Why You Should Migrate to Shopify
According to several overviews, Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms worldwide. It is also worth mentioning that many merchants have already switched from other solutions to Shopify. But why do they do that? Here are the main reasons why to migrate your website store to Shopify..
Scalability
Shopify provides you with everything you need to create a scalable and efficient online store. You can add products, manage inventory and monitor your sales directly. Shopify takes care of all aspects of running your store, meaning you can focus on increasing your revenue. Another benefit is that Shopify has an impressive range of apps to make it easy for anyone to start an online business regardless of their previous experience.
No Tech Worries
Shopify is a powerful platform that ensures your shop is built for your business and ready for its development. The only thing you’ll have to focus on is growing sales. And with an established ecosystem of apps, integrations, and marketplaces, it won’t be hard to do just that.
Shopify’s online store builder makes it easy for anyone — from amateurs with little e-commerce experience to full-fledged developers — to set up a professional-looking site with ready-to-use themes and features.
Fast Loading Speed
The speed of your store defines how long it takes for you to get a visitor and for them to convert. Studies show that 1 in 2 visitors leave a webpage that takes more than 6 seconds to load. That’s why you must provide a fast-loading and mobile-friendly website. This way, visitors don’t get frustrated waiting for pages to load.
Shopify has been making strides in improving website loading times, and they continue improving on it every year. You can rest assured knowing your shop will load quickly every time users visit your site.
SEO Friendly
Shopify is optimized for search engines and allows you to get more traffic and sales. The platform uses clean URLs and provides space to include keywords in page titles, helping you to boost rankings.
Shifting your store to Shopify can cause some confusion about your product URL. However, SEO will not be impacted, and each product page will maintain the same ranking. Even more, Shopify has introduced a useful function of setting 301 redirects if they don’t match with your current website.
Learn more about Best Practices for Migrating to Shopify in our recent blog post.
Easy Payment
Finding a trustworthy and efficient payment gateway is a major concern for an online retailer. If you want a service that gives your customers a wide range of payment options for your pricing model, Shopify is a good choice. It makes it simple for store owners to set up the payment gateway, including the Stripe payment option that eliminates the buyer's ability to make transactions with extra fees.
App Integrations
Integration with apps helps to reach scalability and customization for Shopify. It's especially great for selling because the seller can simply add other features to his store, so it's of much greater value. Also, the platform allows you to add your own templates and edit them as you wish.
Visibility
Shopify is a well-known company, and it offers merchants full visibility into their business through stats, reports, analytics, and more. Shopify also offers a web dashboard that will tell you how your store’s doing at all times.
With special plans, you can even track your orders with mobile notifications and review your viewers and buyers on Shopify.
Security
Shopify stores take care of personal and financial information about your customers to guarantee their safety. For real, the Shopify platform is reliable and secure, thanks to unlimited bandwidth and an automatic SSL certificate.
On top of that, the platform routinely reviews its system, modifying and improving its security features.
Robust Ecosystem
Shopify is a huge online community composed of customers and other affiliates. Experts help merchants and app developers to get what they need. Joining this community will give you access to plenty of marketplace solutions and the knowledge base to boost your sales and online presence.
Store Customization from Scratch
Once you decide to transfer your website to Shopify and choose a theme, be sure that Shopify provides you with this opportunity thanks to the pre-built theme editor. In this menu, you can alter colors, fonts, and sections.
This easy-to-use interface allows you to make quick customizations, which is key for advertising your new product or running a flash sale. Shopify Theme store offers a wide range of themes for your business to choose from and start selling.
Well, now you know why migrating to Shopify from another platform is so popular and what benefits it provides.
What Kind of Data Can Fit Migrating to Shopify Process?
You can export to Shopify various types of basic data:
- Products and product categories: All the main information about your product, including title, description, and SKU.
- Visuals of products: Everything related to the appearance of your product, meaning shape, size, and color.
- Data of orders: Product prices and order status of your inventory.
- Content on website pages: All the web pages about your businesses (like About Us and Blog).
- Images: Including those on the homepage and in the product descriptions.
- Integrations: Customer data from your CRM.
- Benefits: Marketing tools like discounts, coupons, etc.
If you’re cautious about losing data from third-party services used before, no worries — most brands have Shopify apps for data synchronization. And so there should be no data-related problems while migrating to Shopify.
Main Ways to Migrate to Shopify
Once you’ve made a decision to migrate to Shopify, you’ll see there are different ways to make it happen. The exact choice depends on your resources, knowledge, and the size of your store.
Using Third-Party Apps
If you decide to refer to third-party apps for Shopify website migration, you’ll get the solution for the simplified import of your product information and shopping cart. To find them, you should refer to Shopify AppStore and select an option for free or premium migration.
The greatest advantage of this method is simplicity. A third-party app will be running the entire migration process instead of you. However, if you decide to add some data this app doesn’t support, you can lose your data or be forced to migrate it manually, which may be inconvenient or risky.
Manual Migration
Manual Shopify website migration gives you full control over copying information from your online store to Shopify. However, this method is not convenient if you have a huge data load.
Also, the lack of technical knowledge may also cause difficulties for you. Follow this guide to migrating to Shopify so you can complete this task manually yet smoothly.
Configure Your Basic Setup Settings
Before you begin adding products and setting up payments, you'll need to complete a few tasks as an administrator:
- Products and product categories: All the main information about your product, including title, description, and SKU.
- Visuals of products: Everything related to the appearance of your product, meaning shape, size, and color.
- Data of orders: Product prices and order status of your inventory.
- Content on website pages: All the web pages about your businesses (like About Us and Blog).
- Images: Including those on the homepage and in the product descriptions.
- Integrations: Customer data from your CRM.
- Benefits: Marketing tools like discounts, coupons, etc.
Import Your Store’s Content and Data to Shopify
You have two ways to determine the data migration order: copying old content or using CSV files for manual transfer. For the right choice, the platform you migrate from also matters. For example, if you used Magento, it’s easier: Shopify has an integrated tool that helps you copy most of your product information.
In any case, the Shopify data migration matters. For convenience, complete importing certain sorts of data from one list before importing from another list. You can access your client’s transaction history and order status if done right.
Organize Your Product after Shopify Store Migration
- Check product descriptions and variations
- Create collections of categories
- Built drop-down menus and links to collections
- Update your product inventories regularly
Hiring Shopify Migration Experts
Finally, you can delegate the task of Shopify migration to an expert. This person has the required expertise and experience in handling problems and transferring data between different platforms.
If you need more information on the capabilities of such expert help, check out our overview of Shopify migration services.
How Should You Prepare for Shopify Store Migration?
Never ignore the discovery phase of the migration project. Pay special attention to the functionality of the admin panel of the source store. For this, it might be necessary to recreate some functionality modules from scratch — especially Shopify App, wherever possible.
Plan Carefully
If you don’t think your Shopify store migration procedure through, it will affect your source store and take extra time. Also, it’s important to backup your store data so that you can handle all your products during migration.
When considering maintenance mode, schedule the migration on the weekend, when the number of visitors to your store is at its lowest.
Find Store’s Access Details
Prepare the store’s URL and FTP credentials (for an open-source cart) and your shop’s API details (for migration from a hosted solution).
Migrate Your Store Data to Shopify
Last but not least, set up your source and target stores and choose the entities for demo migration. To complete this step, prepare URLs of the stores, generate the Security Token, and enter the API password. Also, consider the data types you want to migrate (not to forget anything important) and launch Free Demo Migration (if possible) to understand the process.
You may also be interested in How to Migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify
GenovaWebArt Experience in Migrating Online Store to Shopify
We at GenovaWebArt have implemented several projects related to migration from WooCommerce, WordPress, OpenCart, Magento, Prestashop to Shopify platform, Bigcommerce and outdated custom solutions, including transferring main store functionality and creating exclusive features for the platform. Mostly, we work with brands who are not satisfied with the limited functionality of their platforms or want to use up-to-date eCommerce opportunities from Shopify
For big established brands, we offer migration to Shopify Plus. For this service, it is critical to save the database of current clients and their interactions with the brand, including the purchase history. Frequently, we combine migration to Shopify with website redesigning to refresh and give it a new look and feel.
In 2018, we cooperated with Kit & Kin on brand migration from WooCommerce to Shopify. Beyond migrating business processes and client communication channels, we’ve established a unique subscription system for the brand. This way, we’ve ensured a smooth migration of existing clients to a new platform.
In 2022, we’re working with Zen Cart to Shopify migration, for clothing brand with over 400K monthly views. The brand has already overgrown its outdating platform, and we help it with re-platforming to Shopify. During the process, we update UI and UX and work on the complete redesign to make a client’s journey more convenient and intuitive.
For an Australian brand Workout Meals, we helped integrate extra online store functionality from Drupal to Shopify, their main eCommerce platform. By steadily increasing the available features, our Shopify plus app developers have established a custom ERP that saved tremendous time for the business owner and employees, letting them concentrate on development.
Additionally, our expertise extends to assist those looking to migrate from Wix to Shopify, ensuring a seamless transition without sacrificing functionality or data integrity.
Also, we help businesses migrate to Shopify from outdated platforms.
Also, we help businesses migrate to Shopify from outdated platforms. One of our clients was a distillery brand that moved from a platform designed in the 90s to Shopify and started using the innovative capabilities of Shopify POS. The platform’s old age didn’t prevent our Shopify migration experts from transferring an existing client base information, including contacts, order history, and products, to a new Shopify store.
Let’s Start Migrating to Shopify!
As you can see, Shopify migration is a wise move for online store owners, given its benefits and the number of great ways to complete this. Since Shopify is one of the world's most convenient and popular e-commerce platforms, we highly recommend our client to transfer to Shopify and enjoy this secure, scalable, and easy-to-use platform with plenty of integrated apps and a robust ecosystem.
