In 1976, the Eagles gave us a strangely prophetic lyric for ecommerce merchant:

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

At first glance, this sounds like a technical error during checkout. But think about it a little harder, and the Eagles may have accidentally written the unofficial anthem of a very modern SaaS problem – vendor lock-in.  

Vendor lock-in is what happens when the platform you chose to run your business becomes so deeply woven into your operations that leaving it feels less like switching software and more like relocating to a new country.  

A good example is Apple. The MacBook or iPhone you use comes with software and applications that you can’t simply take with you if you decide to leave the Apple ecosystem. The more you buy, use, and build around it, the harder it becomes to imagine starting over somewhere else. No wonder switching to another brand can feel like filing for a divorce from a very expensive, very well-designed cult.

That is the entire trick. And it becomes business-threatening when it happens to a store. And unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening to stores running on the predecessors of one of the most celebrated ecommerce platforms.

Lock, stock, and thousands of smoking storefronts

Magento 1 reached end of life on June 30, 2020 with over 100,000 stores still running on it. That deadline was brutal and public. By February 2022 there were still 49,300 holdouts, and six years on, under 15% of Magento stores remain on the unsupported version.  

Migrations ran anywhere from $8,000 for a simple store to $250,000 plus for a complicated one, taking three to six months on average. For many stores it was this or facing the risk of critical hacks, payment breaches, and compliance failures.

Those merchants got a date and that date also created a budget line, a board discussion, and an entire market of migration vendors elbowing each other for their business.

An unannounced fade out hands you none of that, but it’s still as costly in terms of the opportunity cost.  

So, if you do not want to be a straggler like any of these stores, these are your signs for an ecommerce replatforming:

• Climbing exit price: Every custom workaround, every bit of glue code and "we'll just handle that manually for now" gets added to the eventual migration invoice.

• Someone else's deadline, becomes yours: Remember when Google killed Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023 and every merchant on earth was left to set up their GA4 properties so that their historical data was there? Stores on modern platforms flipped a switch. Everyone else paid a developer to rebuild their tracking from scratch, and plenty still lost years of historical data in the process.

How else vendors can lock you in  

Nobody sits in a boardroom plotting how to trap you. Lock-in is what happens when a thousand small conveniences become one big inconvenience.

• Proprietary code: Let’s take the example of RTML, a markup language used in only by one merchant: Turbify Merchant Solutions templates (more on that later). A language only one vendor speaks means your future developer pool is whoever that vendor decides to bless.  

• Data that is technically portable and practically stuck: No vendor blocks your export. They just make it fiddly enough, in a format odd enough that usually have you end up saying "we'll sort it next quarter" until it becomes a five-year tradition.  

• The bundle: Platforms make their own adjacent services the cheapest option and everything else a penalty. Shopify, for instance, charges an extra 2% per sale on its Basic plan if you use any payment processor other than its own, sliding down to 0.2% on Plus. Nothing stops you using Stripe or PayPal. You just pay a fee for the privilege, which is a very polite way of pricing the door.

• Checkout and payments: Your gateway, your saved cards, your subscription tokens. This is the one part of your store you cannot afford to have wobble for a fortnight, which makes it the most effective seat belt any vendor owns.

• Your team's muscle memory: Years of workarounds, quirks, and "oh, you have to click that twice" go through your ops manager's head means they are going to have flashbacks working on a new platform for a long time. Adjusting becomes difficult.  

• The paperwork: Multi-year commitments, auto-renewals, and renewal pricing that climbs while the feature set sits still.  

This is just what happens when you stay somewhere long enough to make yourself comfortable.

But why is Vendor Lock-in so hard to detect?

Simply because everything looks normal on the surface, but deep beneath, the decay has set in:  

And these are not the only problems limited to storefronts on Magento 1. Very similar thing is happening to businesses using Turbify, formerly Yahoo Store.

In June 2022, Yahoo slipped out of the website builder and hosting business altogether, selling its Small Business Essentials portfolio to a different company, and the legacy ecommerce platform silently became Turbify. But despite somewhat replicating the name of its biggest competitor, the platform had none of its charm.

It came with its own programming language, RTML. Today, you’re probably more likely to find a BlackBerry user than someone who still writes RTML.

So, it probably won’t come as a surprise that the platform now runs only 2,722 live storefronts, down ~50% year over year from 4,085 at the end of 2022. In the last 90 days, it lost nine merchants to rivals, six of them straight to Shopify, and gained exactly one.

None of us sure as hell don’t want to be stuck in this kind of ecosystem. So, here’s what to do:

Run the Standstill Test on your own store

Ask yourself these 4 questions:

1. When did you last ship a change you actually wanted to ship? If you cannot remember, that is your answer.

2. How many vendors could take over your store next month? If the number is one or zero, that is not a partnership.  

3. When the last compliance or tax rule landed, who absorbed it? Every "we sorted it ourselves" is a permanent line in your operating costs.

4. Is your exit getting cheaper or pricier? Though it might seem like a hassle but I do recommended getting a migration quote every year, especially if you’re working on shaky platform.

Your go-to ecommerce replatforming checklist that'll save you from a vendor lock-in

If you do make the jump, the goal is to land somewhere you could leave again. So, run every candidate platform past this:

So, do you want to check out or stay?

Nobody is coming to force this call.

So price your exit, then price it again next year, and see which way the line moves. That number tells you more about your replatforming risk or whether you are running into a vendor lock-in trap.