Online store owners have to make decisions all the time. One of the hardest is to choose the type of e-Commerce platform to run their shop. Can hosted shopping cart meet all the requirements? Or will you be able to cope with open source software?

When your cart is hosted, the question is — what can it offer? In case you use an open source platform, usually, you think how to make use of all provided functions. BigCommerce and Magento are bright examples of two sides of one e-Commerce coin. Lets find out the main benefits of each platform to make the choice of shopping cart easier. Later on we will discuss the most comfortable way to move from BigCommerce to Magento.

BigCommerce — Can Hosted be Enough?

Currently, BigCommerce is one of the world leading SaaS solutions for online business. Currently it powers more than 50 000 stores. The platform provides:

• wide range of features in a row with extremely easy-to-use interface and admin panel
• around 125 ready-made free templates
• an opportunity to customize the templates via WYSIWYG or HTML/CSS editor
• intuitive shop installer that allows merchants to build an online shop really quickly

Magento — the Benefits of Open Source

Magento currently is the most searchable e-Commerce software on the web. Over 200 000 live stores are now powered by this software. In addition, it is one of the most fast growing vendor, owned by Ebay Inc. The platform has clear roadmap for new versions, and a huge (around 1 500 000) members community. To sum up the benefits, Magento is:

• e-Commerce solution that offers powerful reporting features, handles complex discounting and vouchers and can be integrated into other systems such as stock control and accounting.
• extremely featurable and flexible but requires tech skills in order to make some major changes. The minor customisation can be done via the admin interface which is generally easy to use.
• the platform that provides multilingual store front — perfect for international sales.

Why Merchants Decide to Move?

However, Magento has a list of advantages over BigCommerce that appears this way:

• BigCommerce limits categories and product numbers for different plans. Magento has no limits.
• Bigcommerce is hosted cart and charges a monthly fee. Magento is free to download and install.
• BigCommerce loses Magento in terms of multilingual storefront.
• BigCommerce doesn’t allow you to access the source code that limits customization possibilities.
• BigCommerce also has a lack of extensions comparing with Magento.

So, if you are looking forward to get more functions from your platform, take a look at open source software.

How to Perform an Accurate Migration?

So, if you wish to have more flexible platform that allows to add unique functions and expand your business horizons migrate from BigCommerce to Magento. You can choose different ways to move the data.

1. Manual transfer takes a lot of time and need high tech skills to perform.
2. There is also an opportunity to hire a programmer for this task, but it will only boost your total spend and still be a time-consuming process.
3. Or there is an opportunity to perform an automated migration with Cart2Cart. Lets take a look how easily store data can be moved from Bigcommerce to Magento.

To setup an automated migration you don’t have to be highly skilled programmer or so. Simply log into your account or create a new one, and follow Migration Wizard to setup your own migration. Nothing more than a few mouse click to select source/target carts and select entities for migration. It can be your products, categories, customers, orders, along with the other corresponding information. For example, if you decided to move customers, their shipping and billing addresses will be transferred as well.

In a row with general data transfer there is an opportunity to select additional options. Try free demo migration to see how the entities from BigCommerce will appear on Magento store. The process will take up to 20 minutes. Downloadable CSV report shows what exact entities are moved. So you can easily check them.

Now you know why merchants migrate from BigCommerce to Magento and how simple is to perform it with Cart2Cart. So, go ahead and perform an accurate data migration right now.