KNOWLEDGE BASE · MIGRATION

What a migration from your current shop really costs

A migration is rarely a technical problem and nearly always a data question. The count determines the lead time, not the technology.

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THE NATURE OF THE WORK

Rarely technology, nearly always data

The question “what does a migration cost” is usually asked as if it were about technology, and it almost never is. The items come across, the customers come across, the files come across. Where it stalls is on the questions that follow: what about the variants that sat in the old system as separate products, and which price agreement actually applies to that one customer?

Questions like those cost no processing power but decisions, and decisions cost time. So we do not start with a quote but with a count. That count produces a plan with an order of work, and that order determines the lead time — not the technology. This piece describes what we count, which items get forgotten in practice, and in what order we do it afterwards.

THE COUNT

What we add up in advance

The count covers five things: how many items, how many variants, how many images, how many customers and how many open quotes. That looks like a simple inventory and it is the whole budget in miniature, because each of the five has its own cost per unit and its own kind of surprises.

We do that count on your own data and not on an assumption, and you get it even if you take nothing afterwards. The exploration also includes a design book and a technical analysis of your current environment: what the site runs on, how fast it is, how findable it is, how security stands and what the biggest weaknesses are. What is good is in there too, because you rarely hear that.

Items and variants

The two are often confused, and that is exactly where the work differs. An item with ten colours and five sizes is one item and fifty variants. If your old system holds that as fifty separate products, it has to be brought back to one base SKU with variants underneath — otherwise you inherit the mess and pay maintenance on it for years.

Images

Not how many files there are, but how many are attached to the right variant. A photo without a variant is not a photo but a work order. It also matters whether cut-out versions exist and whether each channel needs its own crop; that decides whether the images can come across or have to be prepared again.

Customers and price agreements

Migrating customers is easy, migrating their agreements is not. Discount groups, fixed prices per item, volume tiers that were once agreed verbally: that is rarely recorded in full in the old system. This item is nearly always why a migration takes longer than expected, and it is the one item you can do most about yourself.

Open quotes and orders

What is still running? A quote that went out last week has to be findable in the new system, with the same lines and the same number. The longer you put off that decision, the bigger the pile. Here too: count before you plan.

THE FORGOTTEN ITEMS

What is not in the first estimate

Besides the five above there are items missing from nearly every first estimate, because they are not visible in the old system. None of them is complicated; they simply are not counted, and so they come back later as extra work. We would rather name them up front, even when that makes the figure higher.

The print data

Which area, which technique, which maximum size, which position and which price — per item and per variant. Most old systems keep a free text field for this, and a free text field cannot calculate anything. It is exactly the part a logo configurator and a quoting module rely on, so it has to be there before you go live.

The addresses of your old pages

Every link that works today and not tomorrow is traffic you have lost. Product pages, category pages, last year's newsletter: they all have to point at the new address. It is little work and it is structurally forgotten.

The chain to the accounts

A sales environment is not finished at the order. Order, invoice, credit note and payment belong attached to one another, and your accounting package does not have to go for that: a connection is usually enough. But that connection is an item, and it belongs in the count and not in the surprises.

Who owns which field

If two systems claim the same data at the same time, the stock does not add up. So we record per field who owns it. That is half an hour of work at the start and it is the most common cause of the reports that never come afterwards.

WHAT WE CANNOT SAY

About the figure itself

What a migration costs at your place is not in this piece, and there is a reason for that. The one-off set-up — implementation, migration of your data and the connections — is given as a fixed amount in advance, and that amount follows from the count. Naming a figure without that count is a shot in the dark, and it would rightly be of no use to you.

What is fixed is what is always included and what never is. Included: the demo up front in your own branding with your own items, the design book, the technical analysis, and after that hosting, updates, monitoring and Dutch-language support. Not included: the set-up and the migration themselves, and bespoke work outside the modules. That boundary matters more than the figure, because it says where the bill can run up later.

THE ORDER OF WORK

See it first, then switch over

We never switch a whole company over in one weekend. With most customers the product data goes first, then the sales environment, then the price rules and then the chain to the accounts. That way you keep seeing what happens along the way, and a mistake stays limited to one step instead of everything at once.

And something comes before all that. Before there is an assignment we put up a working demo in your branding, with your items, at its own address: not a screenshot but an environment you click through and can forward to a colleague. That usually takes five working days. On 20 September 2026 there were 24 such demo environments on our servers, all built before there was an assignment. That is why we dare make the promise: it is routine, and so we know where those days go.

READ ON

What this is about

The four steps we work in are written out on the page about how we work. If your migration is about print data from supplier PDFs, the PDF Browser queue is where you watch the progress.

Shall we make the count for you?

We count your items, variants, images, customers and open quotes, and set out what each of them means for the order of work. You get that count even if you take nothing afterwards.

Rather see first what can be built from your own data? Book a demo.

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