Migrating from Magento to Shopify: A Game Changer for Your eCommerce

Magento is an open-supply eCommerce platform that has been a choice for a large of online businesses for over a decade. Nevertheless, along with technology innovation and customer expectancies rising time by time, many Magento store owners have faced challenges, namely performance issues, high maintenance costs, and restricted flexibility abilities.

These pain points have led to a growing demand for Magento business owners to have alternative eCommerce platform solutions. Considered one of them is Shopify/Shopify Plus, which has emerged as a compelling alternative platform for Magento/Adobe commerce.

Shopify is a cloud-based eCommerce platform founded in 2004, it has rapidly grown to be a leading eCommerce platform solution with more than 1.75 million users all over the world. It comes with a user-friendly interface, rich features, and scalable capabilities, making it a good choice for merchants looking for a seamless online selling platform.

Let’s delve into What is migrating from Magento to Shopify, Why should do and How to do it in the article below.

Understanding of Migrating from Magento to Shopify

Migrating from Magento to Shopify is the migration of your current eCommerce website on the Magento / Adobe Commerce platform and its associated data to the powerful and user-friendly Shopify / Shopify Plus platform.

Whilst Magento and Shopify Plus are released to support different business needs, the key differences lie in their architecture, scalability, and ease of use. Magento is a self-hosted, open-source platform that offers extensive customization options but requires significant technical understanding and resources. Shopify, on the other hand, is a cloud-based, fully-hosted solution that prioritizes simplicity, scalability, and a user-friendly experience.

Why Should You Migrate from Magento to Shopify/Shopify Plus?

While working on a Magento website, there are several issues online store owners faced, that led to the decision to migrate their Magento website and how Shopify/Shopify Plus can address these challenges.

• Website Performance Issues

Magento requires good RAM, CPU power, and disk space to run smoothly. Therefore, if there is any issue with the server, your Magento store can suffer slow processing times and increased page loading times. Moreover, Magento has specific server requirements and recommended configurations for good site performance, if the server is not configured accurately, it can lead to slow performance on your Magento website.

Also, if your website has a large database, it takes time to retrieve and manipulate the data, especially in the high traffic volume times. All of these can lead to a negative user experience and potential loss of sales.

Shopify, on the other hand, is a cloud-based and hosted platform that is secure and designed for optimal performance and scalability. Its servers are optimized for eCommerce, ensuring fast page loading times and the ability to handle surges in traffic without affecting performance.

• High Maintenance and Development Costs

Maintaining a Magento website can be cost-consuming, requiring dedicated hosting, frequent updates, and skilled developer resources for custom integrations, configurations, and optimizations. These recurring costs can quickly add up, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

Shopify’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) model offers a lower cost of ownership and ease of management. With Shopify, business owners can avoid expensive hosting fees, and the platform’s user-friendly interface gives users easy store management without requiring extensive technical skills.

• Limited Customization and Flexibility

While Magento offers extensive customization options, achieving unique requirements often involves complex code modifications and third-party extensions. This can lead to compatibility issues, performance degradation, and increased development costs.

Shopify is easy to use even with a non-tech-savvy owner, you can add more features to your stores on your own from the app store. Shopify app store has more than 8,000 apps and add-on features. Add-on features can be paid for, but there are also a lot that are free. Thus, store owners can easily extend their store’s functionality and tailor it to their needs.

• Security Vulnerabilities and PCI Compliance

Ensuring secure transactions and maintaining PCI compliance is crucial for any eCommerce business. However, Magento’s open-source nature and frequent security patches can make it challenging to stay up-to-date and compliant.

Shopify, on the other hand, prioritizes security and PCI compliance. The platform is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, ensuring that all transactions are processed securely. Additionally, Shopify’s dedicated security team continuously monitors and updates the platform to protect against vulnerabilities and threats.

Apart from the above reasons to choose Shopify or Shopify Plus to migrate your website, there are many other reasons such as:

• Superior direct support of Shopify: One of the most famous reasons that people move from Magneto to Shopify is that Magneto doesn’t have a direct support system.  As a result, while running shops, if you have any issues, you will not receive in-time support from Magneto, which leads to sales losses. Meanwhile, Shopify can solve this problem with a 24/7 support system.
• Theme Diversity: While Magneto only has six theme options, Shopify could provide you with tons of themes, such as the Eurus theme,… You can freely choose the theme that fits with your stores, products, and style. Shopify themes come in a wide range of prices, and it offers free theme options as well.
• Appropriate for both small-scale and large-scale stores: Shopify supports your store even if you only own a few products. On the other hand, Magento only supports large stores.

How to Migrate from Magento to Shopify/Shopify Plus: 2 Methods

There are two methods for migrating from Magento to Shopify:

1. Manual Migration.
2. Hire a Magento to Shopify Migration Service / an eCommerce Expert.

Method 1: Migrating from Magento to Shopify/Shopify Plus Manually

The process of moving from Magento to Shopify manually is daunting and not easy at all. To make sure your migration checklist is fully completed, let’s break it into 3 phases, which are before, during, and after migration. Discover this section below for more details. 

Migrate from Magento to Shopify Checklist Before Migration

Do not jump into the action of migrating from Magento to Shopify immediately because there are some things you must set up first.

#1. Assess Your Current Magento Store

Before switching to Shopify, you need a thorough review of your current Magento store. Make sure that you know clearly about current categories, products, customer data, and order history. This step will ensure that you will miss nothing important in the migration process.

#2. Create a Backup of Your Magento Store

One thing on the Magento to Shopify migration checklist is to create backup data for your Magento store. This step is to ensure that all your company’s files and data are protected from being lost in the event of a transfer failure. It does not matter whether you create data backups manually or automatically. Essential information such as product descriptions, photos, customer data, and purchase history should be taken into consideration while creating backups.

Follow these steps to create backups:

Step 1: Open your Magento store, then scroll down to the Magento admin dashboard section.

Step 2: Click on Systems. In the Tools section, you choose Backups.

Step 3: Select the backup type, including “Database Backup“, “Media Backup“, and “Database and Media” backup.

Step 4: Enter the file name, choose the file location, and start the backup process.

#3. Define your migration goals and priorities

Before learning about the Magento to Shopify migration checklist, let’s set a transparent goal that you want to achieve. In other words, what motivates you to make this transfer, such as greater functionality, superior usability, or cutting-edge additions?

The reason you need to clarify the goals and priorities is that it will affect your Shopify plan. It will decide which information is important and which is less important. Each goal will fit into one plan, and it is the key to helping you conquer it.

#4. Choose the Right Shopify Plan

After understanding your goals and priorities, you need to choose the right Shopify pricing plan. You can compare the different Shopify plans based on your income, the needs of your business, and the data needed to move.

First, choose a plan that fits your products, the number of visitors you expect, and your plans for growth in the future. Different kinds of plans are offered to meet the needs of everyone.

Shopify now provides 3 pricing plans, which are Basic, Shopify, and Advanced:

• Basic: It is appropriate for individuals and small business
• Shopify: Small businesses should choose it because it offers more professional reporting and more staff accounts.
• Advanced: It is the best choice for medium to large businesses because you can own custom reporting and the lowest transaction fees.

Moreover, Shopify offers a Shopify Plus plan that is the best fit for more complex businesses.

#5. Set up your Shopify store

Before understanding the Magneto to Shopify migration checklist, first and foremost, you need to have a Shopify store. It is not complicated, so you can do it by yourself. Please strictly follow this guideline.

Step 1: Search “Shopify” on the web browser and go to the Shopify homepage.

Step 2: Write your email address and click on “Start free trial.“

Step 3: A lot of questions pop up on the screen; you should answer them all to personalize your Shopify store. Or, you can click on “Skip All“, it depends on you.

That’s all! Now you own a Shopify store and can start Magento to Shopify data migration.

During the Magento to Shopify Migration Checklist

After completing all the preparation steps, you can start migrating from Magento to Shopify. This section will give you a comprehensive migration checklist. Check it out carefully.

#1. Export Magento Data

When it comes to migration checklist, exporting data from Magento is one of the most important things. You should export the product data, customer data, and order data.

• Export product data: Exporting product data is a crucial step when migrating products from Magento to Shopify. This process involves gathering comprehensive information about each product, including images, product descriptions, prices, and other essential attributes.
• Export customer and order data: All the names, emails, and orders of former customers should be exported to maintain the relationship.

To export data, you follow these steps: Magento Admin Panel > System > Data Transfer > Export. Now you only need to select entity type, which means the type of data you want to export, such as “products”, “customers”, “orders”, etc. We highly recommend that you export data with CSV files.

#2. Design and Theme Migration

The next thing in the Magento to Shopify migration checklist is the design and theme migration:

• Choose a Shopify theme that matches your brand identity and customer expectations
• Customize the theme to fit your store’s layout, colors, fonts, and images
• Transfer your logo, favicon, and other assets to Shopify
• Optimize your theme for mobile devices and SEO

Check out: 15+ Best Shopify Themes for SEO to Drive More Traffic (Free & Premium)

#3. Functionalities and Features

The next one in the Magento to Shopify migration checklist is to check functionalities and features:

• Evaluate the need for third-party apps on Shopify: Finding the right apps that can replace or copy the functions of Magento extensions is very important when moving from Magento to Shopify. For example, “Google Analytics by Shopify” replaces “Magento’s analytic extensions”, “Klaviyo“ replaces “Magento’s email marketing extensions” or “Shopify Payments“  replaces “Magento’s payment extensions”. 

Check now: Best Email Marketing Shopify Apps for Efficient Email Campaigns

• Configure payment gateways on Shopify: After the migration is done smoothly, the Shopify store’s payment gateway settings need to be changed. To make sure customers can easily place orders, you should make sure that all of the payment options that have been set up work. Also, it’s important to keep shipping options up to date because not doing so could cause problems with shipping estimates being off or goods in transit being delivered late. Setting up shipping rates for different countries or places is part of this update.

Discover now: Shopify Payment Gateway – The Wise Choice To Improve Customer Experience

#4. SEO and URL Redirects

When moving from Magento to Shopify, you need to carefully handle URL redirects and structures to keep your search engine rankings and make sure users have a good experience. If you do URL migration the right way, your website will keep its search engine exposure and authority, which will keep you from losing any organic traffic.

By carefully mapping and moving URLs, you can lower the risk of broken links, make it easier for crawlers to find your site, and keep it up and running while the platform changes. For best search engine exposure, keep your meta tags, descriptions, and structured data up to date.

To optimize SEO, you can follow this guideline:

• Change the URLs, meta titles, and descriptions for your pages and goods.
• Research keywords to find those important to the people you want to reach.
• You might want to get SEO apps to help you get things done faster and make sure you’re on the right track.

#5. Magento to Shopify Data Migration

Once you have exported the data from your Magento store, it is very important that you then import that data into your Shopify store. During this step, all the information about the products, customers, orders, and other important things from the saved file will be imported into your Shopify database.

Here’s what you need to do to get the info into Shopify:

• Sign in to your Shopify account. In Shopify Admin, go to Settings > Import.
• Pick the Data You Want to Import: Shopify has a section called “Import” that lets you add different kinds of info. You should choose the right choice for the data you want to import, like orders, products, or customers.
• Put the Exported File online: When you see the “Upload file” button, click it and choose the data file that you saved from your computer.
• Map Data Field: Once you’ve uploaded the file, Shopify will ask you to connect the data fields from the file to the right fields in your store. This step makes sure that the data is aligned properly and added to the right parts of your store.
• Run the Import: Now you can click “Import” to start the nearly last step in the Magento to Shopify data migration.

#6. Testing and Quality Assurance

Testing and quality assurance are important in the migration checklist because they will ensure that your store won’t encounter any problems. Before you launch your Shopify store to the public, make sure that all of the data, features, and connections that you moved are fully tested and confirmed.

Domain testing is one necessary step. You need to connect your old Magento domain to the Shopify store so that SEO works better. One thing to take into consideration is to unlock the domain before you move it.

To transfer the domain, you go to Shopify admin, then click on Settings > Domain > Transfer Domain. To register, all you have to do is type in the previous domain name and then pay for it.

After the Magento to Shopify Migration Checklist

After completing moving to Shopify from Magento, let’s do the following things:

#1. Announce the migration to customers and stakeholders

Notify your customers and stakeholders that the migration is complete and invite them to explore your new site. You can also offer them a discount code or a gift to encourage them to make a purchase. You can also ask them for feedback on your new site and how you can improve it further.

#2. Continuously monitor the site for any issues and address them promptly

Keep a close eye on the performance measures of your new Shopify store, such as how fast it loads and how quickly the server responds. Use smart optimizations to improve speed, usability, and the quality of interactions with users as a whole.

Method 2: Hire a Magento to Shopify Migration Service

While there’s no cost to migrate from Magento to Shopify manually, it can be a complex and time-consuming process, especially when dealing with a large product catalog and intricate data structures. If the checklist above of how to migrate from Magento to Shopify bothers you a lot, there is another choice: hire an expert team or a Magento to Shopify migration service to help you with the migrating process without any doubt losing your valuable data.

With more than 11 years of experience in eCommerce site development and with many successful projects and happy customers, BSS Commerce proves itself as a trusted partner to help any businesses with their eCommerce site development. And migration service is not an exception. We will cover all the work to seamlessly move your site from Magento to the Shopify platform. 

Why is BSS Commerce’s Magento to Shopify migration service?

With years of experience in successful migrations, BSS Commerce stands out for its unique selling points:

1. Expertise & Experience: Customers are concerned a lot with their data safety and smooth data moving during the migration process. They are afraid of losing data or interruption in the switching process. Being a trusted partner with many companies, with expert certifications in both Magento and Shopify and more than a decade of experience working in the eCommerce industry, BSS Commerce has a proven track record of seamless migrations, ensuring minimal downtime, data loss, and errors.

2. Time-Saving and Efficient Migration Processes: BSS Commerce has a clear and straightforward migration process to follow, providing comprehensive migration service from requirement gathering, planning, execution, delivery, and ongoing support.

3. No Additional Costs and No Time Over: In the Discovery & Proposal phase, the team will monitor the website and then provide a transparent proposal of the migration costs and timeline before starting, eliminating any additional fees and ensuring timely project completion.

4. Post-migration Support and maintenance: To ensure the site works well after the migration, BSS Commerce not only supports customers throughout the migration process, they offers long-term support and maintenance services even after the migration is complete, ensuring your Shopify or Shopify Plus store runs smoothly.

By partnering with BSS Commerce for your Magento to Shopify/Shopify Plus migration, you can rest assured that your eCommerce business is in capable hands, poised for growth and success on the robust Shopify platform. You can contact BSS Commerce’s Shopify Migration Services to get your work done.

Migrating from Magento to Shopify – Conclusion

Migrating from Magento to Shopify Plus is a strategic decision for businesses seeking a more robust, scalable, and user-friendly eCommerce solution. While Magento has been a popular choice for years, its challenges, such as performance issues, high maintenance costs, and limited flexibility, have led many merchants to explore alternatives like Shopify.

Shopify and Shopify Plus, by prioritizing performance, security, and ease of use, empower businesses to focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving growth.

BSS Commerce Shopify believes that the above information of the Magento to Shopify migration checklist makes the process easier for you.

Magento to Shopify Migration – Frequently Asked Questions

1. How much does it cost to migrate from Magento to Shopify?

The cost of migrating from Magento to Shopify can vary depending on several factors, including the size and complexity of your store, the migration method chosen (manual or professional service), and additional customizations or integrations if required. Manual migrations can be more cost-effective for smaller stores, meanwhile, larger or more complex migrations may require the expertise of professional migration services, which can incur higher costs.

2. How long does it take for a Magento to Shopify migration?

The timeline for a Magento to Shopify migration can range from a few weeks to several months, depending on the store’s size, complexity, and the migration method chosen. Manual migrations for smaller stores may take 2-4 weeks, while larger or more complex migrations by professional migration services can take 2-6 months or longer.

3. Are my SEO rankings affected during the migration?

If the migration is executed properly, your SEO rankings should not be significantly impacted. Professional migration services follow best practices to preserve your existing SEO efforts, including redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts on Shopify. However, it’s essential to monitor your rankings and website traffic during and after the Magento to Shopify/Shopify Plus migration to address any potential issues.

4. Do I need to update my payment gateways and shipping methods after migrating to Shopify?

Yes, during the migration process, you will need to set up your payment gateways and shipping methods within the Shopify platform. While some integrations may carry over seamlessly, others may require reconfiguration or the use of alternative apps or extensions available in the Shopify App Store.