Are you an owner of a Magento store? Are you looking for a solution to boost your sales? Migrating to Shopify is the way to go!
Magento has been a popular platform for many online stores. As for June 2020, Magento 1 will cease to exist, which means Magento will not be releasing any patches or updates for it. Many online shop owners are now looking for a solution to this problem and more and more of them are taking their business to Shopify. This migration can be the best choice for your store, but you have to be prepared.
Our article will hopefully make the process less troublesome and provide you with all the necessary information before you take a leap.
Why migrate to Shopify? / Reasons for migrating to Shopify
Firstly, let’s dive into why you would want to migrate to Shopify in the first place. There are plenty of reasons for that, like:
Shopify Pros:
- Shopify hosts the store for you, which means you do not have to pay for your own hosting worry about possible problems with traffic spikes
- Shopify offers lots of themes and customizations options
- Every Shopify store has an SSL certificate
- Shopify is more user-friendly
- Shopify has 24/7 support, so if any problems occur, you can get help immediately.
- all of Shopify’s themes optimize for various devices and screen sizes
- Shopify is the forefront of eCommerce security
- Shopify is serving over 500 000 businesses all over the world
- Shopify is more popular than Magento
Magento Cons:
- Magento only has a forum of users
- requires more time investment to get the store up and running
- it limits the number of products published
- Magento limits bandwidth to 32GB max
- Magento’s popularity is constantly decreasing
How do I migrate to Shopify?
The process of migration can be easily narrowed down to 6 easy steps.
Step 1: Create a Shopify account
First of all, if you want to have a store with Shopify, you need a Shopify account. The great thing is, Shopify offers a free trial so you can get familiar with all the features before making a commitment.
In this step, you will set up your business details and should plan what applications and integrations you will need ( Shopify App Store).
Remember to check pricing plans and what each of them offers (e.g. you can find information on staff limitations not listed in the pricing plan table)
Step 2: Decide what needs to be migrated
Analyse which data should be transferred from Magento to Shopify. If possible, consider involving a technical migration partner to analyse it for you. Some key data you might want to take into account are products, customer details, historical orders, gift cards and store credits, pages (contact, about us, blog), product reviews. You should also consider transferring SEO settings.
This analysis should help you get rid of outdated or redundant information.
Step 3: Migrate your store’s content and data to Shopify
- Create a backup of your Magento store — you can use a backup option provided by your hosting service
- Migrate your data — there are a few options to do so:
- If you have a Shopify Plus account, you can use the Transporter app
- If you have little content, you can move your data manually (you can migrate products and customers data using CSV files, but you have to adjust them first, see examples here, points 1–3
- You can use an existing migration app, like Cart2Cart, Excelify o rLitExtension
- Hire developers who will help you with the migration (you can hire a Shopify Partner)
Remember that the data must be imported in the following order: products, customers, historical orders. This will give you full access to customers’ complete transaction history in Shopify.
Step 4: Organize data after migration
After the migration, it is important to check whether all product information was imported correctly. Focus on checking product details, images and meta descriptions.
If all looks good, you can move on to creating collections to organize products into categories. This is where you can add dropdown menus, create links etc.
Later on, you have to configure information on shipping, taxes and payment providers for orders and Place some test orders. The test orders should be run all the way through the checkout. Ensure the customer data is organized and displayed properly.
Step 5: Take care of your new store’s look
To customize your store, you can check out free themes developed by Shopify or go to the Shopify Theme Store. There are also paid themes that you can preview before purchasing. If that is not enough, you can also hire a development team to build you a custom theme or replicate the old design. More on this can be found in Shopify’s help center.
Step 6: Save your site’s position in the search system
When you finalize the migration and find the right theme it is time to redirect customers to your new store from your old domain. It can be done by configuring 301 redirects.
Take a look at your pages, products and images whether they are set up with proper key words. Make use of them in the content on your website. Set up measurement tools like
Google Analytics that will provide you with information on traffic, bounce rate and visitors engagement.
One more thing to remember about is SEO. When migrating to a new platform it is crucial to save your website’s current position in the search system.
Summary
As you can see, the process of migration from Magento to Shopify includes a few key steps and some preparation. You must be ready to determine what kind of data and how much of it you wish to transfer.
Shopify will surprise you with its simplicity, beautiful themes and outstanding security.
To have a hustle free, quick process, hiring a professional team of developers is worth considering. They can provide you with a custom theme and ensure your data migrate safely.
Originally published at How To Migrate From Magento To Shopify.
