Today, many CEOs and CTOs find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side, they are grappling with a legacy tech stack that hinders growth and drains resources; on the other, there is the palpable fear that a migration could disrupt operations, jeopardise sales, and turn a strategic project into a full-blown crisis.
The inevitable outcome is delayed action. The focus shifts instead to accumulating patches, integrations, and exceptions. Although minor friction is tolerated and the growth of technical debt is acknowledged, remaining stagnant is a dangerous strategy in today's retail landscape. In fact, it often poses the greatest risk.
At NRF 2026, while listening to speeches and conversations on enterprise migration (including a particularly compelling session by Eduardo Frias, Field CTO Lifestyle at Shopify), we encountered reflections that frequently surface in our daily work.
Many decisions are not blocked by "facts", but by myths. And when myths drive strategy, the real numbers always arrive later. Sometimes, too late.
3 Myths Paralysing Enterprise Decisions
Today’s business decisions are often based on outdated assumptions. Here are the three most common ones.
1) "A migration takes 18 to 24 months"
This estimate drives many brands to delay action and renew contracts with platforms they have already outgrown, fearing they lack a viable window for change. However, studies conducted by EY on hundreds of real-world cases show that modern platforms like Shopify have implementation times that are, on average, 20% faster than competitors, with a 66% higher probability of meeting scheduled deadlines.
Instead of simply asking ourselves "how long will the migration take in absolute terms?", the more useful question is: how long will our migration take if we stop increasing complexity in an attempt to 'buy time'?
2) "Going over budget is inevitable"
There is widespread trauma here: long projects, scope creep, consultancies multiplying billable days, and costs that become difficult to justify even internally. Yet, in the same data cited by Shopify, a different dynamic emerges: implementations result in being 3 times more predictable regarding budget and, on average, offer better economic controllability compared to migrations on rigid, custom stacks.
In practice: the problem is rarely the migration itself, but rather the type of project we build around it (processes, dependencies, late-stage decisions, ungoverned requirements). That is where inevitability stems from.
3) "Migration is only about technology"
This is the most dangerous myth, as it strips value from the entire investment. An enterprise migration is not merely a software swap; it is an opportunity to answer questions that are usually postponed:
- Which processes are genuinely slowing us down?
- Where are we spending time (and headcount) just to "keep the lights on"?
- What could we release if we didn't have to ask the stack for permission?
The migrations that work are those where the focus is not on "replicating everything" (the classic lift and shift trap), but on redesigning what is truly needed: objectives, flows, priorities, and responsibilities.
From Total Cost of Ownership to True Cost of Ownership
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is usually calculated by looking at licences, fees, transaction costs, and infrastructure. All of that is correct, but it’s incomplete.
In enterprise retail, there’s another cost that carries real weight yet rarely makes it onto a slide deck: the cost of friction. It’s what you pay every week in wasted time, drained energy, misused talent, and missed opportunities.
That’s why it’s more accurate to talk about True Cost of Ownership a measure that reflects not just what a platform costs on paper, but the impact it has on your business day in, day out.
This includes at least three elements that truly shift the conversation:
- Human costs (and operational load)
How many people does it take just to keep the platform running? How many are needed to actually get value from it? And how many end up stuck in maintenance mode?
According to Stripe’s Developer Coefficient report, developers estimate they “waste” an average of 17.3 hours every week on maintenance work debugging, refactoring, dealing with poor code quality, and fixing errors.
- Maintenance costs (time stolen from innovation)
Every hour spent managing complexity is an hour taken away from speed, conversion rate, experimentation, and optimisation.
- Stack simplification (dependencies and "forced" tools)
Many businesses end up buying third-party tools to fill the gaps in performance, security, resilience, catalogue management, integrations, only to find themselves managing a fragile ecosystem where everything depends on everything else.
When the tech stack is simplified, it’s not just the technology that improves, but the way teams actually work.
This is why Shopify often reports a lower average TCO compared to other enterprise platforms: its model is designed to reduce complexity and limit dependencies.
Did you know that?
Tangible Results: Speed and Revenue
When a migration is well-designed, the benefit is not just savings, but primarily the ability to accelerate. In retail, this means:
- Improving performance (which directly impacts conversion and customer experience)
- Releasing more often, with lower risk
- Reacting to the market without paying for every change with weeks of infrastructural work
A good example is UrbanStems, which moved from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify in just four months right ahead of a critical peak like Valentine’s Day. The result? Zero downtime and a 15% reduction in total cost of ownership.
And this is the point that really matters. Migration isn’t about change for the sake of it. It’s about protecting the moments when the business is truly on the line, peak trading periods, major campaigns, product drops, international expansion, new ranges.
You shouldn’t have to choose between control and efficiency.
At NRF 2026, that message came through loud and clear: this is a false trade-off, rooted in outdated architectures and operating models. The real decision today is a different one, whether to keep investing a large share of your best talent’s time in “keeping the lights on”, or to free those teams up to focus on growth.
Technology shouldn’t be the place where the business slows down or breaks. It should be where momentum is built.