Migration from a custom-built B2B portal to Magento, how risky?
Common path. Risk is real but quantifiable.
The typical custom-portal stack: Laravel / Django / Rails app + MySQL/Postgres + manual ERP scripts. Built 5-10 years ago, hard to hire for, no upgrade path, every new feature is a custom build. Maintenance is a tax on the dev team.
Migration plan (12-20 weeks):
- Data audit (week 1-2): companies, buyers, customer-group pricing rules, requisition lists, open quotes, AR balances. Map to Magento entities, companies → B2B Companies module, buyers → customers, segment pricing → customer-group prices.
- Feature parity matrix (week 2): what does the custom portal do that Magento doesn’t out-of-box? Build the gap list. Usually 6-12 items, 3-5 of which need custom modules.
- Magento + extensions setup (week 3-5): base Magento, Hyvä theme, B2B extensions, ERP connector, payment gateways.
- Custom-portal data export (week 6): SQL dumps + CSV exports of all customer + order + pricing data. Validate counts.
- Magento data import (week 7-9): via dataflow / API / direct SQL. Spot-check 100 customers + 50 orders for accuracy.
- Parallel run (week 10-14): both portals live. New orders go to Magento; old portal is read-only for AR / reporting. Buyers get a "we’ve moved" email + reset-password link.
- Cutover (week 15): DNS flip. Old portal stays read-only for 90 days for any AR queries.
- Stabilisation (week 16-20): bug fixes, buyer training, ERP sync tuning.
Risk hotspots: (1) password migration, you can’t move hashes if the algos differ; force a reset email at first login. (2) saved-card tokens, need to re-tokenise at the new gateway via account-updater service. (3) custom-portal-only URLs, build a redirect map covering >95% of indexed traffic before DNS flip.