Migrating to Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) is one of the highest-impact decisions an enterprise ecommerce team can make — and one of the riskiest if poorly planned. This guide walks through the phases we use with clients moving from Magento 1, Shopify Plus, custom platforms, or legacy monoliths.
Phase 1: Discovery & audit. Inventory your catalog structure, customer segments, promotions, integrations (ERP, PIM, OMS), and custom code. Document every third-party extension and whether an Adobe Commerce equivalent exists.
Phase 2: Architecture. Define store views, websites, B2B company structures, and headless vs traditional frontend. Plan URL structure early — every redirect must be mapped before launch.
Phase 3: Data migration. Products, categories, customers, orders (historical if needed), and media assets require staged imports with validation scripts. Never migrate directly to production without a full dry run.
Phase 4: Integrations. Rebuild ERP, payment, tax, and marketing connectors with idempotent APIs. Test failure scenarios — what happens when SAP is down during checkout?
Phase 5: QA & performance. Load test peak traffic, validate checkout edge cases, and run Lighthouse on category and PDP templates. Target LCP under 2.5s on mobile.
Phase 6: Go-live. Use a phased cutover with rollback plan, monitor error rates for 72 hours, and keep the old platform read-only for 30 days minimum.
Modern path — Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (ACCS): Enterprises on Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce on Cloud (PaaS), or on-premise should also evaluate ACCS — Adobe's fully managed, versionless SaaS with Commerce Storefront on Edge Delivery. See our ACCS migration and SaaS vs PaaS guides.
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