Ask a business owner why they are still on a system they complain about weekly, and the honest answer is usually not price or features. It is fear — specifically, the fear of losing history. Years of orders, customer records, and what-sold-when are the memory of the business, and "we will start fresh on the new system" quietly means "we will forget everything we know about our customers." So they stay.
That fear is reasonable, but the tradeoff behind it is false. A good migration brings the history with you.
What "keeping your history" requires
A migration that preserves the past has to move more than a product list. It has to carry:
- Products — including variants, and the categories/departments/suppliers they belong to.
- Customers — with their contact details and the link back to what they bought.
- Order history — past orders with their real dates and the prices actually charged, not today's prices stamped on yesterday's sales.
That last point is where most imports quietly fail: they re-price historical orders at current prices, and your revenue history becomes fiction. Preserving the prices as they were charged is what makes the migrated history trustworthy for reporting.
No manual column-mapping
The other thing that stalls migrations is the spreadsheet gauntlet — hand-mapping dozens of columns from the old system's export to the new system's fields. Omni takes a competitor's native export (Shopify and Zoho today) and transforms it into its own model directly: products with variants, customers, and full order history, auto-creating the categories and suppliers along the way, with no manual column-mapping. The migration is available on every plan.
You are not choosing between the software you have outgrown and the history you cannot lose. You get to keep both — the history, on the better system.
History in, backbone on
Once the history lands in an operations backbone, it becomes more useful than it was in the tool you left — one customer record across channels, real historical demand feeding purchasing, and reporting (plus the "ask your data" assistant) that can finally see all of it. Keep your storefront and your books; move the operations and the memory of the business onto one system that can actually use them.