A brief guide to seamlessly strategizing your ecommerce platform migration process.

An important milestone in the growth of your ecommerce business is when you realize you have outgrown your current web platform and need to upgrade it. Often times first time site owners on a tight budget opt for low cost site options, because it seems like the most viable option at the time. These types of websites, however, start bursting at the seams once the business crosses a degree of success.

The process of migrating your current website might feel intimidating initially, because change isn’t always easy. However, following a defined process will surely make the experience seamless.

Advantages of Ecommerce Platform Migration
Before we move on to anything else, it’s only fair to analyze what are the advantages of ecommerce platform migration. Why would anyone go about the whole process? To list a few benefits are as follows:

1. More Optimized Mobile Experience:   With over 35% of ecommerce transactions occurring through mobiles, retailers simply cannot afford to overlook this. For late adopters, it is a great way to expand your horizons.

2. Quantify Marketing Initiatives: Ideally, it is crucial to have efficient marketing tools such as email marketing, landing page builders, built in SEO capabilities etc. integrated with your store to draw in new customers and engage existing ones. Platforms that fail to provide these solutions slow down your success which is why they should be upgraded.

3. Adapt to modern Merchandising Techniques: With increased competition, merchandising is advancing rapidly. All retailers are continually striving to provide customers a better shopping experience. In such a market, it is crucial that your platform is able to keep you up with modern techniques to improve your shopping experience.

4. Increased Reliability and Speed: 40% of customers abandon websites if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Also, sites going down on busy sales days is a tragic nightmare. Only the platforms that can perfectly align with your store requirements can keep you away from these nightmares.

5. Improved Business Agility: A great user experience is simply not enough to keep your store succeeding. An efficient and well integrated backend system too is equally important to boost your business. Even if you may be getting away with it now, in the long run, a poor backend business system makes it difficult for you to handle your operations and drastically hurts your chances of success.

Once you absorb the significance of these advantages and decide to migrate your ecommerce platforms, the time to define the roadmap of the whole process arrives. These things kept in mind, will make everything immensely easy for you and your development partner.

Important Things to Consider when Migrating

1. Choosing the Right Platform:There are a plethora of ecommerce platforms available with different versions of them. However, each platform and its versions are best suited for different store types. There are a variety of factors that need to be kept in mind before choosing the perfect ecommerce platform.
If in doubt, it is best to partner with an ecommerce development agency dealing in all ecommerce platforms , to help you make an informed decision.

2. Time of Migration: Ecommerce migration is not an easy task. So it is best to assume that the process would take at least six months to complete. Hence, do not migrate during your busiest season. Analyze your previous records and determine the season in which your traffic is minimum and schedule your migration accordingly.

3. 3rd Party Vendors: If you are using any 3rd Party Vendor solutions or integrations for your website, it is best to inform them beforehand to let them know about the shift. A majority of the time it won’t be a problem since most vendors are well aware of this situation and make sure that their product can work across various platforms.
However, some third party applications can be customized to efficiently integrate with different platforms. The integration of such applications can be done on your own. However, it is always advisable to get this done from a professional eCommerce development company. .

4. Data Sorting and Transfer: Ecommerce data and its structure is often very complex to be imported easily. It is one of the reasons why migration often takes a long time. Hence, it is best to strategize and sort out the data thereby ignoring the irrelevant one and importing only the crucial one. However, if all the data is required, it is best to choose the time of migration more wisely.

5. 301 Redirects: Using 301 redirects is a great practice since using it will transfer all the SEO power of your old URL to the new one. This will help you avoid the hassle of going through the whole procedure of regaining your search engine ranking from scratch and put you in a position to move up only from your current ranking.

6. Keep the Old Site: Not forever, but at least for a couple of months after the launch of the new site. This will give you sufficient time to make sure that you didn’t miss out any vital data, scripts or any other piece of information.

7. Soft Launch: A soft launch is a great strategy to test the new website in the real world environment. A soft launch will give you a chance to analyze any other changes that you might require to deliver a much better experience of your store.
Also, users are less critical about soft launches. If you launch your final site and problems arise with it in the real environment, users will be intensely critical about it and prefer not visiting it again. However, if informed that this is just the beta stage, they grow more tolerant expecting everything to be made perfect in the final version.

Finally, going through all the initial steps of launching your store while migrating to a different platform too will be immensely beneficial. This article here lists all those crucial steps to launch your ecommerce store . Going back to the basics will help you re-analyze and determine if there is any need for you to reconfigure your business model to make it even more successful.

The market waits for no one and creativity has no limits. Hence, all you have to do is to make sure to stay up to speed with both in order to travel the path of accomplishment.