Ecommerce Migration Testing: What Should You Test Before Launch?

Before launching a migrated store, test the flows that make money first: checkout with every payment method, market and shipping option, taxes, discounts and gift cards, then order flow into fulfilment, ERP and customer notifications. Validate migrated data with counts, totals and samples, test customer accounts, check every redirect automatically, verify SEO elements and analytics, and test performance, accessibility and mobile. Run several test cycles with the people who use the store daily, and fix and retest before go-live.

A new store isn't only new code; it's new data, new integrations, new URLs and new configuration, all switched on at once. Problems often appear at the boundaries: a tax setting that works for one market but not another, an integration that handles standard orders but not partial refunds, redirects that miss uppercase URLs. Testing must cover these edges.

This article is the test plan. For the checklist of preparation tasks, see migration checklist; for launch day, see launch plan.

Compare record counts and totals between the old and new systems, check random samples and edge cases (products with many variants, customers with many orders), and test relationships. See ecommerce data migration.

Test as migrated customers: activating accounts or signing in (passwords usually don't migrate), viewing order history, reordering, managing addresses, subscriptions and loyalty balances. Check activation emails render correctly and links work.

Run end-to-end scenarios through every integration: ERP, OMS, WMS or 3PL, payments, tax, email and SMS, CRM, reviews, search, loyalty and marketplaces. Include failure scenarios: what happens when an integration is down, and whether messages are retried without duplicates. See OMS integration.

Test the full redirect map automatically, then spot-check high-value URLs by hand. Crawl the new site to compare titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, headings, structured data and internal links with the old crawl. Check robots rules and sitemaps. See URL migration and SEO migration.

Check that analytics records page views and ecommerce events with the same names and parameters as before, that purchases match platform orders, that ad pixels fire with consent respected, and that consent banners work in each market. Changes to tracking during migration make performance comparisons unreliable. See event tracking.

Measure page speed for key templates on mobile and compare with baselines. For high-traffic stores, load test checkout and search. Test key journeys with keyboard and a screen reader, and run automated accessibility checks on templates. Check layouts on common phones and tablets. See accessibility checklist.

Before launch, review staff and app access, remove test accounts and staging credentials, check scripts on checkout-adjacent pages, confirm HTTPS on all domains and review integration credentials. Custom code and headless builds may warrant professional security testing. See security audit.

The people who run the store should test their own work: merchandisers updating products and collections, customer service finding orders and issuing refunds, operations processing fulfilment, finance checking reports. Give them scripted scenarios and a way to log issues with severity.

Log every issue with steps to reproduce, severity and owner. Agree go-live criteria in advance: no open critical issues in checkout, payments, order flow or redirects; known minor issues documented with fixes scheduled. Retest fixes before closing them.

An illustrative scenario, not a client case: during testing, standard orders flow correctly to the ERP, but partial refunds create mismatched totals because tax is recalculated differently. Because the test plan included partial refunds and ERP reconciliation, the issue is fixed before launch instead of appearing in the first month's accounts.

Migration testing protects revenue by prioritizing checkout and order flow, validating data and accounts, testing integrations with edge cases, checking every redirect and SEO element, and confirming analytics, performance and accessibility, with agreed go-live criteria. Related: parallel runs and migration strategy.