Switching integrators without stopping sales

What people fear about migrating

Most businesses considering a change of integrator worry about the same four things: sales stopping, stock going wrong, data being lost, and two systems writing to the same place at once.

These fears are reasonable. In a badly planned migration a channel connection closes for a day and listings drop; two systems push different stock figures, so the same unit sells twice or the channel shows zero while the goods are on the shelf; past orders and return records stay in the old panel, and reconciliation becomes impossible; worst of all, the two systems overwrite each other and nobody knows which price is correct.

We design the migration by closing those four items one by one. Each section below answers one of them.

So sales do not stop: parallel running

A migration is not a button pressed at midnight. The system you use today keeps running while Bulutegra is installed beside it and starts in shadow mode: it reads channels, orders and stock, and writes nowhere.

This period typically lasts one to two weeks. Throughout it the two sets of numbers are compared: stock shown on the channel against stock calculated by Bulutegra, order counts, prices, return records. Every line that differs is opened up; usually it traces back to product matching or a leftover rule in the old setup, and it is fixed before cutover.

When shadow mode ends you hold a compared table, not an assumption. The cutover decision is made by looking at that table.

So stock stays clean: the ownership flag

The riskiest moment in any migration is when both systems try to write to the same product. Bulutegra prevents this with an ownership flag: for every product and channel pair, it is marked who manages that channel, Bulutegra or the external system.

While the flag sits with the external system, Bulutegra writes no stock or price to that product; it only reads and reports. When the flag moves to Bulutegra, write permission belongs to one side. At no point do two systems write to the same field, so the question of which one is right never comes up.

Because the flag works at product level, you can start with a product group instead of a whole channel. One category can be handed over first, watched for a week, and the rest taken afterwards.

Channel-by-channel cutover, and rolling back

Cutover happens in sequence. It usually starts with a low-volume channel; orders, stock movements and prices are watched for a few days; if nothing looks wrong, the next channel follows. The busiest channel is left for last, and no cutover is done during campaign weeks.

Every step keeps a way back. If a channel behaves unexpectedly, the ownership flag is handed back, that channel returns to its previous arrangement, and Bulutegra becomes read-only there again. This does not require cancelling the whole migration; only that one channel is rolled back.

That is why we do not recommend cancelling your current integrator subscription on day one. Closing it after every channel has been handed over and has run cleanly for a few weeks is worth a few weeks of double subscription.

Data migration: what moves and what does not

What can move is clear. Product mappings, meaning which SKU corresponds to which listing on which channel, are transferred directly if they can be exported, and rebuilt from SKU and barcode if they cannot. Past orders and return records are pulled into Bulutegra as far back as the channel APIs allow, so reconciliation and reports do not start from an empty table.

Let us be honest about what does not move. Internal records held inside the system you use today, panel-specific labels, notes, user activity and the report history on its own screens do not reach us; they stay in that system's database. Orders older than the channel API's lookback limit cannot be pulled either. Records entered by hand in the old panel with no counterpart on any channel do not migrate automatically.

That is why we recommend taking your own exports from the old panel before the migration. We share what moves and what does not, item by item and in writing, at the planning call, so the surprise arrives at the start rather than halfway through.

What changes after the migration

Once the channels are handed over, orders, stock, prices, returns and settlements run from one panel. 24 marketplaces, 6 ecommerce infrastructures, 4 ERP systems and 10 carriers, 47 integrations in total, are managed from the same place.

Orders are written into your ERP with the customer, line items, carrier and payment details; invoicing and dispatch continue in your own routine. Channel monitoring runs continuously, and a channel that goes quiet raises an alert. The settlement and reconciliation page shows missing settlements and returns whose commission was not refunded, separately.

If you want to go deeper

If you want to plan the move in detail, two pieces go deeper: ten questions to ask before changing integrator and parallel running, so selling never stops.