Agentic Checkout Security: Payment Tokens, Fraud and Chargebacks for Merchants
Agentic checkout security for merchants: how payment tokens, fraud screening and dispute handling work when an AI agent pays on a shopper’s behalf today.
Services
Page
eCommerce Data Migration: What Actually Gets Lost in a Platform Switch
Want to discuss
your project?
your project?
Five parts of your store that quietly break during a replatform, with a check, an owner and a test for each.
Key takeaways
- Why it matters: most migration damage is silent. Rankings, accounts and order history degrade after launch, when the team has already moved on.
- What to do first: build the redirect map before you build anything else, because search traffic is the first thing to go.
- Customer passwords generally cannot move between platforms, so plan a reset campaign.
- Order history, gift cards and discount codes need an explicit decision, because import tools skip them by default.
- Count records before and after, and test one real order through every integration.
Teams plan a migration around the catalog and the theme, since that is what they can see. The losses come from the parts nobody put in the plan: old URLs that stop resolving, customers who cannot sign in, balances that disappear, and tracking that stops reporting.
Why migrations lose data
Platform switches rarely fail loudly. Three habits explain most of the quiet losses:
- Import tools move what they know. A tool maps products, customers and orders because those are standard objects. Anything custom, such as metafields, loyalty points or B2B price lists, needs its own mapping or it stays behind.
- The plan covers what the team can see. Designers check the theme and merchandisers check the catalog. Nobody opens the redirect file or the email flows until something stops working.
- The edges have no owner. Redirects, consent records, tracking tags and gift card balances sit between teams, so each team assumes another one has them.
An example: what week one can look like
The numbers below are illustrative, built to show how small gaps add up.
A store with 4,000 products, 12,000 indexed URLs and 31,000 customer accounts moves to a new platform. The import runs cleanly and the team celebrates. By day seven:
- About 600 old URLs that used to earn traffic redirect to the home page, because the redirect file covered products but not collection pages. Search treats them as soft 404 errors.
- Returning customers cannot sign in. Support gets 140 tickets in two days, and the reset email lands in spam folders for one mailbox provider.
- Eleven customers present gift cards with balances that the new system does not know.
- The ad platform reports half the usual conversions, because the purchase event fires on the old confirmation page only.
None of these needed new technology to prevent. Each needed one check, one owner and one test before cutover.
Before you start: how to use this guide
Go through every check and mark it Moves cleanly, Needs a plan or Will be lost. Every Will be lost item becomes a decision with an owner: recreate it, replace it or accept the loss. Plan about two hours for a first pass with your developer, your SEO owner and whoever runs customer support in the room.
Platforms differ in what they import, and limits change. Confirm every detail in the current documentation of both platforms.
Part 1: URLs and search. What happens to the traffic you already earn?
Search traffic depends on addresses. A new platform often fixes its own URL structure, for example with set prefixes for products and collections, so old paths rarely survive and every old URL needs a destination.
- Redirect map. List every old URL that earns traffic or links, and map each to its new address one to one. Include collections, blog posts, filters that rank and image URLs that earn links.
- Permanent redirects. Use 301 redirects. A temporary 302 does not carry the same signals and can cost rankings.
- Duration. Google has advised keeping redirects in place for at least a year after a site move, as reported by Search Engine Journal. Do not schedule their removal.
- Titles and descriptions. Carry over page titles and meta descriptions for pages that rank, unless you are improving them on purpose.
- Sitemap and canonical tags. Submit the new sitemap and check that canonical tags point to the new addresses.
- Practice. Crawl the old site, take 20 high-traffic URLs and confirm that each lands on the right new page in one hop.
Part 2: Customers and accounts. Can people still sign in and buy?
Customer records move easily. Credentials and consent do not.
- Passwords. Password hashes generally cannot be moved between platforms, according to migration vendors, and Shopify Community replies say the same about imports into Shopify. Expect every returning customer to reset.
- Reset campaign. Plan the email, its timing and its wording before launch, and consider a small incentive.
- Saved payment methods. Stored card data typically does not transfer, so customers re-enter it at the first order.
- Consent. Marketing consent and unsubscribe status must travel with the email list, or you risk mailing people who opted out.
- B2B accounts. Company accounts, price lists and approval rules often need rebuilding by hand.
- Practice. Send a reset email to three real test accounts and complete a purchase with each.
Part 3: Orders and money. What happens to balances and history?
History supports service, returns and reporting. Balances are money your customers believe they have.
- Order history scope. Decide how far back to migrate. Recent orders support service, and older ones may live in an archive.
- Order numbers. Keep existing numbers, or add a visible link from old to new, so a customer can still find an order.
- Gift cards and store credit. Each balance is a liability. Shopify's default import tools do not appear to move gift card balances, and merchants in community threads point to third-party apps for the job. Check this for your own platform pair.
- Discount codes. Active codes and their rules, such as usage limits and expiry, need recreating.
- Tax and shipping rules. Rates, exemptions and shipping zones differ between platforms. Re-check them against a sample of past orders.
- Practice. Reconcile one month of orders by count and by total between the old and the new system.
Part 4: Catalog content. Is everything still attached to the product?
Products import well. The details around them are what get dropped.
- Variants and SKUs. Each variant keeps its identifier, price and stock level.
- Custom attributes. Metafields, specifications and filters often have no automatic mapping.
- Images and alt text. Check that every image arrives with its description and in the right order.
- Reviews and user content. Reviews often sit in a third-party app and need their own export.
- Collections and categories. Rules-based collections may need rebuilding, and category hierarchies may flatten.
- Practice. Count products, variants and images in both systems, then inspect a sample of 20 products field by field.
Part 5: Integrations and tracking. Does everything still talk to everything?
A store is a network of connections. Each one is a place where an order can stop.
- Analytics and tags. Move analytics, ad pixels and conversion events, and check they fire on the new checkout and the new confirmation page.
- Back-office connections. ERP, PIM, warehouse and accounting integrations need new connectors or new configuration.
- Payments and shipping. Providers, webhooks and carrier rates must all work before the first live order.
- Email flows. Abandoned cart, order confirmation and shipping notifications need rebuilding and testing.
- Subscriptions. Recurring billing rarely migrates on its own, so confirm with the provider how active subscribers are carried over.
- Practice. Place a test order and follow it through every system it should touch: payment, stock, warehouse, accounting, email and analytics.
Cutover day: a runbook
Cutover is the moment all five parts meet. A written runbook keeps the team calm and makes the day repeatable.
- One week before: freeze catalog structure, finish the redirect map and run a full rehearsal import.
- One day before: lower DNS time-to-live values, send the customer notice and confirm that everyone knows their role.
- Cutover: switch traffic, load redirects, run a final delta import of orders and customers, then place a test order.
- First hour: check the homepage, a product, a collection, search, cart, checkout and confirmation on desktop and mobile.
- First 24 hours: watch orders, errors and support tickets, and compare order counts with the same hours last week.
- First week: re-crawl the redirect map, review Search Console and fix whatever the crawl finds.
Behind the parts: the first 30 days after launch
Most damage shows up after cutover. Keep watching for a month:
- Search Console. Look for crawl errors, 404s and a drop in indexed pages.
- Order parity. Compare daily order counts against the same period before the move.
- Support tickets. Track sign-in problems, missing orders and gift card questions.
- Redirect health. Re-test the redirect map weekly and fix chains and loops.
- Tracking. Compare conversions in analytics with orders in the store.
At a glance: part, what breaks, owner
Seven mistakes we see most often
- Redirecting everything to the homepage. Search treats it as a soft 404, and the page loses its value.
- Migrating on the first day of a sale. Any slip costs real revenue, so choose a quiet window.
- Skipping the rehearsal import. Let the rehearsal absorb the surprises.
- Forgetting non-product pages. Blog posts, guides and landing pages often earn more links than products.
- Leaving the old site editable. Orders and edits that land on the old system during cutover vanish.
- Turning off redirects after a month. Search engines need far longer than that to settle.
- Measuring only revenue. Revenue can hold for a week while search traffic and sign-ins quietly slip.
Questions to ask your migration partner
- Which data objects does your import cover, and which does it skip?
- How do you build and test the redirect map?
- What is your plan for passwords, consent and saved payment methods?
- How do you reconcile counts and totals, and who signs it off?
- What happens to gift cards, store credit and discount codes?
- Do you run a rehearsal import, and how many?
- Who is on call during cutover and the first week?
Terms in plain words
- 301 redirect: a permanent forward from an old address to a new one that tells search engines the page has moved.
- Canonical tag: a hint that names the preferred address when several addresses show the same page.
- Password hash: a scrambled form of a password. It is one-way, so it cannot be turned back into the password.
- SKU: the code that identifies a product or variant in your stock system.
- Cutover: the moment traffic switches from the old platform to the new one.
- Parity: the new system showing the same counts and totals as the old one.
In Lazy Ants
We run migrations as a sequence of checks, in the order above:
- We build the redirect map from your analytics and Search Console data before development starts.
- We list every integration and test each one with a real order.
- We agree which data moves, which is rebuilt and which is retired.
- We reconcile counts and totals after every import run.
- We keep a 30-day watch plan after launch with named owners.
If you want an outside review before you commit, our eCommerce architecture review covers your platform, integrations and migration risk. For budget questions, see what replatforming costs and our Magento to Shopify Plus migration checklist.
Score yourself: what to fix first
- This week: build the redirect map and list every integration.
- Before cutover: write the reset campaign, decide what happens to gift cards and discount codes, and agree record counts to match.
- At launch: test one order through every system and watch search and orders daily.
- First 30 days: fix redirect chains, answer support patterns and retire anything you chose not to migrate.
FAQ
What is the most common thing lost in a platform switch?
Search traffic, usually because old URLs were never mapped to new ones. It is also the loss that takes longest to recover.
╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌
Can customer passwords be migrated?
Generally no. Migration vendors and Shopify Community replies say password hashes cannot be moved between platforms. Plan a reset campaign and tell customers in advance.
╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌
How long should redirects stay in place?
Google has advised at least a year, as reported by Search Engine Journal. Many teams keep them for much longer, because they cost almost nothing.
╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌
Do I need to migrate all order history?
Not always. Migrate enough to support returns, service and reporting, and keep the rest in an archive you can search.
╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌
How do I know the migration worked?
Compare counts and totals before and after, test one real order end to end, and watch search and order numbers daily for the first month.
╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌
How long does a migration take?
It depends on catalog size, integrations and custom features. Data preparation and testing usually take longer than the import itself, so plan the schedule around those.
╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌
Can we migrate in phases?
Yes. Some stores move the catalog first and customers later, or run both platforms for a short period. Phasing lowers risk and adds coordination work, so decide it early.
Sources: Google's guidance on keeping 301 redirects for a year, as reported by Search Engine Journal; Shopify Community replies on imports; agency analyses of migration traffic loss, treated as estimates. Platform limits and rules change, so check current documentation before you plan.
Conclusions
Replatform in one move or step by step?
Need expert advice on your project?
Schedule a call with our team to discuss your needs and get expert guidance.
Related articles
B2B eCommerce Platform Comparison: Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce vs Adobe Commerce
Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce for B2B? Compare cost, flexibility, and control to pick the platform that fits your growth stage.
Signs Your eCommerce Platform, Not Your Marketing, Is Capping Growth
Traffic is up but revenue is flat? See the signs your eCommerce platform, not your marketing, is capping growth, and how to fix the limits without breaking revenue.