If you’re here, chances are you’re looking for a smoother, more powerful e-commerce experience from Shopify. One of the key reasons behind Shopify’s growing Gross Merchandise Volume is its user-friendliness, extensive customization options, and ease of integration.
But before you can fully access all of Shopify’s benefits, you must migrate everything without sacrificing your data, customers, or sales. It might seem like a tall order to move your entire website from CoreCommerce to Shopify; however, the process doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds.
A botched migration can cause broken links, disappearing products, and disgruntled shoppers. The good news? When done right, moving from CoreCommerce to Shopify can be a relatively stress-free process.
Let’s break down how to move your store efficiently, ensuring everything—from products to customer data—makes it to Shopify without issues.
1. Prepare Your CoreCommerce Store
Before migrating to Shopify, take some time to clean the house in your current store. Chances are, you have outdated product listings or inactive customer accounts that you don’t need to bring over to Shopify. It will only slow down the process by adding unnecessary data.
Start by going through your product catalog. Delete anything you no longer sell and verify the accuracy of all product descriptions, pricing, and images.
Next, look at your customer database. If there are users who haven’t purchased in years (or longer), ask yourself if you need to import their information into your new store. The less customer data you bring over, the easier it will be to manage your new Shopify site.
Finally, ensure that all order history and transaction data are accurate. If you have orders in CoreCommerce with missing details or other problems, now is the best time to deal with them. A clean CoreCommerce store will make an easier transition so that all the clean data can be imported into Shopify without surprises down the road.
If you find doing all this challenging, hire Corecommerce to Shopify experts. These experts are certified and have years of experience in migration. They do all the migration process for you without much hassle.
2. Choose the Right Migration Tool
You can manually migrate your store, but it’s time-consuming, and you risk running into unnecessary errors down the lane. This is why most businesses use automated CoreCommerce to Shopify migration tools built to move your data safely and efficiently.
These tools migrate everything, including product descriptions and images, customer information, order data, and SEO components such as URL redirects. Before switching, they also allow you to perform a trial migration to see if anything is left behind.
As always, choose a migration tool that offers continual assistance and has CoreCommerce expertise. The cost of using a reputable migration tool or service pays off by reducing downtime and keeping your store operating correctly during the move.
3. Set Up Your Shopify Store
Once you’ve chosen your migration tool, you’ll want to start by getting your Shopify store ready. Assuming you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Shopify account and choose the appropriate plan for your business (features & size wise). If you’re unsure if it’s right for you just yet, don’t stress — they also offer a free trial.
Also remember to take some time out to properly design your e-store since that’s another area where Shopify excels. Browse through their themes, find one that suits your brand best and can create an effortless shopping experience for the users.
You can get free and premium themes at the Shopify theme store or you could hire a Shopify developer if you want something more custom. The more prepared your Shopify store is before the migration, the easier it will be when everything is being moved over.
4. Initiate the Migration
Now that you’ve got everything ready, it’s time to start migrating. Simply plug in your CoreCommerce store via the migration module and select all the required data you’d like to move over, including product information, customer details, order history, as well as coupon codes.
Before you actually perform the migration, do a test or demo migration as this is meant to verify that data has been moved over as expected. If everything went smoothly, begin the full migration that may last for hours/day depending on how much data you have on your store.
After the migration has completed, it’s time to do an audit of your new Shopify store. Visit several product pages as a customer, test customer accounts and order histories to ensure everything migrated over smoothly.
If something isn’t quite right, no worries! For the most part you can – re-migrate or manually tweak any issues you may have.
5. Post-Migration Optimization
The migration may be complete, but your work isn’t over yet. It’s time to fine-tune your Shopify store for the best possible performance. One of the first things to do is set up 301 redirects from your old CoreCommerce URLs to your new Shopify URLs. This ensures customers who bookmarked old pages don’t end up on broken links.
Next, ascertain if everything works. Go into product categories, add something to the cart, and do a checkout to spot any last-minute issues that need to be fixed before you go live.
If you use third-party app integrations with CoreCommerce, check for similar apps on Shopify’s App Store. They have over a thousand apps for everything from email marketing to more advanced analytics.
Last but not least, you should announce your move. Alert your customers about the change and share some advantages they can benefit from the migration, such as better shopping, navigation experience, or faster checkout.
Final Thoughts
Switching from CoreCommerce to Shopify makes sense if you want more freedom, improved design, and easier handling. For a smooth transition, prepare your store for migration, find the right tool to do your migration with, set up Shopify correctly, ensure everything works as you expect before proceeding, and lastly focus on post-migration optimization.
Shopify makes managing and scaling your online store easier. Most importantly, you’ll set your business up on a platform dedicated to constant innovation and growth. Once your migration is complete, the only things left to do are to build your brand and grow sales.
Leave a Reply