Migrating your ecommerce to Vtex without losing sales: lessons from a real migration

Migrating a live store is open-heart surgery: the business can't stop selling while you replace the entire infrastructure underneath.

At Doto.com.mx we migrated over 10,000 products from Magento 2 to Vtex IO without a single minute of interruption. These are the lessons no agency tells you about.

Migration is not an event, it's a parallel process

The classic mistake: shut down the old store on Friday, launch the new one on Monday. When something fails — and something always fails — there's no way back.

The right approach is running both platforms in parallel: the new one gets built, tested with controlled real traffic, and the final switch is a DNS change reversible in minutes.

The catalog is 80% of the risk

Products, variants, prices, inventory, images, SEO for every URL. A 10,000-product catalog has hundreds of edge cases: special characters, orphan categories, redirects accumulated over years.

Demand a complete URL mapping with 301 redirects. Without it, years of accumulated SEO authority die on launch day.

Custom components make the difference

Vtex IO lets you build your own React components. It's the difference between a store that looks like every other and a brand experience: at Doto we built a custom component library the internal team could maintain afterwards.

The integration layer is invisible but critical

ERP, invoicing, shipping, local payment methods. The new store has to talk to every system already running the business. Designing that integration layer before migrating prevents the classic "the store works but doesn't invoice".

Minimum checklist for your migration

1. Parallel operation plan with reversible switch
2. Complete URL mapping and 301 redirects
3. Catalog audit before moving data
4. ERP and payment integration tests in staging
5. Pre/post launch conversion metrics

Evaluating a Vtex migration, or did your last one go wrong? Write to us: we'll give you an honest risk assessment before you sign with anyone.