How to Migrate Shopify to Magento

Nowadays running an online store is rather a common thing. You don’t have to be a programmer or web development expert to launch a successful shop. Everything depends on two key points. The first one is your idea: what are you going to sell, who are your clients, what do they like etc. The second one, is how are you going to organize business processes. For this reason choosing a shopping cart becomes an extremely important issue.

Magento and Shopify are both powerful platforms, which can lead your online store to prosperity. Yet, e-Commerce propensities illustrates that more store owners choose to migrate from Shopify to Magento. Therefore , the following reasons of this trend are shown below:

Magento vs Shopify

Main distinctive feature is that Shopify is a hosted platform while Magento — licensed. Magento is one of the leading platforms with over 25% of market share. It has gained such recognition because of:

Flexibility: Magento is an open source platform and allows modifying existing features according to your specific business requirements;

Advanced modification opportunities: Platform offers a possibility to set up multiple languages and currencies, different prices for different customer groups. Moreover, store owner will be able to launch several different stores and manage them from one admin panel;

Large number of third party components: You will be able to expand stores opportunities with a wide range of extensions.

Mobile commerce: If you are an owner of iPhone, iPad or Android mobile device, you can easily buy products from Magento store.

Price: Magento goes in three editions — Magento Commerce (free), Magento Go (hosted), Magento Enterprise (paid). So you will be able to choose edition, which will satisfy your specific needs.

Regular updates: You can expect a new Magento release every few months. New version is fully packed with bug fixes, new features, and other improvements.

At the same time, Shopify is also a robust shopping cart with rich features.

Over 100 free templates will help you to create eye-catching design. Moreover, themes can be customized via the user-friendly editor and CSS/HTML files.

Your customers payment information will be protected with SSL technology.

The platform is equipped with advanced marketing tools — target email marketing, social media integration, SEO, store statistics.

How to Migrate?

Migration process may cause some confusion, especially among users with low technical skills. Actually, it is not so complicated and tedious process as it seems to be. Sure, everything depends on the method of migration, which you will choose.

Manual migration will be suitable only in a case your store has several entities. Otherwise, it will be time consuming process. Moreover, during the monotonous work you will definitely run into some mistakes that may cause data loss or duplication.

There is another way out. You can hire a developer, who will transfer all data for you. In this occasion, you will probably have few problems with migration accuracy, but be ready that this way may be quite expensive.

Another option, there is a third solution — automated migration. As an example let’s take Cart2Cart. It is an automated migration service, which will convey all data from Shopify to Magento in several hours. It is a profitable tool, but you will be capable to try how everything works by performing absolutely free Demo Migration.

A straightforward step by step instruction will help you perform successful migration with minimum efforts.

Pre Migration Tips

Before you start, analyze your traffic and choose a time when the number of visitors is the lowest.

Notify your customers, stockholders and suppliers about time of migration.

In order to protect yourself, make a backup. You can save all your data on USB flash drivers or use backup option of your hosting provider.

Make sure you have store access information (store admin panel access, FTP access, API Keyword and API Password)

Install Magento and make sure it is running properly.

Migration Steps

Before you start, you have to register Cart2Cart account or log in via Google or Facebook account.

Provide shopping cart details. On this step, you have to choose a target and desirable shopping carts from a drop down menu and enter stores URLs.

Choose data you want to transfer. You will be able to move products, product categories, manufacturers, customers and orders.

Start free Demo migration.

If you are satisfied with Demo migration results, start Full Migration. You will receive an email notification when the process is finished.

Post Migration Tips

Your SEO will not be moved, so you will have to set up 301 redirects, create custom 404 page and generate sitemap.

Store design is not migrated so you will need to customize it by yourself after migration is finished.

As it was already mentioned, you will have an opportunity to migrate customer accounts, but bear in mind that passwords will not be moved. Hence, you must inform your clients about your future migration and invite them to improve their password after migration is done.

for more queries, contact us.