Inspired with Interspire?

On the first of July 2012 Interspire shopping cart announced that platform won’t be supported anymore. e-Commerce solution used to be one of the biggest and popular licensed platforms. Although shopping cart stopped being maintained, thousands of online stores are still build on Interspire. e-Merchants got into a situation when they are left without any bug fixes or updates. Official support is available but only until the license expires. After that store owners will be asked to migrate to BigCommerce, which is hosted and paid solution or stay without support and updates.

Merchants face a dilemma. That is why a lot of them are looking for ways to migrate to another shopping cart. But which platform can be an alternative to Interspire?

Is Magento an Alternative?

e-Commerce tendencies show 45% of all migrations are performed to Magento. It is the most popular platform in today’s e-Commerce environment. Statistics show that the platform has gained over 25% of market share. Let’s take a closer look in order to find main reasons of such Magento popularity.

Magento is a powerful and robust e-Commerce platform with a steep learning curve, which is mostly aimed at larger online businesses.

Multi store function offers a possibility to set up diverse web stores and manage them from one administrative panel. You will be able to assign several shops to one website and set store views, specify different root categories, set different prices for the same products.

1. Script is integrated with Google analytics, so e-merchants will receive diverse reports, which will help to analyze store productivity.
2. Product browsing includes wishlist, multiple images for products which will help customers to find exactly what he or she is looking for.
3. Numerous shipping and payment options including credit cards, PayPal, eWay, ePay, shipping to multiple addresses, flat rating shipping, and much more.
4. Advanced SEO and marketing tools involve numerous coupons and discount codes, promotion options. Magento is 100% SEO friendly.
5. Multiple languages, tax rate that supports US and International markets, customizable outlook make the process of store management more straightforward.

Tips and Tricks

Now you probably understand that Magento is feature rich platform. However, it is a common situation when merchants refuse to migrate from Interspire to Magento because of complicated process of data transferring. The are afraid to face data loss or duplications. Really, migration can become really time-consuming process with unpredictable result. Look through useful tips including pre and post migration tips in order to perform successful Interspire to Magento migration.

Before you start migration:

• Prepare for migration. It means you have to choose a proper time for migration. To do that, analyze traffic and choose a time when it is the lowest.
• Inform users, employees, suppliers about store migration.
• Make a backup in order to prevent unpredictable outcomes.
• Install Magento cart. Check the system requirements in order to make sure, you’ve chosen a proper hosting. Remember Magento is resource “hungry” platform.
• It is also recommended not to customize a Magento store before data migration in order to avoid possible inconveniences.

And remember, forewarned is forearmed.

Watch a video tutorial on how to perform the process itself. It illustrates a simple step by step instruction from the very beginning till the end.

After migration is completed:

• First of all you should take about your SEO. Set 301 redirects to direct your customers and search engines to a new Magento store. Secondly, generate sitemap. And lastly, create 404 page.
• In order to make all your products visible on Magento store, you should reindex data. To do that: log in to your admin panel; enter to System-> Index management-> Select all; click Submit; clean cache to make changes visible.
• Since customers passwords will not be migrated, you will have to ask them to recover passwords.
• So, now you can customize a store according to your special business requirements. Chose one of the wide range of templates and make you store look really attractive and eye catching.

That’s it! Now you are aware of all tricks that have to be performed before, during and after Interspire to Magento migration. You can boldly migrate and be sure to shift all data accurately.