zero pressure, because no customer is touching it.

Day 4 — Connect channels

Wire up where you actually sell — your website, WhatsApp, social, marketplaces — so they all read from Stella's single inventory. Test that a stock change in one place shows up everywhere. This is the moment "four possible answers to is-it-in-stock" collapses into one.

Day 5 — Set your rules

Before going live, define the guardrails you want automation to respect:

• Low-stock thresholds and reorder behaviour.
• Refund and discount limits.
• What needs your sign-off vs. what runs on its own.

Switching platforms is the rare clean moment to set these intentionally instead of inheriting whatever you had.

Day 6 — Soft launch

Flip a portion of traffic or one channel over to Stella. Watch real orders flow end to end: placed, paid, fulfilled. Keep the old system as a fallback for one more day. If something's off, you catch it at low volume.

Day 7 — Cut over and retire

Move the rest of your traffic. Confirm a full day of clean orders. Then — and only then — retire the old platform. Keep its data export archived for a few months, just in case.

The one rule that matters

Never migrate by turning the old thing off and hoping the new thing works. Run them side by side, move in stages, keep a fallback until you've seen real orders succeed. Do that, and a platform switch stops being a gamble and becomes a quiet week.

Want a hand scoping your own move? Book a demo and we'll map your catalogue and channels with you.