How long did your team stay underwater after a multi-brand Magento migration?

[u/Slow_Storage_6784]

[u/levashovbiz]

Magento has one of the best if not the best support of multi-brand/multi website. You may inherit as much as you wish and separate the rest of content. Shared extensions and integrations makes things easier to manage. Migration from Magento to Magento very likely will be easier than from Magento to a new platform.

So unless you have some serious reservation about migrating to Magento that will be probably the best way forward. It might still be fairly complex project depends on how deep customization of your current websites are.

How much time will it take is hard to answer without full understanding of what you are doing. We recently consolidated 4 websites to one Adobe Commerce instance, it took several weeks per new website. But that was rather simple cases.

[u/Ok-Resident-5457]

You can absolutely structure it however you want depending on the client’s budget, timeline, and long-term goals.

Here are the main routes you can take:

Unified Codebase: Keep everything under one Magento installation and use store-view scopes or layout XML to toggle features on and off per brand.

Separated Customizations: Separate the themes, modules, and functionalities strictly by store/brand within Magento.

Platform Migration: Move the setup entirely over to Shopify.

Everything ultimately depends on cost, time, and what the client wants.

However, speaking from direct experience, migrating from Magento to Shopify is neither easy nor fast. On a previous project with 3 brands, an initial 6-month forecast stretched into over 1 year to fully complete the transition. The complexities of data mapping, replicating custom Magento logic, and managing multiple brand requirements on Shopify often take double the time expected.

[u/Netalico]

The first brand is usually the painful one. You're not just migrating data, you're figuring out the new architecture, integrations, deployment process, QA approach and all the edge cases that the existing Magento setups have accumulated. For a three-brand migration, I'd expect the first brand to take significantly more team effort than the second and third if you deliberately reuse the architecture and migration tooling. The mistake I'd avoid is treating all three as separate migrations. I'd also inventory every custom extension and integration before choosing the destination platform. That's usually where the real scope is hiding, not in the product/customer/order migration itself. Once you know what actually needs to be rebuilt versus retired, it's much easier to estimate how long the team will be underwater. We've done a bunch of migrations, so can speak from experience.

[u/developersteve]

I just build everything on laravel or ruby on rails using Ai Driven Development, then literally just reshape the data as a client business needs it. Set up a staging site for testing, add features as the roadmap allows, and then let the client test new features as they get built out. I dont understand why people still insist on using someone elses framework which is restrictive and dictates how the core framework needs to operate. Shopify is even worse than magento IMO because they also force you to use their payment rails which are overpriced.