When Brooklyn-based fast-fashion retailer Rainbow Shops decided to switch its ecommerce platform from Salesforce Inc. to Shopify Plus, the enterprise version of Shopify, it didn’t immediately consider one extremely important fact about making the switch, says David Cost, vice president of digital and ecommerce at the retailer.

“We had eight years’ worth of sales history trapped in Salesforce,” Cost says. “We’d be accepting orders on Salesforce until the moment we switched to Shopify.”

That meant when Rainbow Shops lost access to Salesforce, it would lose eight years of sales and customer data—extremely valuable data—including order values, SKUs sold per order, order numbers and vital customer information like email…

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