eCommerce migration best practices: 6-Steps for a smooth transition

Are you facing issues with your eCommerce site or store? Some examples are poor performance, mobile optimization, errors in payment gateway, or security vulnerabilities. It must be hitting on your business operation or making you fall behind competitors. Here is your time to switch for platform migration! You can also refer to the process as eCommerce re-platforming to transfer site data, website content, and updated integrations. Migrating your existing eCommerce website can be a big decision. It requires extra time and effort.

Table of Contents

Here, for complete guidance, follow this comprehensive blog to understand how to make this transition simple while saving costs and adding benefits.

Why do businesses opt for eCommerce migration?

Traditional e-commerce websites might look like product-selling platforms, but digital transformation follows key trends of social e-Commerce, customer support services, personalization, and voice search capabilities. It can transform the outlook for back-end management to front-end operations, so businesses are bound to consider site migration to grow their online store.

eCommerce Migration can be done in multiple ways:

Platform-to-Platform: It can be transitioning from one SaaS platform to another, like migrating from Shopify to Magento Cloud
Monolithic to Headless: It decouples front-end from back-end to allow flexibility and support agile development for third-party APIs.
Monolithic to Microservices: It can break down bundled operations for architecture to function independently and manage services to communicate via APIs.
Phased Migration: It is migrating specific sections or modules over a set of timelines to minimize disruptions.

Let’s outline some possible reasons why your business should opt for eCommerce migration:

Updating UI/UX

Most consumers prefer to explore online store optimization with fast navigation and make it visually appealing. It can be frustrating to be stuck between confusing navigation, poor optimization, and a lengthy checkout process. It can be a possible reason for site migration to improve user experience by adding new product pages with better performance and speed.

Limited features

For seamless shopping experiences, eCommerce sites or stores are constantly upgrading by adding features of product categories, checkout, order tracking, security, and compliance. So, businesses are considering platform migration to stay competitive with innovations.

Security and compliances

Data protection and security compliance could be reasons for migration. Several factors that you can consider can be authentication, secure file transfer, security plugins, backup or recovery, and payment gateways. Integrating with the new platform can provide updated security practices and tools.

Cost-effective solutions

Migration to the platform can save a bunch of additional costs and expenses like licensing fees, integration expenses, hosting, security patches, and upgrade expenses. You can look at multiple platforms and calculate eCommerce migration expenses with total ownership costs to build a comparison.

Poor performance

In the era of digital transformation, if your eCommerce site shows errors, slower site speed, and weak responsiveness, it will show bad experiences with a high bounce rate. So, businesses that are relying on older websites or lack online store optimization are now migrating to a fully customized e-commerce platform to resolve scalability and stability issues.

6-Steps for implementing platform migration

eCommerce migration can result in favorable changes to grow your online business. It can improve security, cost optimization, and scalability while offering a user-friendly experience to the users. But how do you implement it? Here are 6 simple steps to follow for a subtle transition:

Step 1:Set goals and objectives

As you head to start your eCommerce re-platforming, it should start with a precise assessment of your business needs. Setting up a goal as you aim for better performance cost or features, as well as setting a budget and timelines, will make it easier to migrate to a new e-commerce platform with the best consultant.

Step 2: Select an ideal eCommerce platform

You can find a variety of e-Commerce platforms to aim for better scalability choose from BigCommerce, Wix, Shopify, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, Big Cartel, Square, and OpenCart. Find a suitable one that can be optimized for your business needs.

Step 3: Backup stored data

You can proceed with transferring key data like product details, past orders, and customer information in order to ensure data integrity and security. Also, you can strategize with a migration checklist and handle data discrepancies to simplify the complex process.

Step 4: Design new site & integrate features

It is time to design your new eCommerce store with suitable UI/UX using retrieved data. You can integrate customized features of payment gateways, inventory management tools, or CRM systems. Also, check for compatibility and whether it works for the chosen platform migration or not.

Step 5: Conduct Audit, SEO, and Testing

Quality assurance can be a key measure for eCommerce migration. You can integrate a new platform to pass through an audit assessment, SEO optimization, and performance testing. It helps to identify bugs before deployment and resolve them.

Step 6: Launch and communicate

Once everything is aligned with your eCommerce platform, conduct a final review and go for a successful launch. Also, you can update and share with existing customers through social media updates, email newsletters, WhatsApp marketing, and other sources.

Top challenges for e-Commerce site migration

Digital transformation provides a series of tools and software for site migration that might make it an easy process. However, there are certain challenges you might face while migrating your existing eCommerce solution to a new platform. Here is a list of challenges:

Different data set

One of the challenges for eCommerce migration is handling multiple data sets, such as product info, customer data, and order history. Due to the absence of an efficient migration process, it might increase the risk of data duplication and missing details that affect business operations.

Feature complexities

What if you successfully deployed a platform that does not support features of custom development or third-party plugins? Such a terrific situation! To avoid this, you can search for new features and look for reconfiguration to select alternatives so as not to miss any useful feature post-site migration.

SEO and traffic

It is crucial to ensure that your business’s online store optimization works well otherwise, migration will not help with ranking. You can focus on handling URL redirects and preventing broken links by fixing meta tags, alt texts, and canonical tags to prevent a drop in organic traffic.

Product categories

It is crucial to assess whether your eCommerce store has been mapped for all product categories before migration. So, consider placing all products into the right tabs of home essentials, decor, groceries, apparel, or accessories for complete migration.

Be ready for smooth site migration!

Strategy-building and precise configuration will support the setup of your new eCommerce migration live! Having experts by your side and trusting reliable and experienced partners will help you overcome quick and efficient platform integration. Regardless of the options available to choose from, the best eCommerce platform, you can vouch to deliver the best customer shopping experiences with fast and quality checkout experiences and exploring features for site navigation.