Why replatforming has become a strategic imperative for enterprise brands
Enterprise brands building on custom or legacy platforms eventually reach a point where their infrastructure slows innovation, limits experimentation and increases operational costs and complexity. As customer expectations rise, and global commerce accelerates (expected to reach $8 trillion by 2027), the platform that enabled early growth may not be able to keep pace. Replatforming to Shopify with Recharge gives brands a modern, unified architecture that protects retention, strengthens LTV, and lowers total cost of ownership. As Shopify’s Preferred Subscription Partner, Recharge provides the stability, performance, and scale required for high-volume brands to evolve from maintaining custom systems to driving continuous growth.
What scaling brands need when evaluating a new platform
As more brands outgrow the limits of their current ecommerce platform, migrations should focus on identifying and choosing the infrastructure that will power the next stages of growth. When operators evaluate a new platform, they’re looking for clear, measurable advantages that will strengthen performance, reduce complexity, and accelerate revenue. This decision comes down to four core priorities:
Improve pace of innovation:
Brands need to shorten development cycles and leverage easy-to-use tools to improve time to value, rather than waiting months for custom code.
Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO):
Moving to Shopify + Recharge allows brands to achieve cost savings through headcount re-allocation and technology consolidation, replacing expensive custom maintenance with out-of-the-box automation.
Drive incremental revenue growth:
Brands need turn-key toolsets to improve conversion and subscriber LTV, backed by deep data visibility to prove ROI.
Mitigate migration risk:
Partnering with Solutions teams that have deep expertise of Shopify is critical to map, validate, and import subscriber data without loss.
Why enterprise brands choose Shopify and Recharge
Choosing the infrastructure that powers the next stages of growth involves more than just choosing a subscription tool, it involves choosing an ecosystem. Shopify paired with Recharge has become the default path for both scaling and enterprise brands because it solves the core challenges that hold growing brands back: speed, performance, customer experience, global reach, and revenue expansion. Together, they offer a modern commerce foundation built for scale. Here’s why:
1. Speed to market
The legacy constraint: “It takes our development team months of custom coding just to launch a new subscription model, integration, or promotion.”
The Recharge advantage: Shopify x Recharge allows brands to launch faster. With Shopify’s intuitive platform and Recharge’s out-of-the-box functionality, you can deploy new subscription models without heavy development or lengthy timelines. Recharge’s product-led R&D approach, delivers shorter development cycles and faster access to new features than other platforms.
2. Enterprise-grade performance
The legacy constraint: “Our platform can’t keep up with our growth.”
The Recharge advantage: Recharge provides proven performance for high-volume models. Our scalable infrastructure prevents costly downtime and re-platforming cycles, powering everything from DTC startups to the world’s largest retailers.
3. Unified customer experience
The Recharge advantage: With Shopify x Recharge, brands manage one storefront for both one-time purchases and subscriptions. This creates a frictionless customer experience and eliminates the data silos caused by fragmented legacy systems.
4. Global expansion ready
The legacy constraint: “Expanding into new markets is complicated.”
The Recharge advantage: Recharge integrates seamlessly with Shopify Markets. This streamlines cross-border selling, multi-currency display, and international tax compliance, making global expansion truly out-of-the-box rather than a custom engineering project.
5. Maximized customer LTV
The legacy constraint: “Our current platform doesn’t provide the levers to improve our customer LTV.”
The Recharge advantage: Recharge provides a turn-key toolset to improve the highest leverage metrics in subscription commerce.
How Recharge de-risks your migration from legacy or custom platforms
What is the risk of losing my existing customer billing data (payment tokens)?
There is always some level of risk when transferring payment data, but Recharge is built to minimize it. With over 10 years of migration experience, dedicated tooling, strict automations, and a specialized Migration Engineering team, we handle the process end-to-end with precision.
Whether you’re moving from another subscription platform or replatforming your entire business to Shopify, Recharge ensures that your migration is simple, fast, and low-risk.
Recharge’s Migration Engineering team handles the full process end to end, including data import, payment token transfers, and subscription continuity, so merchants keep their subscribers and billing continuity without disruption.
Recharge has successfully completed thousands of migrations from Skio, Ordergroove, Stay, Loop, Bold, and other platforms, each backed by a dedicated migration success manager and automated QA tools to validate every data point before go-live.
Migration isn’t a rebuild, it’s an upgrade. Recharge gets you live quickly, improves retention immediately, and provides the foundation to scale faster within Shopify’s ecosystem.
Recharge handles migrations of all sizes: from a few hundred subscribers to millions of subscribers. It has successfully led some of the largest migrations in the Shopify ecosystem, including brands like quip and Harry’s, proving its ability to execute both fast-moving brand migrations and complex enterprise migrations seamlessly.
Do I receive dedicated project management and support?
Yes. To prevent scaling brands from having to manage the complexity alone, Recharge pairs the Migration Engineering team with a dedicated migration success manager. Leveraging enterprise-grade internal tools to map, validate, and import complex subscriber data, there is assurance of a hands-on partnership throughout the process.
How is data integrity ensured when moving from a legacy platform (e.g., Salesforce, Custom build)?
Recharge addresses the structural complexity of non-Shopify data by using precise data mapping and automated QA tools. Recharge has a history of migrating major brands from legacy platforms like Magento and Salesforce, ensuring that all subscription rules and historical data translate correctly to the new architecture.
Frequently asked questions about replatforming to Shopify and Recharge
Why does Recharge focus primarily on Shopify?
Recharge’s focus on Shopify is intentional and strategic. Commerce’s center of gravity has shifted to Shopify, and Recharge now powers the majority of Shopify’s enterprise subscription volume. By investing directly in Shopify-native performance, we ensure full integration with Shopify Checkout, Payments, and Markets. Recharge isn’t limited by Shopify, it’s leading the enterprise migration to it.
How does Recharge ensure we benefit from Shopify’s innovation roadmap?
Recharge is natively built on the latest Shopify architecture (Checkout Extensibility, Functions). This ensures your brand never outgrows the ecosystem, unlike multi-platform apps that require slower, external updates to keep up with Shopify’s pace of innovation.
Does Recharge require a duplicate product catalog or separate checkout?
No! Recharge changed its architecture in 2019 and now runs entirely on Shopify Checkout and the Shopify Product Catalog. There are no duplicate SKUs, workarounds, or separate checkout processes. Recharge’s platform is fully native to Shopify, ensuring a unified experience identical to any Shopify storefront.
How does choosing Recharge guarantee a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)?
Recharge reduces TCO by consolidating multiple point solutions into one unified subscription platform. By eliminating the need for custom development and maintenance overhead associated with legacy systems, you can reallocate headcount and budget toward growth rather than infrastructure maintenance.
Does Recharge support the flexibility and highly configurable API structure enterprise businesses need?
Yes. Recharge offers an API-first, highly configurable platform that adapts to Enterprise needs. This supports complex billing and custom product logic without the high technical debt of custom-built legacy systems, ensuring a perfect fit as your requirements evolve.
