Good business is about good decisions. Good decisions are ones made after serious research of the market and data gathering. One of the decisions that must be made by eCommerce experts is choosing the right eCommerce platform for success of their businesses. The problem is there is a lot to choose from.

OpenCart and Magento are both eCommerce platforms which give a huge opportunity for creating a beneficial web shop. However, businessmen often change their own platforms to Magento. Why?

Opencart vs Magento

OpenCart is a unique open source shopping cart system. It secures virtually unlimited store management opportunities which provide you an opportunity to run your eCommerce cost-effectively. OpenCart has an simple order management as well as built in multiple payment gateways. Moreover the developers store owners will be able to get free support and free software updates.

Magento is a very powerful and fast growing shopping cart. It offers great flexibility through its modular architecture, is completely scalable and has a wide range of control options. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, and content management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs, putting no constraints on business processes and flow.

Magento and OpenCart have some similar characteristics:

• both are global open source eCommerce platforms supporting multiple languages and most currencies, neither limit users;
• both are developed in PHP;
• both are popular and have huge developer communities for support.

Advantages of OpenCart

1. OpenCart is lightweight, easy to download and install.
2. OpenCart is completely open source, supports an unlimited number of products and categories, and includes product reviews and ratings functionality.
3. OpenCart is easy to administer. The control panel is clear and convenient so no special technical skills are required.
4. OpenCart is quite suitable for small and middle sized enterprises.

Benefits of Magento

1. Magento is very powerful and yet intuitive when it comes to presenting the product. It is possible easily to create the products catalog and manage it. Magento requires high programming skills. It allows product filtering and product comparison.
2. Magento gives the possibility to get numerous reports and analyze data and processes like sales, including customer shopping history.
3. Magento personalise the customer experience with superior search capabilities, special storefronts for specific customer groups, and preference and behavior-based content delivery.
4. It is possible integrate Magento into Google Analytics account and use all its options to analyze the customer behavior on your website and optimize it for better results.
5. Magento allows to use many marketing promo tools — organize price promotions, use coupon codes.
6. Magento is suitable for large stores, where OpenCart unfortunately fails.
7. Number of online stores — 150 000.

These are the major reasons of OpenCart to Magento migration.

Before you start migration

• make a backup;
• secure access info;
• install Magento.

Migration Setup

Step 1

Register a Cart2Cart account or login via Facebook or Google (service provides automated migration that enables you to move your store info, saving the all the connections between entities (categories, products, images, reviews, etc.) — basically all the data that you currently have in your store).

Step 2

Select and setup source cart type,which is OpenCart platform, and target cart, which is Magento.

Step 3

Select entities you would like to migrate. You should select which type of entities you want to migrate, for example, products and product categories, customers, orders etc.If you choose to migrate the products you will not be able to migrate only certain amount of products, or only the latest added to your store.

Step 4

Currencies mapping means that if you have multiple currencies in your source cart, you can map all of them to your target cart. Make sure all of them are listed in your target shopping cart settings.

Step 5

Order status mapping: if you have chosen to migrate your orders, you can map certain order statuses from your source cart to the target cart. If there are specific order statuses that are not supported in your target cart by default, make sure to change the settings in your target cart and add the missing order status types. Only after that you will be able to migrate that information.

Step 6

Demo migration can be started but just a limited number of products, customers and orders will be migrated. Make sure not to close your browser window during the actual Demo Migration. Until the demo is done, you will not be able to check the results. Only after it’s all over, you will be able to see the results on your target shopping cart.

Step 7

Start full migration. If there’s not enough funds on your account, you will be asked to charge it with more credits. If you have a discount coupon code, include it in the appropriate field on the same page. At this point you can close your browser window. You will receive an email notification when the Full Migration is over. The results of your Full Migration will only be visible on your target store after it is done.

Check migration results and enjoy your newly established Magento store.

Post-Migration Checkup

Right after your store migration is completed and you’ve checked the results on your target Magento store, you can finish setting up your new store. This includes managing data, not available for migration (store design).

1. In case you need to implement your shopping cart migration all over again for the same source and target stores, you can request Re-migration Service. This may happen if the source or target cart hasn’t been properly setup or some fields are missing before or during migration, etc.

3. Test Your Website: all you need to do is test your website to see if everything works fine. Check if your domain name is active and working as well as all the data within your website. Pay a special attention to the links.

Infographic

In order to make your OpenCart to Magento migration more comfortable, you may look through an infographic.

Video tutorial

Video Tutorial shows step by step instruction, which can help you to move all data from OpenCart to Magento.