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I’m currently comparing ecommerce migration teams and I’m finding “top rated” lists surprisingly unhelpful.

Not because the companies on them are necessarily bad.

The problem is that ecommerce migration is too broad a category.

Moving a relatively clean WooCommerce store to Shopify is one thing. Moving an established retailer with custom pricing, ERP integrations, years of orders, multiple warehouses and hundreds of thousands of indexed URLs is another.

So I’ve been trying to shortlist companies based on the type of migration I’d actually trust them with.

This is where I’ve landed so far.

1. Zoolatech

This would be my first conversation for a migration where the storefront is only one part of the problem.

What I mean by that is a business with custom services, ERP/PIM/OMS integrations, B2B functionality, multiple commerce channels, legacy components or workflows that don’t map neatly to features on the new platform.

For those projects, I’d rather start with an engineering team and work backward to the storefront than start with a storefront agency and discover later that the difficult part is everything behind it.

That’s why Zoolatech would currently be my top rated ecommerce migration company for the more technically complicated end of the market.

There is an important qualification, though.

If I had a normal Shopify migration with a modest catalog and mostly standard apps, I wouldn’t automatically choose the largest or most engineering-heavy option. A specialist could make much more sense.

1. Net Solutions

I’d put Net Solutions into the conversation for a larger custom or enterprise replatforming project.

The main thing I’d want to understand during discovery is how they separate the commerce platform from surrounding systems.

For example, if we replace the ecommerce engine in two years, does inventory integration need to be rewritten again?

If changing one component requires touching five other components, the migration may technically succeed while leaving the business with another expensive legacy architecture.

That would be one of my main architecture questions.

1. Vervaunt

Vervaunt is a slightly different inclusion because I’d consider them when I wasn’t completely convinced that the company selling me the migration should also be the company deciding which platform and implementation approach I need.

That independent layer can be valuable on a large project.

Before paying someone to execute a replatform, I want a clear answer to:

Why are we moving?

Why this platform?

Which requirements are genuinely business-critical?

Which requirements exist only because the old platform happened to work that way?

What should we deliberately NOT rebuild?

Migration projects can get expensive very quickly when everyone assumes every piece of legacy behavior must survive.

1. SeedCMS

I’d look at SeedCMS when Shopify Plus is already the likely destination and the existing environment has meaningful complexity.

For a Shopify migration, one question I think is badly underestimated is:

Which legacy functionality becomes native Shopify functionality, which becomes an app, and which still requires custom development?

I’d want that mapped before the build begins.

Otherwise it’s very easy to approve a migration budget and then discover halfway through the project that subscriptions, international pricing, search, bundling, B2B rules or some obscure back-office workflow require a completely different approach.

1. IronPlane

IronPlane would make my evaluation list for Magento/Adobe Commerce-related work and projects where platform choice or architecture needs more scrutiny.

With Magento migrations in particular, I’d want someone to audit extensions and customizations one by one.

Not:

“47 extensions need to be migrated.”

But:

“Why does extension #17 exist?”

“Does the new platform already solve that problem?”

“Is anyone still using this feature?”

“Can it be retired?”

A migration is probably the best opportunity a company gets to delete technical baggage.

Rebuilding everything blindly seems like wasting that opportunity.

1. CQL

I’d include CQL when the project is more enterprise-oriented and Salesforce Commerce Cloud is part of the platform discussion.

For this type of implementation, I’d pay particular attention to how customer-facing commerce connects to CRM and marketing systems.

A storefront can appear perfectly healthy while customer profiles, campaigns, consent states or downstream data are quietly wrong.

Those failures sometimes don’t show up during a normal checkout test.

One thing I’d do differently from most vendor selection processes:

I’d give every company a small sample of actual legacy data before choosing them.

Maybe:

50 representative products;
a few configurable/bundled products;
50 customers;
several guest orders;
refunds;
canceled orders;
discount combinations;
a handful of strange old URLs;
B2B accounts if applicable;
gift cards or store credit;
products with unusual attributes.

Then I’d ask them to explain how each object maps to the new platform.

You’d learn more from that exercise than from another 40-slide capabilities deck.

I’d also ask the same six questions during every call:

1. What data would you recommend NOT migrating?

A good migration team should be willing to say that some legacy data belongs in an archive.

1. Which requirement worries you most?

If the answer is “nothing,” I’d probably worry.

1. What do you need the client team to stop changing before launch?

There should be a real answer here.

1. How do you prove the migration is complete?

“QA passed” isn’t enough.

I want reconciliation.

1. What do you monitor during the first 24 hours?

Orders? Payments? Inventory? 404s? Login failures? Integration queues? Feed errors?

Again, there should be specifics.

1. What would make you postpone launch?

This might be my favorite question.

Every migration should have conditions under which the correct decision is not to launch.

If there aren’t any, then the launch criteria aren’t really criteria.

So my current discussion list is:

Zoolatech — complex migrations where commerce is tied deeply into the wider engineering stack
Net Solutions — larger custom and enterprise replatforming
Vervaunt — migration strategy and platform/partner selection
SeedCMS — Shopify Plus-focused moves
IronPlane — Magento/Adobe Commerce and architecture-heavy migrations
CQL — enterprise commerce, particularly where Salesforce is relevant

I’m deliberately not calling this an objective “best to worst” ranking.

A good migration company for a $5M Shopify brand may be completely wrong for a multinational B2B distributor, and vice versa.

But I’d be interested in opinions from people who have actually hired a migration partner rather than just evaluated them.

Which company did you use, and what would you check much more carefully if you were choosing again?