Magento — which was acquired by Adobe in 2018 and is now officially called Adobe Commerce — has been one of the most popular ecommerce platforms for online businesses for many years. But the times, they are a-changin’, as the saying goes, and more and more business owners are turning to the Shopify platform. Despite Magento’s great features, Shopify also comes with numerous benefits. So, what is Shopify, and why should you consider moving to this ecommerce platform? And what’s the best way to go about it?
If you are an online business owner stuck with the task of Magento to Shopify migration and are asking yourself these questions, this article can help you conquer the main aspects of that challenge.
Let’s get started!
Shopify is software that allows you to create, run and manage an online store. The uniqueness of the platform is that it is designed for users without advanced technical skills. Shopify has a large set of templates, as well as simple functionality, and that combination allows even a beginner to get their website up and running.
Shopify offers a two-week trial period during which you can explore the ecommerce platform’s features. After the free trial expires, you can choose one of the following plans: Shopify Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify, Shopify Plus.
Shopify Lite is the most inexpensive paid plan, which costs only $9 per month. For this price, you will not be able to create an online store from scratch, but you can sell through an existing WordPress website that does not have an online checkout feature. In addition, Facebook and Instagram’s monetization can be set up with Shopify Lite. You can showcase and sell products, accept payments with Shopify, track orders, and provide live chat support.
The Basic Shopify plan costs $29 per month. This package gives you a ready-to-use solution for your website. Plus, you’ll have access to a Shopify builder to create a web store.
With Basic Shopify, you have the option to create two additional accounts. That is, besides yourself, two more people will be able to work in Shopify. Moreover, Basic Shopify users can upload an unlimited number of products, create promotional codes for discounts, and place orders manually. The plan comes with an SSL certificate and built-in order analysis tools to prevent fraud attempts.
Among other things, this plan includes access to Shopify’s customer support system. If you have a physical store, for $49 you can purchase an additional package of options that allows you to manage the Shopify POS system, cash registers, barcode scanners and staff.
The standard Shopify plan costs $79 per month and is ideal for growing businesses. The package includes all the benefits of the Basic plan, as well as several additional features.
These include the ability to create five accounts instead of two, which would suit a business with more employees, and the ability to offer and accept gift cards.
In addition, this plan provides professional reporting. This allows owners to better track product stocks, calculate their popularity, and evaluate the territorial characteristics of demand, income and sales forecasts.
This standard plan also offers lower transaction fees.
For $299 per month, Shopify offers this upper-tier pricing plan, which is suitable for large ecommerce projects. You get all the features and functionality of Shopify in full. Users of Advanced Shopify can create up to 15 accounts, which allows the whole team to work with the store, and transaction fees are even lower. Moreover, you get an advanced report builder for creating a variety of reports.
Shopify Plus is an individual plan adaptable to and customized for the unique characteristics of each client. It does not have ready-made templates and is designed for large corporations. The price of this Shopify plan depends on the client’s request.
Before making any sudden moves, let’s take a comparative look at two of the most popular ecommerce solutions today.
Shopify and Magento offer numerous core features for creating and managing online stores on an ongoing basis. In both cases, users get checkout modules, product collections and pages, and shopping carts. But installing Shopify software is much easier and doesn’t require any specific technical skills on your part. However, Magento has a lot more middleware and advanced features built into the system. With Shopify, you’ll often find yourself looking for an app to extend your site’s functionality.
All Shopify plans allow you to upload an unlimited number of products to your site. It is worth noting that Shopify supports a form of business called drop-shipping, where the store owner, upon receiving an order from a customer, simply contacts the supplier, who then delivers the product(s) directly to the customer. Magento also allows uploading an unlimited number of products, but if that number becomes too numerous it can cause poor server performance and slower loading speeds.
Both solutions provide powerful capabilities for speedy delivery and calculating cost. As we mentioned, Shopify integrates with some drop-shipping pricing tools, such as more accurate shipping calculators.
Shopify does not provide this feature in the Shopify Lite plan. Magento allows you to calculate discounts with any of its membership tiers.
Magento and Shopify offer a huge number of themes and templates to customize the look of a web store. But Shopify paid themes start at $80, while Magento can offer themes for just a few dollars.
Shopify supports over 70 payment gateways, while Magento offers support for far fewer. However, Shopify charges fees for transactions made through third-party gateways. That said, if you are using Shopify’s built-in gateway, there is no commission at all.
More than 100 apps available for Shopify can expand the functionality of your website. And the Shopify store is constantly moderated to protect you from downloading unwanted apps.
Magento offers over 5,000 apps, thanks in large part to the community that uses Magento Open Source, and constantly improves the platform.
Both ecommerce platforms offer paid and free add-ons alike.
Shopify does not allow using many languages, but you can get additional applications to create a multilingual store. Magento has built-in multilingual support.
Both platforms offer extensive SEO options to drive more organic traffic to the website through search engines.
Consider the advantages of this ecommerce platform.
Launching an online store on Shopify does not require the extra development costs or special skills that you might need when working with ecommerce platforms like Magento. The interface of the software is logically structured, and Shopify itself provides you with hosting — which will be much faster and easily adapt to any traffic fluctuations, as well as keep track of all updates.
Shopify immediately integrates SSL certificates into the website to encrypt data and transfer it over a secure connection. With platforms like Magento, you would have to buy security certificates yourself.
The Shopify customer support team is available day and night, and responds almost instantly to a query. If you have a problem with the site, you can contact the support department by phone, email or online chat.
All Shopify themes are adapted for mobile phones and tablets. Your web store will look high quality on any device. Plus, users can manage their stores with the Shopify app for iPhone or Android.
Shopify has powerful search engine optimization features that will help your website rank higher in the SERPs. The platform gives you access to advanced analytics that shows where your customers are coming from. Thanks to these tools, you can fine-tune your marketing strategy.
As we noted above, Shopify charges fees for using payment gateways. But the use of Shopify Payments is completely free.
Ok, you’ve decided you’re now ready to transfer your Magento site data to Shopify. Congratulations! But before you begin, you should note that you will only be able to transfer certain types of data.
Moreover, you must take into account several additional aspects of transferring data from one ecommerce platform to another to maintain uninterrupted store traffic. Keep in mind that when migrating a site, you need to redirect user traffic to the new address. 301 Redirect is one of the SEO tools used to organize a permanent redirect from an outdated domain address or to a working version.
Don’t forget to port graphical content that is not stored in your database to a specific platform and replace links with the exact code. And confirm that your site’s content will look as good on the new platform as it did on the previous one. If this is not the case, you must fix it before launching your new store.
Let’s go directly to the transferring process.
When migrating from one ecommerce platform to another, it is worth considering all the possible risks associated with the transfer. You can choose from three Magento backup options: create a full copy of the database and file system, database and media backup, or only database backup.
For copy creation, log in to the admin panel, select the “System” section, in the “Tools” subsection, select “Backups.” Next, you just have to pick the type of backup.
As you already know, the first 14 days the platform is available for free; thereafter, you will have to choose one of the pricing options:
At this stage, you can install all the necessary applications.
To complete this stage, you must go back to the “System” section of your Magento admin panel, and then go to the “Data Transfer” and “Export” subsections.
In the “Export settings” section, select the type of data to transfer:
Next, you must select the format of the export files, CSV or XML. If necessary, the choice of the format should be repeated for each type of data. Now you can click “Continue.” All files will be exported and exist in a spreadsheet, ready to be processed and imported.
It’s time to move the packaged data to the new ecommerce platform. Use the import application of your choice. Go to the “Import store” section and specify the platform from which you are transferring data (in our case it is Magento). If this option is not provided, select “Other.” In the “Upload files” section, select the files exported from the Magento website to upload and click “Continue Import.” You can also download each exported file separately. It is important to know that you need to import data individually in a strict order:
Note: Any customer passwords that were stored encrypted on your Magento website cannot be transferred to Shopify.
Review the imported data to make sure that all data was transferred correctly. When checking, you may run into some fairly common import issues:
These issues can be resolved by manually editing the inaccuracies. If some files are missing, check the import summary to find and edit them. If the files could not be imported in a group or batch, you can upload them separately using the functions of a separate import of products or customers. You can use Shopify extensions to group products into bundles. If you don’t have product sizes and options, Shopify also gives you the option to manually add these metrics.
In addition, there are several other problems that you may encounter.
If your Magento website had your products listed in hidden visibility mode, then Shopify will show them as unpublished. In this case, you need to change the availability of the product in Shopify.
To sell digital goods, you need a dedicated Shopify app. Make sure you purchase one if you want to sell digital goods in your store.
Now you can customize the theme for the website design. Like Magento, Shopify offers a large selection of modern and stylish designs for your storefront.
Now that the Magento to Shopify migration process is complete, it’s time to test your new website to make sure it’s ready to go.
Make sure you have all the extensions and add-ons you need to get the job done; if something is missing, you can find the app you require in the Shopify Marketplace.
The website is now fully ready to go, and you can let your customers know that your store is live and hosted on the new eCommerce platform. Send them an invitation asking them to reactivate their accounts. In addition, you can ask them to report any crashes and problems to you, which will help improve your new store’s performance as quickly as possible.
Let’s summarize. To successfully transfer an online store from the Magento platform to Shopify’s platform, you’ll need to:
If you decide that the Magento platform is no longer suitable for running your online business and have made the final decision to use the Shopify platform, these steps will help you make the transition quickly and do so without experiencing losses. But if you’re not confident that you want to handle the migration yourself, IntexSoft experts can help your business migrate from Magento to Shopify. You can always contact us for a free consultation!
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