What running a 12M€ e-commerce business taught me about Shopify migrations

Most people who migrate an e-commerce site have never had to deal with a stock-out on a Sunday night, or explain a shrinking margin to an investor. I spent six years in that seat, as CTO and co-founder of Limited Resell, a sneaker and streetwear resale platform that generated 12M€ in revenue (the full background is here). Here’s what that actually changes in how I approach a migration.

An ERP built because no SaaS tool fit the business

Sourcing, inventory, repricing, logistics, pre-accounting: rather than stacking market tools on top of each other, I built the ERP in-house. Not out of a taste for custom-building things for its own sake, but because no SaaS solution correctly modelled a business with this many overlapping constraints (multiple suppliers, real-time repricing, multi-channel sync). The concrete result: over 100K€ saved every year compared to equivalent SaaS subscriptions.

What this teaches me for a migration: the temptation to add an app for every need is rarely the right call long term. A natively coded feature costs more to build once, but it doesn’t accumulate a monthly bill or a compatibility debt over the years, unlike a pile of Shopify apps.

A repricing engine with a direct impact on margin

In 2025, this engine generated 800K€ in gross margin on 3M€ of revenue, up from 2.4M€ in revenue the year before. It wasn’t just an isolated technical tool, it’s what actually moved the needle on the company’s real profitability.

What this changes in my approach: when I audit a store before a migration, I don’t just look at Core Web Vitals or theme design. I also look at where the current architecture is quietly eating into margin, whether that’s through accumulating app fees, a checkout losing mobile conversions, or manual processes that should be automated.

A supplier portal at real scale

Limited Hub connects more than 6,000 verified suppliers, with multi-channel integrations into the Shopify Partner App and marketplaces like Decathlon, Spartoo, Sarenza and About You. Running this system day to day requires reliable sync across several platforms that share neither the same data format nor the same update frequency.

That’s directly transferable to a Shopify migration: a client with an existing ERP, marketplace integrations or a multi-channel sync system doesn’t just need a new storefront, they need someone who understands how all of it fits together before touching any code. That’s a skill you build by running these systems day to day, not just by developing them against a spec sheet. It matters most on a CMS to Shopify replatform, where supplier flows and business logic that used to live in PrestaShop or Magento modules have to find a new home outside the storefront.

What this actually changes about your migration

In practice, having run an e-commerce business from the inside, with margin pressure and operational emergencies included, translates into three things on a migration project:

Architecture decisions built around margin and operations, not just the technical performance score on display. A perfect PageSpeed score is worthless if the new system makes day-to-day inventory management harder.

The ability to talk directly about your business challenges, not only with your technical team. I can discuss margin, churn or acquisition cost with you, not just APIs and React components.

A focus on what actually matters rather than what’s easy to measure. An audit that stops at standard technical metrics misses the real operational friction points, the ones that never show up in a Lighthouse report.

The takeaway

A successful Shopify migration isn’t just about clean code and a good performance score. It’s also about understanding the business running behind the site: the margins, the suppliers, the day-to-day emergencies. That dual skill set, product and technical, is what I bring to every project.

To learn more about this background, check out my full experience. And if your project needs this kind of approach, the Shopify to Hydrogen migration path details how the initial audit accounts for these considerations from day one.