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THE ECOMMERCE PLATFORM MIGRATION GUIDEBOOK www.cpcstrategy.com
THE ECOMMERCE
PLATFORM MIGRATION GUIDEBOOK
www.cpcstrategy.com
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 1: NEW TO ECOMMERCE PLATFORMS? QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF
How Many Products Do You Have? How Much Are You Willing To Spend? What Kind Of Functionality Do You Want In Your Stores?
PART 2: DEALING WITH STORE MIGRATION ECOMMERCE BUSINESS OWNER TESTIMONIALSTHINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN MIGRATINGRED FLAGS TO LOOK OUT FORBEST PRACTICES FOR MIGRATIONEVALUATING THE NEW SITE
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PART 1: NEW TO ECOMMERCE PLATFORMS? If this white paper landed in your hands (metaphorically speaking), you’re either new to brand name ecommerce platforms and shopping carts, you’re fed up with your current solution, or business is good and it’s simply time to upgrade.
No matter the situation, one thing is for sure: you’re not going to enjoy the platform migration process without the proper research. Choosing a platform is hard on its own, but transferring your entire existing store can be painful.
If you’re new to ecommerce platforms or are in the process of deciding which platform to switch to, then first things first: You need to dive into some self-assessment.
QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF: How many products do you have?
Not all platforms support an unlimited number of products. So if you manage a large online store of over 10,000 products, you can already rule out several mainstream platforms.
It should be noted that when it comes to open-source solutions, the number of products supported is typically not an issue (just about all support an “unlimited” number of products). BUT, there are many cases where having a huge inventory with a less functional open-source shopping cart results in significantly reduced site speed.
Let’s break down the hosted platform options available to you depending on your product count (of course, every plan here is still applicable to retailers with less than 1000 products depending on desired functionality)
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Volusion Mini & Bronze –100 to 1000 SKU Max $15 – $35/month
All Big Cartel plans – 300 SKU Max Free to $29.99/month
Bigcommerce Bronze, Silver, & Gold- 100 to 1000 SKU Max $24.95 – $79.95/month
Shopify Starter- 25 SKU Max $14/month
Magento Go Free, Get Going, Going Places, Go Beyond- 100 to 1000 Free - $65/month
3dcart Mini & Starter- 100 to 500 SKU Max $19.99 to $35.99/month
Less than 1,000 Products:
1,000 - 10,000 Products:
Volusion Silver & Gold- 2500 to 10000 SKU Max $65 - $125/month
3dcart Professional & Professional+ - 1000 to 5000 SKU Max $65.99 – $99.99/month
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How much are you willing to spend?
First, I’d like to clear the air about open-source solutions being free. Yes, you can indeed download these at no cost and have your developer make some minor tweaks. But the reality is that these shopping carts were made to be customized. They provide the framework, but you have to fill in the pieces.
Many of these open-source solutions make their money off of their extensions/app stores, and the most recent retailer I spoke to (who switched to Magento Community) said he easily spent $4,000 in extensions for added (and very specific) functionality.
With that said, let’s take a look at the cost of some of the most comparable hosted solution plans for medium –sized retailers (10,000+ products).
Yahoo! Stores- 50,000 SKU Max $39.95-$299.95/month
Volusion Platinum & Enterprise- Unlimited SKUs $195/month, N/A for Enterprise
Bigcommerce Platinum & Diamond- Unlimited SKUs $149.95-$299.95/month
Shopify Basic, Professional, Unlimited, & Enterprise $29-$179/month, N/A for Enterprise
Magento Go Anywhere- 10,000 SKU Max $125/month
Miva Merchant Boutique, Marketplace, & Warehouse- Unlimited SKUs $49.95-$129.95/month
3dcart Power Plan & Enterprise Solutions- Unlimited SKUs $129.99-$499.99/month
Amazon Webstores- Unlimited SKUs $39.99/month (+ transaction & processing fees)
+10,000 Products:
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It should be noted that I’ve received testimonials on how Bigcommerce and Magento Go are not ideal for big online stores (those with SKU counts in the 10,000’s).
If this list tells us anything , it’s that transaction fees are a real buzz kill, and their negative impact only rises as your store’s performance improves.
Amazon Webstores $39.99/month + transaction & processing fees (~2%)
To put this in perspective, a merchant clearing $100,050 in monthly revenue would have to pay an estimated $3,659.04/month. 98.9% of this are transaction-based fees.
Yahoo! Stores Professional $299.95/month + transaction fees (.75%)
To put this in perspective, a merchant clearing $100,000 in monthly revenue would have to pay an estimated $1049.95/month. Professional is recommended for merchants clearing more than $80,000/month.
Magento Enterprise $15,550/year, $77,990/year for Premium, ~$1300/month for standard
Bigcommerce Diamond $299.95/monthRelatively cheap apps, but most are based on monthly subscriptions
Volusion Platinum $195/monthApp prices are very comparable to those of Bigcommerce.
Shopify Unlimited $179/monthSlightly higher prices than the industry average for apps
Miva Merchant Warehouse $129.95/month
3dcart Power Plan $129.99
Magento Go Anywhere $125/month
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What kind of functionality do you want in your store? Any unique feature requests?
This is going to be the most limiting factor when you’re deciding on which store to choose. Below is a list of unique features that are commonly requested. Again, just about any open-source solution can be customized to include these with the help of a developer.
Forum
Trying to build a sense of community around your store? Forums are great for this functionality and for providing customer service. Unfortunately, this isn’t available as a standard feature for basically any hosted or open-source solution. For just about all open-source carts, you can purchase this as an extension, like this one for Magento. The process is clear for Bigcommerce and Shopify, and they can probably be applied to similar platforms. In most cases you will need to host a forum on a separate subdomain.
Gift Registry
Depending on your product category, a registry can be an essential feature for your store. There are several beta options available for Shopify, a module available for Yahoo, and a clear process for Volusion. But if you’re a typical baby or wedding registry store, perhaps the best option is 3dcart, which features a built-in gift registry for every one their plans.
Ratings/Reviews system
Surprisingly, this isn’t a standard feature for some mainstream solutions. Volusion, 3dcart, Bigcommerce, and Amazon Webstores all provide this functionality with ease while you’ll have to make separate purchases for ratings/reviews on Shopify and Yahoo. You can add this function easily on open-source carts.
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Blog
I highly recommend this versatile marketing tool for any retailer starting with a fresh store. However, the only mainstream platforms that offer this as a standard feature are 3dcart and Shopify.
Mobile Integration
This is a big one and really a requirement for retailers with high mobile conversion rates. Let’s look at your options here:
Miva Merchant Not standard; Available for $699
Amazon Webstores Not standard; Available from 3rd party providers
PrestaShop Can download a mobile theme for free
Yahoo! Stores Not standard; Available from 3rd party providers (here’s one)
Volusion Standard
Big Cartel Not standard; Available for some themes like this one
Shopify Standard
Magento Go Not standard; Can be added later
3dcart Standard
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PART 2: DEALING WITH STORE MIGRATION
Re-platforming shouldn’t be taken lightly because it can be time consum-ing, detrimental to sales numbers, and expensive. These days, businesses migrate platforms primarily for 2 reasons: budget and mobile integration.
A lot of bigger retailers will find they’d rather not be tied up with a host-ed platform because of being limited by the platform’s customer service and indebted with monthly payments (not to mention transaction fees).
Self-hosted solutions void all the hand holding involved with a hosted platform (see hosted vs. self- hosted). That’s why many bigger merchants are switching to Magento (about 26% of the Alexa Top 1M use Magento); you can download a capable software for free and pay for a bunch of extensions up-front.
ECOMMERCE BUSINESS OWNERS ON MIGRATION
The Retailers:
Daniel Passov Site: GreekU
Daniel is the founder of GreekU, a custom sorority and fraternity merchandise retailer. He founded the company in 2001.
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Cynthia Lizana
Site: TexCyn Wallets & TexCyn Wholesale
Cynthia Lizana began selling online on eBay as a hobby in 2004. It wasn’t long before she realized this could be a real business and quit her day job to sell full time on eBay. In 2009,Cynthia incorporated her business, Texcyngoods, Inc. Texcyngoods, Inc. sells handbags, wallets and other women’s accessories retail on their website, texcynwallets.com, Amazon and eBay; and wholesale on their website, texcynwholesale.com. Sales are forecast to reach $1 million this year. Texcyngoods, Inc. is located in San Antonio, TX and has four full time employees.
Tobi Skovron
Site: The Pet Loo
Tobi founded Pup-Pee Solutions, a thriving Pet Product Manufacturing business that has expanded globally through the commercial brand Pet Loo. In February 2013 Pup-Pee was acquired by Radio Systems Corpo-ration® and now sits under the umbrella of the PetSafe® group. Tobi’s success story was actually featured on the HLN network and he has been featured on Internet Retailer as well.
Questions
What’s your current ecommerce platform/shopping cart? What provider did you transfer from and why?
Daniel [per phone interview]: Daniel had 2 sites when starting out: one, GreekU, on a custom built content management system (CMS) with no ecommerce functionality and another, 123 Greek, on 3dcart. He wanted to merge the 2 sites and give GreekU ecommerce functionality. One of the unique features that he required was to allow his customers to fully customize and design their products. When choosing a platform, Daniel was looking for scalability, a well-established community, and an open-source solution. He ended up choosing Magento because it had all of the above as well as a large, reputable extension store.
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Cynthia: Currently have two stores with Volusion, www.texcynwallets.com and www.texcynwholesale.com. We switched from ChannelAdvisor. At the time, we just had the retail site, texcynwallets.com. We switched from CA because it was too expensive and did not do everything we were promised it would do. Their store option was not very robust, and we really wanted to give a standalone website a real try. I researched the various ecommerce web hosting sites, and narrowed my choices down to the two that were rated the best for overall usability and SEO. Those two were BigCommerce and Volusion. At the time, BigCommerce was not PCI Compliant and seemed to be having trouble getting their compliance certification. So I chose Volusion. The prices were very reasonable, the SEO options were excellent, and they had a lot of nice, free templates. Since then, we opened the wholesale site, texcynwholesale.com, on Volusion as well. We also sell on Amazon and eBay. We needed an inventory manager to pull all these sites together, so we chose Solid Commerce, which is one of the few inventory managers that will pull inventory from two different standalone websites, and it is completely integrated with Volusion, Amazon and eBay.
Tobi [per phone interview]: Tobi moved to Netsuite’s SuiteCommerce after having been on a very basic solution called Myob, which is basically the equivalent of QuickBooks for ecommerce. As the business grew, he needed a solution that was a great customer relationship manager (CRM) and highly accessible. Basically, Tobi was interested in one big hosted platform was very intrigued with Netsuite’s cloud technology. What were the biggest hassles / pain points for your business during the platform migration process? Daniel: Daniel’s biggest pain point was dealing with developers, who would often overpromise and under-deliver projects in terms of deadlines. The migration process took about a full year for Daniel even though he says 6 months would have been more realistic. In total, Daniel spent over $4000
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on extensions to get his store functionality just right. Figuring out how to tweak some extensions was also a challenge. Last, 301 redirects became
a big issue, and Daniel ended up having to run that multiple people to make sure all his links were correct.
Cynthia: The migration was mainly handled by an employee, although I was involved in the training. Just getting all the products loaded properly, and the pictures added, would be the biggest pain points. But I don’t remem-ber it being that difficult. When that employee left about a year later, I got hands on inside Volusion and was happy to discover a lot of options we weren’t using, but would be useful. I also found it very easy to customize the template with my little bit of HTML knowledge.
Tobi Skovron: When integrating with SuiteCommerce, Tobi had to deal with a pretty big learning curve. But overall, his platform migration experience was pretty seamless. NetSuite’s cloud technology awarded Tobi and his business a lot of freedom. Tobi was never worried about the site being compromised and full integration was quick. The biggest pain point about transferring to the cloud was that he needed to learn the new behaviors of the system (but that goes with just about every new platform transfer).
In retrospect, what aspects of migration do you wish you could have done differently?
Daniel: In retrospect, Daniel would have set more timelines and milestones for his developers to hit. Overall, he would have been more hands on as a project manager to ensure that the migration process was more efficient.
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Cynthia: I should have been more hands on and learned about all the options available from the start, rather than relying on my employee so much. I have never regretted switching to Volusion. They have an excellent platform, and great customer service.
Tobi: Tobi was very hands on and very invested in the whole transfer process so it was intense for him. But in terms of just the platform migration process, it was relatively seamless and pain-free.
THE KEY TAKEAWAY HERE
Retailers find success with platform migration when they approach it hands-on and are involved in the process. This way, overall project management is more efficient: deadlines are met on time, progress is noted, and integration goes exactly to the owner’s specifications.
THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN MIGRATING FROM A CUSTOM SOLUTION OR HOSTED SOLUTION
Speed
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Speed kills in ecommerce, and this should be one of the first aspects you research when choosing a destination platform.
Yottaa, a site speed monitoring and optimizing service, warns that because ecommerce stores are often loaded with images, Java plugins, and various 3rd party integrations, 80-90% of the load time is attributed to the front-end (which is really up to the shopper’s browser), the speed esti-mates that platforms will give are typically just for the backend speed, which is an almost negligible margin of the overall ecommerce site speed.
To avoid being lured in by the platforms’ misleading numbers, do your own due diligence by testing your website speed at WebsiteTest and identifying which are the most significant factors to your site performance.
Custom Extensions
There are a couple aspects of extensions that you should consider when identifying a quality destination platform. First, does the platform or shop-ping cart offer all of the unique store functionalities (that you would have to add on) that you want in the extension store? Not all extension stores were created equal, and some of the industry’s best include Magento’s and PrestaShop’s. Now compare this to VirtueMart’s extension store. You’ll quickly learn that it pays to be backed by a commercialized, mainstream solution. Which is brings us to our next point…
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Thorough documentation and customer support for extensions are a huge plus. Without them, you’re essentially gambling by putting all of your trust in your developer to be able to understand the code and install it on your site. Some extensions stores who don’t offer support or documentation have been called scams, and this is a sentiment I’ve seen particularly with OpenCart’s module store.
Third, you should consider the overall quality of the actual extension store. How extensive is it? Does it include extensions from a lot of 3rd party developers? Do you have numerous options for the same functionality? “Very, yes, and yes” are the ideal answers here. From what I’ve seen, Magento Connect is tops when it comes to ecommerce extension marketplaces.
Last, be sure you have the web development resources to implement the extensions you’ll want to add before buying them. Practically all modules and extensions that you would want to add to your site will require programming expertise.
Time of Year
Rule of thumb: Don’t migrate during your busy season. For most retailers, this is Q4, but for school supply retailers or seasonal product retailers, your busy season may be sometime else. It’s important to set aside 6 months (after having researched which platform you want) for the
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migration process to start and complete, and this is a rough but reasonable estimate for how long the process will take.
When migrating stores, you never know if there will be hiccups somewhere in the process that may cause your store to go offline or for a good chunk of your product pages to go missing. For this reason, it’s a good idea to take those risks outside of your busy season so that you can still get the most out of it.
Web Hosting
If you’re not switching web hosts along with your ecommerce solution, this isn’t applicable to you. But if this is the case, you should check and double-check that you have your domain name on lockdown. It’s possible that your last solution registered your domain name for you, so you’ll have to contact them and “procure” it from them if this is the case.
To check your domain name registration, go to DomainTools and look up your site. Your domain name should be there and ideally, you will be listed as the domain name administrator and be able to edit
3rd Party Vendors
Another significant step early on in the re-platforming process is assessing how it will affect your 3rd part vendors / integrations. You should always contact your vendors and let them know which solution you’re switching to so that they can weigh in on how it may potentially affect your service.
I’ll use CPC Strategy as an example. We work with over 200 retailers and have experienced our fair share of replatformers. Specific to our service, we always want to know how it will affect how well the client can export their product data feed since the process is different for every platform. For example, Shopify has proved difficult for us, but Magento feed exports always work seamlessly.
These minor factors can really affect your existing relationships with 3rd party services.
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Security
SSL (secured socket layer) certificates and PCI compliance are required for reliable ecommerce websites. Odds are you already have an SSL certificate and PCI compliance if you accept credit card payments, so the complication is transferring the SSL to a new server or seeing if your destination platform will require that you purchase a new one.
Data Transfer This is the technological essence of platform migration. In general, the more complex your product data / product data structure is, the more difficult it will be to seamlessly import into another platform. Exporting customer data and order history is another battle, but you should assess whether you will even need order history on your next platform.
If your resources are tied, an interesting option may be Cart2Cart, an automated shopping cart migration service. Check out a review of it here.
RED FLAGS TO LOOK OUT FOR
Customer Support Structure
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Be thorough in your research on what your destination platform offers (and doesn’t offer) in terms of customer support and for onboarding clients. You can do this on the platform/cart website, but really the best place to gain insight on a solution’s support quality is through customer testimonials and reviews.
Be cognizant of the availability of your solution’s support, too. Is it 24/7? Are they only available through email? Do they function on a ticketing support structure? These factors will determine whether their customer support will fit your business’s schedule and preferences.
A good, early measure of the destination solutions support quality is how willing and helpful they are with your migration. There’s a pretty significant red flag if the platform isn’t even willing to help on-board new business.
Lack of Updates
For open-source solutions, software should be updated regularly. This isn’t to say that you should update every time there’s something new (this often causes complications with custom extensions), but it shows that the solution provider is on top of their stuff. You can see below that Magento updates every few months, whereas ZenCart likes to take some more time in between.
Frequent updates can indicate that the solution provider is dedicated to providing their clients up-to-date ecommerce features and ironing out bugs. The same can be applied to hosted platform solutions, except they should be updating for you.
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BEST PRACTICES FOR MIGRATION
301 redirects
A 301 redirect is a signal to search engines that an old URL should now be directed to a new, desired URL. The idea is that this new, desired URL will now have all, or practically all, the SEO power that the old URL had. I won’t even try to dive into the logistics of 301 redirects and SEO, but if you want to learn more about them, check out this Moz explanation.I’ve received a testimonial from a retailer who said that they switched to Bigcommerce and it resulted in all the URLs having to be changed through 301 redirects. That’s pretty normal, but the problem is that he lost all of his SEO value and his organic rankings tanked. This was probably due to slight errors in his PHP and not having it reviewed over many times.
Assistance from Destination Platform One of the talking points when discussing a deal with your destination (hosted) platform should be support for your actual store migration. If you’re going to be making a drastic move to their platform, they should at least be on hand to troubleshoot any issues you have when transferring data, choosing extensions, etc.
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This white glove service is typically not going to be offered for merchants who don’t ask because in reality, platforms don’t like to talk about the nitty gritty details of store migration because they know it’s challenging work. It’s the equivalent of a real estate agent telling you about all the pitfalls of an apartment and how difficult it’s going to be to get all your furniture up the stairs and through the door.
Test Everything
Before launching your store to the public, your site should go through sev-eral test runs. In addition to just simple test orders, you really should be testing every single possible combination of potential shoptper actions: different order sequences, creating accounts, returns, chat, navigating product and category pages, placing products in the cart, checkout, etc.
Be sure to do this in multiple browsers, too.
Don’t Delete the Old Site
You never know, you may have missed some vital pieces of information during the data transfer process. Keep the old site at least until you can archive all the information.
Email Functionality
2 things: Do everything you can to keep track of all your email lists, both internally and externally, during the migration process. Switching servers can typically complicate this.
Second, though email marketing is an effective retargeting strategy, it may be a good idea to not send out emails a couple days to a few weeks before the new site launch. This may be because a shopper opening up an old email may be directed to the old, unusable site if there were some lapses with the page redirects.
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Launching the New Site
Although most of the time site launches are immediate, it’s safe to set aside 1-2 days for the new site to fully launch. Create a maintenance page for your old site along with an estimated time when shoppers should check back.
Logistically, you would have to update your old DNS records and set a time-to-live (TTL), which is typically about 5 minutes. After that, shoppers should be redirected to your new site when searching for your domain.
Determining the live date of your new site also requires some strategy. It may be best to set it for the middle of the week (vs. the weekend), when you and your destination platform have full staff to help you trouble-shoot any unforeseen issues.
Keeping Your SEO in Check
Aside from the standard 301 Redirects, there a couple more technical aspects of maintaining your stores SEO, including:
Creating a robots.txt file: makes search engine crawling more efficientChanging your address in Google Webmasters ToolsAvoiding canonicalization errors
If most of this sounds like gibberish to you, check out this article that outlines these SEO migration best practices.
Internally, Don’t Silo Store Migration in One Department
Now more than ever, ecommerce store migration is a full-scale effort rather than just the responsibility of the tech department. Every relevant department should be involved because the new site may affect their existing processes, especially marketing. Making every major stage and milestone of the store migration process transparent to everybody can ensure that the transfer goes smoothly internally.
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EVALUATING THE NEW SITE
Traffic / Traffic Sources
Immediate changes in traffic are negligible, but you should analyze at least the 30 day prior and 30 day post-launch traffic numbers. This could tell you a number of things. First, your traffic may be the same but perhaps your traffic sources are different. For example, you may seem significant drop in organic search traffic post-launch, and this may tell you that there’s been a reasonable decline in your SEO and overall Google/Bing rankings. Changes in direct traffic should ideally be higher, as it may reflect that shoppers are taking mental note of your new site.
Second, a significant drop in overall traffic may tell you that you may have some broken links out there. This wouldn’t be uncommon, but it’s important to quickly identify the cause of any major fluctuations in your traffic and traffic sources.
Revenue Any changes to your overall traffic or traffic makeup should be reflected in overall revenue generated as well. It’s possible that if traffic is about the same but revenue drops significantly, certain factors to your site may be affecting the quality of traffic coming to your site. Additionally, certain aspects of your checkout process also directly affect your before and after revenue numbers.
Changes to Conversion Rate This could be the most telling metric when comparing your before and after launch effects. What’s important to note here is how customers are navigating through checkout differently if there are any significant changes to your CR (good or bad). It could be that your CR actually dropped and that your shoppers are bouncing (exiting your site) at a specific point. These subtle findings need to be caught and evaluated early on.
