What Does the Data Actually Say About Replatforming Success?
Replatforming has a marketing problem: the headline statistic makes it sound close to risk-free. The retailers actually living through one know it rarely feels that way in year one.
Commercetools' 2024 State of eCommerce report, which surveyed large retailers, B2B manufacturers and CPG brands, found 90% of recent platform migrations were a success, with 92% of migrators satisfied or very satisfied with the outcome [1]. The gains were concrete: 94% reported meaningfully better site performance, 86% said their new platform offered more customization, and three in ten reported sales increases of 30% or more [1].
The same survey found urgency building on the other side of that decision. 77% of respondents said they feel pressure to migrate to a new platform within the next year, mainly citing limited scalability and poor user experience on their current one [1].
| Reported outcome | Share of retailers |
|---|---|
| Called the migration a success | 90% |
| Satisfied or very satisfied | 92% |
| Reported meaningfully better performance | 94% |
| Reported sales growth of 30% or more | 30% |
| Feel urgency to migrate again within a year | 77% |
What Does a Migration Look Like When It Doesn't Go Smoothly?
Grove Collaborative's numbers are the other side of that survey. The consumer products company moved onto Shopify starting in March, as part of a broader cost-cutting effort.
“This move enabled more flexibility and efficiency going forward, but created some short-term operational friction that extended into the second quarter.”
The friction shows up directly in the numbers. Grove's Q2 revenue fell 15.5% year over year to $44 million, active customers dropped roughly 11% to 664,000, and DTC orders fell 12.6% to 640,000 [2].
There's a small counterpoint inside the same numbers: revenue was up 1.1% from the first quarter [4]. The migration hurt on a year-over-year basis even as the business edged up from the quarter before.
Why Do Some Migrations Lose a Year of Customer Data in the Process?
Part of what makes a migration risky isn't the new platform itself. It's what happens to the historical customer and order data sitting inside the old one. Rainbow Shops ran into exactly that problem switching from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus, and turned to a third-party data layer, SoundCommerce, specifically to keep eight years of order history, SKU-level sales, and customer records from becoming unreadable the moment the old system was switched off [3].
That's a narrower, more solvable problem than Grove's broader customer-attrition story, but it points at the same underlying lesson: the platform swap itself is rarely where a migration actually goes wrong.
What Should Commerce Leaders Take From This?
Ninety percent success and a quarter of real revenue friction are both honest outcomes of the same underlying decision, sometimes even inside the same company's own numbers. The gap between them isn't really about which platform gets chosen. It's about what happens to the data, the customer relationships, and the operational continuity during the switch itself, the part a headline statistic can't capture and a rushed migration timeline tends to sacrifice first.
Sources
- [1]Chain Store Age, Report: 90% of e-commerce platform changes lead to success — chainstoreage.com
- [2]Retail Dive, Grove Collaborative to review strategic options as Q2 revenue declines — retaildive.com
- [3]Chain Store Age, Rainbow Shops unifies e-commerce data to support growth — chainstoreage.com
- [4]U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Grove Collaborative Holdings, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1: second quarter 2025 results — sec.gov
