You've put years of hard work into building your BigCommerce store. Thousands of orders. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of customers. A detailed sales history that tells the story of what you've sold, when you sold it, and who bought it. That data happens to be more than just records. It's the foundation for how you forecast demand, serve your customers, and plan future growth.
Now you're ready to connect your store to an ERP platform, and a question comes up that too few ERP partners talk about: What happens to all of that history? Will your past orders, invoices, and customer records come with you, or does your new system start from scratch on the day it goes live?
At Stellar One, we've built our ERP implementation approach with a simple principle in mind: The data you've spent years building shouldn't be left behind when you upgrade your technology. As an Acumatica Gold-Certified Partner specializing in eCommerce, we've seen firsthand what happens when historical data gets left behind, and we've developed a proprietary solution to make sure it doesn't.
In this article, we'll cover what BigCommerce data actually matters in an ERP transition, what most partners do with it (and what they skip), and how Stellar One's approach is different. If you're evaluating ERP partners right now, this is one of the most important questions to ask before you sign anything.
What BigCommerce Data Actually Matters in an ERP Adoption?
Not every piece of data from your BigCommerce store needs to move into your ERP platform. But the records that drive sales forecasting, customer service, and audit readiness absolutely should.
The must-haves typically include sales orders, invoices, purchase orders, AP bills, credits and returns, customer records, and general ledger transactions. Skip any one of those categories, and you'll have blind spots in your reporting from day one. We've written a detailed guide on which documents to include in your historical data migration and why each one matters. Check it out if you want the full breakdown.
What Do Most ERP Partners Actually Do With Your BigCommerce History?
Here's the part most ERP sales conversations skip over: The majority of ERP implementations do not include historical data migration. Most partners will bring over your opening balances (summary totals as of a specific date) and any open documents (orders that haven't shipped, invoices that haven't been paid). Everything else, including your closed transactions, completed sales, and purchasing history, will stay behind.
Why? Because importing old invoices and sales orders into a live ERP system is technically tricky. If done incorrectly, historical records can distort current inventory counts, post to the general ledger as if the transactions are happening today, and create accounting headaches that take weeks to untangle. Most partners don't have a clean solution for this problem, so they avoid it entirely.
When historical data doesn't come with you, you’ll likely be left with one of three options, none of them great:
- Keeping your old system running for occasional lookups: This plan sounds practical until hardware ages, staff turns over, and nobody remembers how to use the software.
- Exporting everything into spreadsheets: These spreadsheets are nearly unusable for meaningful analysis and fully impossible to combine with live ERP data without manual effort.
- Starting fresh: Doing so will create a hard break in your business data that affects forecasting, customer service, and compliance for years after the transition.
If you want true historical data migration for all the benefits it brings, you’ll want to skip these three options and find an ERP provider willing to work with your old data.
How Does Stellar One Handle BigCommerce Historical Data Differently?
Stellar One's approach starts from a fundamentally different premise: Your historical data belongs in your new system, right alongside the data your team creates every day. We built a proprietary solution called the Unified Data Package to make this possible without the technical problems that cause other partners to avoid historical migration.
Here's how it works and why it matters for your BigCommerce business.
Historical Records Will Be Stored in Dedicated Tables, Not Mixed Into Live Data
The core technical challenge with historical data migration is that importing old transactions into active ERP tables can distort inventory and accounting. Stellar One will solve this problem by storing your historical sales orders, invoices, purchase orders, and other records in separate, purpose-built tables inside Acumatica.
With the Unified Data Package, your old data will be fully accessible and reportable, but it won’t interfere with current inventory counts, general ledger balances, or daily operations. Your team can look up a historical invoice the same way they'd look up a current one. There's no separate system to learn and no workaround needed.
Your Identifiers Will Come With You
When you adopt an ERP platform, you'll likely renumber customers, vendors, and inventory items. That's normal, but it creates a problem: How do you track a product's sales performance across the old and new numbering systems?
The Unified Data Package includes fields that will store your legacy identifiers alongside new ones, so your team can trace item 123 from your old system to item 456 in Acumatica and see a continuous sales history for that product. This is especially valuable for BigCommerce businesses with large catalogs where product-level trend analysis drives purchasing decisions.
Historical and Current Data Will Unify Into a Single Reporting View
This is the "unified" part of the package, and it's what separates our approach from basic historical data migration. Using SQL union statements, Stellar One's data architecture will let you query historical and current records together as a single dataset.
With the Unified Data Package, you can run a report showing three years of sales for a product line, including two years from your old system and one year from Acumatica, all in one view. For BigCommerce businesses doing a mid-year go-live, this is critical. You won't have to wait 12 months to have a full year of comparable data.
Your Data Will Be AI-Ready From Day One
Acumatica's platform is increasingly incorporating AI-driven features, including product recommendations and demand forecasting. These tools work better with more data.
Most new ERP implementations start with an empty dataset and require months or years before AI features become useful. With the Unified Data Package, your historical transaction data will already be structured and available for AI analysis from the moment you go live. Capabilities like identifying which products are frequently purchased together or spotting seasonal demand patterns will be available immediately, and you won’t need to wait until you’ve accumulated enough data.
Why BigCommerce Businesses Should Pay Attention to Historical Data Practices
If you're running a BigCommerce store, your business data likely lives across multiple systems right now: BigCommerce itself, QuickBooks or another accounting tool, maybe a separate inventory management app, and probably a few spreadsheets filling in the gaps. When you move to an ERP platform, it’s your chance to consolidate all of that into a single source of truth.
Skipping historical data migration will mean your new "single source of truth" has a gap right at the beginning. Every report, every forecast, every customer lookup will have an asterisk next to it: *data before [go-live date] not included.
For a BigCommerce business that's been selling online for three, five, or 10 years, that's a significant blind spot. It hits hardest for:
- Seasonal businesses that rely on year-over-year comparisons
- Multichannel sellers who need historical depth to allocate inventory and marketing spend
- Companies with long customer relationships where account history matters
- Any business subject to audits where accessible financial records going back several years aren't optional
The good news is that you can identify which partners take historical data seriously before you commit. A few pointed questions during the evaluation process will tell you everything you need to know.
Questions to Ask Your ERP Partner About BigCommerce Data Migration
If you're evaluating ERP partners right now, historical data migration is one of the clearest ways to separate partners who are thinking about your long-term success from those who are focused elsewhere. Here are the questions worth asking:
- Will my historical sales orders, invoices, and purchase orders be migrated into the new system, or only opening balances?
- How do you prevent historical records from distorting current inventory and accounting data?
- Can I run reports that combine historical data from my old system with current data in the ERP system?
- Is historical data migration included in the implementation, or is it an additional cost?
At Stellar One, historical data migration through our Unified Data Package is included as a standard part of every eCommerce implementation. It's not an add-on or an afterthought. We believe it's foundational to getting real value from your ERP investment from day one.
Your Next Steps for Protecting Your BigCommerce Data
The short answer to the question in this article's title is yes, you can absolutely keep your BigCommerce sales history when you start using an ERP platform. But whether you actually do will depend entirely on which partner you choose and how they approach historical data.
Most ERP partners don't migrate historical data because they haven't solved the technical challenges involved. That means businesses end up with legacy systems they can't turn off, spreadsheets they can't query, or a brand new ERP solution that knows nothing about the first several years of their business. None of those outcomes will serve you well.
If you want to understand the full difference between a standard historical data migration and the approach Stellar One takes, read our breakdown of the Unified Data Package and how it compares to traditional migration. It covers the four specific capabilities that standard migrations don't include.
At Stellar One, we've already deployed the Unified Data Package with multiple members and can handle data going back as far as your business needs. If you're evaluating Acumatica partners and want to see how your historical data would actually look inside the system, we'll gladly show you. Click below to start your Free Deployment.
Frequently Asked Questions About BigCommerce ERP Data Migration