There was a time when a migration felt like a well-paid indulgence — a big check to a development partner, six to nine months of JIRA tickets, and a board slide that read “future-proofed.” For most brands, that future turned out shorter than promised.
Today, re-platforming is no longer just about fresh code or a prettier checkout. It’s about the real calculus of gross margin, agility, and who owns your pace of change. For the first time in a decade, more brands are migrating with unit economics and agility at heart—from big, bespoke builds to leaner SaaS stacks with just enough firepower.
I’ve sat across dozens of negotiation tables and Slack threads about this, from São Paulo to Singapore. Here’s what I see in the data, the RFPs, and the bruised forecasts.
Why Brands Replatform (Again)
For brands north of $10 million, the original replatform often happens in the sophomore phase: they outgrow Shopify Basic, build out an ERP, maybe tack on a custom frontend for conversion lifts and marginal site speed gains. Three years later, that headless stack feels less like a Ferrari and more like a third car gathering dust — costly to maintain, awkward to tune, and a liability when marketing needs a landing page live by Friday.
The drivers are universal:
| Trigger | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) | Internal dev teams + external retainers + technical debt → draining gross margin. |
| Speed to Deploy | A good idea loses value if it takes two sprints to ship. |
| Multi-channel Reality | DTC-only dreams collide with B2B, pop-up retail, marketplace diversification. |
| M&A or PE Rollups | Consolidation favors fewer systems, not more. |
Where They’re Going: Patterns in the Data
Migrations are not evenly distributed. Some are gravity wells, pulling brands back to the center of mass. Some are exit ramps from legacy stacks to a place where marketing can breathe.
Here’s the snapshot:
| Migration | Observed Trend | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| BigCommerce → Shopify | Increasing, esp. enterprise mid-market | Developers tired of rigid templates, brands want plug-and-play apps, not custom modules. |
| Adobe Commerce (Magento) → Shopify | High-volume exodus | Cost, poor UX for non-dev teams, security overhead. |
| Shopify → BigCommerce | Rare but happens | B2B-heavy brands, unique catalog structures, multi-storefront nuance. |
| Headless → SaaS | Quiet boomerang | Marketing wants control. CFO wants predictability. |
These shifts don’t come from thin air. Shopify Plus reported its highest enterprise upgrade run rate in 2024, driven by the same brands that once posted “headless” in their LinkedIn job ads. BigCommerce, for its part, has quietly cornered mid-tier B2B plays and multi-currency regional clones — where Shopify’s edges are still getting sharper but not always mature.
The Common Feature Stack
If you read enough RFPs, the wish lists rhyme. Different logos, same needs. Below is the aggregated DNA of a 2025 replatform requirement list, from SMBs to multinational wholesalers:
| Feature | Why It’s Non-Negotiable |
|---|---|
| B2B Portal | Account-level pricing, net terms, bulk orders. |
| Multi-Storefront | Region-specific content and currencies. |
| Headless APIs (selective) | Keep the speed where it matters, default elsewhere. |
| Advanced Inventory & OMS | Real-time visibility, partial shipping, backordering. |
| Native POS | In-store and event selling — unified data. |
| Multi-Currency | Serve global carts, local taxes. |
| Custom Checkout | One-page flows, upsells, payment flexibility. |
| Subscriptions | Recurring revenue bolted onto consumables. |
| SEO Control | Clean URLs, dynamic landing pages, metadata without a dev. |
| Robust App Marketplace | Don’t reinvent loyalty, reviews, or SMS. |
| Performance Hosting & CDN | Fast pages, global reliability, no surprise downtimes. |
Behind the Numbers: A Global View
I keep notes from these conversations: what CTOs whisper when the CFO leaves, what eCom managers actually hate about their current build, what legal flags in the SOW but never says aloud. A few truths cut across borders:
- Brands are cost-sensitive but speed-desperate. No one wants a six-month replatform anymore. The sweet spot is 90–180 days: quick enough to swap out broken plumbing before Q4.
- Composable is getting practical. A good operator knows which slice to make composable — custom fit engines, dynamic pricing, or an affiliate program that can’t be boxed — but the rest? They want it default, tested, and maintained on someone else’s dime.
- No one wants to fund an R&D lab for checkout anymore. If Shopify, BigCommerce, or a specialist app has solved it, you’re wasting your margin building your own.
- The exit door is always open. Private equity loves brands that run on clean, single-vendor tech. M&A multiples are higher when there’s no skeleton crew of legacy devs hidden behind a seven-figure stack.
A Note on the Big Losers
Not everything is upside. Adobe Commerce (Magento) is hemorrhaging mid-market share for a reason: open-source is a great badge for a CTO, but a recurring headache for marketing and finance. Similarly, custom headless builds looked brilliant when money was free. When rates climbed, burn rates became board agenda items, and the recurring developer retainer moved from hidden line item to visible cash leak.
The Smart Replatform in 2025
The best teams now treat replatforming like financial restructuring: they weigh capital efficiency, future agility, and margin control — not just feature counts. They start with a short list:
- What’s the custom piece we can’t buy?
- What’s a solved problem we’ll rent instead?
- How do we make this stack portable if we need to pivot in 18 months?
Then they run hard at the migration, kill scope creep, and push live with 80% must-haves — not 100% nice-to-haves. The remaining 20%? Often irrelevant within two quarters, once the new conversion rate lands and the merchandising team can launch collections at will.
CTOs and Where We Go From Here
If you built your stack between 2018 and 2021, odds are your name was somewhere on the RFP that promised ‘true composable freedom.’ You architected it, staffed it, maintained it. And to your credit, the thing worked. It was fast, beautiful, and impressively unique when capital was patient and growth papered over burn.
A good CTO once bragged about how you built. A great CTO in 2025 brags about what you didn’t have to build — and how you reinvested that margin elsewhere.
But here’s what the past four quarters have told the market, quietly but decisively:
Marketing doesn’t want a trophy stack. They want speed. Finance doesn’t want infinite flexibility. They want predictable cash flow. The same brands that celebrated headless in 2019 are now rewriting specs for Shopify in 2025. Why? Because you can’t out-innovate an entire app marketplace with an eight-person dev squad. And you don’t want to pay the mid six-figure annual retainer for a custom build that stops A/B tests dead in procurement review.
This isn’t about abandoning architecture principles — it’s about aligning architecture with margin. Shopify didn’t ‘win’ by being the best backend. It won by lowering the cost of ‘good enough’ to near zero, and then layering an ecosystem on top that outpaces most in-house roadmaps quarter after quarter. The CFO sees that every time a dev request costs $10,000 and two sprints, while the competitor runs a plug-in on Tuesday and pivots again Friday. The marketing lead sees it every time she asks for a landing page variant and hears, “We’ll scope it next sprint.”
2025 won’t be the end of replatforms; we’ll see an acceleration of them. It’ll be the start of better ones — faster, leaner, more honest about what actually delivers ROI. As the paid social squeeze keeps tightening, a clean backend and an agile front end become margin insurance. For some, the smart play will be Shopify Plus with a composable wedge where differentiation counts. For others, BigCommerce will remain a reliable B2B tank.
And for the stubborn few, open-source will survive — but it will cost what it always did: a slice of profit to maintain what should have been standard.
By Web Smith