From Shopify to owned stack: when (and how) to migrate

Platform + transaction + app fees are now over 5% of revenue. Mobile checkout speed is killing conversion you can prove. You're paying for 8+ Shopify apps to do things a custom build does natively. Your dev team can't fix bugs because the source is closed.

Hit two of these and migration starts paying back. Hit all four and you're losing real money every month you wait.

Next.js + a headless commerce backend (Medusa, Saleor, or custom Postgres-backed). Razorpay + Easebuzz for payments. Your own CDN. Your own analytics warehouse. Your own customer data store.

Result: no per-transaction fee from the platform itself, infinite customisability of the cart, your data on your servers, mobile checkout times of 1.2s instead of 4s.

Catalogue first. Get all SKUs, variants, images, prices into the new system. Run side-by-side for two weeks to catch mismatches.

Checkout second. This is where customers feel the change. Build it as a drop-in replacement of Shopify's checkout, then improve it incrementally.

Back-office last. Order management, fulfilment, returns. This is where you have the most flexibility because it doesn't break the buyer experience.

Same URL structure on the new site as the old. /products/{slug} stays /products/{slug}. 301 redirects from any old paths that changed. Sitemap submitted to Search Console the day you flip. Meta tags, canonicals, structured data preserved from Shopify and enriched.

We've migrated brands through Diwali peak with zero ranking dip. The trick is the order: ship the new system to staging, mirror everything, then flip DNS at 2 AM on a Tuesday.

Migration cost: ₹6–15L depending on catalogue size + custom features. Annual platform savings on ₹40Cr revenue: ~₹35L. Payback: 4–6 months. After that, you're keeping money Shopify used to take.

Plus you own everything. That's the part that matters when you want to do something Shopify won't let you do — and you will.