Moving from WooCommerce, Wix, Magento, or SquareSpace to Shopify, BigCommerce, or a custom solution doesn't have to be a nightmare.

At some point, the platform you launched on stops being the right fit. Your WooCommerce store can't handle the volume of international orders coming in. Wix doesn't offer the multi-currency checkout your European customers expect. Your Magento instance costs more to maintain than it generates in value. The platform did its job getting you started, but your business has moved on.

Migration is the obvious next step. It's also the project that keeps getting pushed to next quarter.

Why Businesses Move On

Wix, SquareSpace, and WooCommerce are great for getting a store up and running quickly. But that simplicity comes with trade-offs that become harder to ignore as you grow.

International selling is the big one. Shopify and BigCommerce offer localized storefronts, regional payment gateways, and tax calculations across jurisdictions out of the box. Trying to bolt that onto a platform that wasn't built for it creates fragile workarounds that break at the worst possible moment.

Then there's the infrastructure question. Magento can handle serious volume, but the hosting, maintenance, and development costs scale aggressively. Managed platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce take that entire burden off your plate.

As your tech stack grows (fulfilment partners, accounting systems, ERP connections, marketing tools), you need a platform with a mature integration layer. Every custom integration you have to build and maintain is time and money that could go elsewhere.

And if you're selling across borders, compliance gets complicated fast. VAT, customs documentation, HS codes, regional tax models. Your platform either supports this natively or you're patching it together manually.

None of this means your current platform is bad. It means your business needs something different now.

Why Migrations Keep Getting Postponed

The honest reason is that migrations are painful. You export product catalogues, customer records, and order history from one system. You reformat everything to fit the new system's data model. You deal with field mapping issues, broken product variants, lost metadata, and hours of manual cleanup.

A business with a few thousand products and an active customer base is looking at weeks of focused work. Larger catalogues push that into months. And during the transition, there's always the risk of downtime, lost orders, or data inconsistencies that make your customers lose confidence.

Nobody wants to deal with that. So the migration gets delayed, and the cost of staying on the wrong platform keeps compounding.

Cargo Pilot exists to take the pain out of this process.

How Cargo Pilot Handles the Migration

Cargo Pilot sits between your old platform and your new one. It acts as an orchestration layer that manages the complexity of moving data between systems so you don't have to do it manually.

Connect to your current platform

Cargo Pilot integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, SquareSpace, and BigCommerce. Once connected to your existing store, it pulls your product catalogue, customer records, order history, and metadata into a normalized data layer. Your data gets cleaned up and structured consistently, regardless of how the source platform stores it internally.

Map and transform the data

Every eCommerce platform structures data differently. Product variants in WooCommerce don't translate directly to Shopify's variant model. Customer records in Wix carry different fields than what BigCommerce expects. Cargo Pilot handles these structural differences automatically, mapping fields between platforms and flagging anything that needs a human decision.

For straightforward migrations, the automated mapping does the heavy lifting. For more complex situations (custom fields, non-standard product setups, legacy Magento data structures), Cargo Pilot's consulting team works with you to build transformation rules that preserve your data integrity. Not every migration is the same, and the approach reflects that.

Run both platforms in parallel

This is the part that changes the risk profile entirely. Instead of a hard cutover where you hold your breath and hope nothing breaks, Cargo Pilot keeps both platforms synchronized during a transition period. New orders, customer updates, and inventory changes flow through to both your old and new platform at the same time.

Your customers notice nothing. Your operations keep running. You have time to validate the new platform, train your team, and get comfortable before making the switch permanent.

Validate before you commit

Before the final cutover, Cargo Pilot compares record counts between platforms, flags any data mismatches, and generates reconciliation reports. If something looks off, you can roll back. You're making a decision based on data, not guesswork.

Go live

By this point, your new platform is already populated, tested, and running. The cutover is just a matter of redirecting traffic and decommissioning the old system. Clean and controlled.

Cargo Pilot Stays Useful After the Migration

What separates Cargo Pilot from a one-time migration tool is that it keeps working for you once the migration is done.

Fulfilment orchestration. Once you're on your new platform, Cargo Pilot connects you to a network of logistics partners, from major carriers like DHL and FedEx to smaller regional couriers. Compare rates, automate carrier selection based on your own rules, and reduce fulfilment costs by up to 80%.

Workflow automation. With N8N, Power Automate, or Zapier, you can build automated workflows around your new setup. Stock drops below a threshold? Purchase order goes out automatically. Customer requests a return? Your team gets a Telegram notification instantly. Cargo Pilot's event-driven architecture means nearly any operational event can trigger an automated response.

Accounting integration. Cargo Pilot syncs products, customers, invoices, and ledger data with Xero, QuickBooks, SAGE, and Zoho Books. If you ever need to switch accounting software too, the same migration approach applies. Cargo Pilot has handled QuickBooks-to-Xero migrations that would normally take hundreds of hours of manual work.

Data ownership. Your products, customers, reports, and workflow data are accessible from one dashboard. You're not locked into any single platform. If you need to move again, or run multiple platforms at the same time, your data goes with you.

Common Migration Paths

WooCommerce to Shopify. This is the most frequent migration we see. Businesses that chose WooCommerce for its flexibility but now need Shopify's international infrastructure, hosted reliability, and native multi-currency support. Cargo Pilot handles variant mapping, customer data transfer, and order history migration, including preserving URL structures that matter for SEO.

Magento to BigCommerce. Usually driven by the desire to cut infrastructure and maintenance costs. Magento is powerful, but for many mid-market businesses, BigCommerce delivers similar functionality at a significantly lower total cost. Cargo Pilot's consulting team knows how to handle Magento's unique data structures, including custom attributes and complex category hierarchies.

Wix or SquareSpace to Shopify. Common for businesses that started on a website builder and have outgrown what it can do for eCommerce. These tend to be more straightforward migrations, but the parallel running approach still eliminates the risk of disruption.

Any platform to a custom solution. Some businesses have requirements that no off-the-shelf platform fully covers. Cargo Pilot can orchestrate data flow into custom-built systems through its API layer. This is particularly relevant for businesses with specialized fulfilment workflows, proprietary inventory systems, or industry-specific compliance needs.

Pricing

Cargo Pilot starts at $100/month globally for the Starter plan, which includes core integrations and workflow builder access. The Premium plan at $200/month adds API access and additional integrations. Enterprise pricing is custom and includes unlimited integrations, self-hosted deployment, and dedicated support.

Consulting services for complex migrations are scoped and quoted based on your specific situation. In most cases, a managed migration through Cargo Pilot costs a fraction of what businesses spend doing it manually, and it takes a fraction of the time.

Getting Started

If you've been putting off a platform migration because the process feels too risky, start with a discovery call. The Cargo Pilot team will walk through your current setup, understand what you need, and put together a migration plan that keeps disruption to a minimum.

Book a discovery call: cargopilot.net/contact

Cargo Pilot is a delivery orchestration and fulfilment management platform serving businesses in South Africa, the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Belgium, and the US. For more information, visit cargopilot.net.