Ecom­merce migra­tion, not migraines: a rel­a­tive­ly prac­ti­cal guide — Part 2

Once I ran to you, now I run from you

Migra­tion from Shopi­fy Plus

Shopi­fy is a pop­u­lar eCom­merce plat­form known for its user-friend­ly approach, favored by mer­chants that val­ue sim­plic­i­ty and con­ve­nience. It’s an eCom­merce plat­form and also a pay­ment gate­way, ship­ping and ful­fill­ment provider and email mar­ket­ing ser­vice. At some stage, for some busi­ness­es, this may be good. Some­times, for some busi­ness­es, it can be a prob­lem. It may not be the only one.

Many of Shopi­fy’s native fea­tures don’t offer the lev­el of com­plex­i­ty that most enter­prise busi­ness­es need. And get­ting it comes at a cost. In terms of mon­ey and performance.

B2B and Hybrid companies

There are some spe­cif­ic ways in which B2B and Hybrid busi­ness­es may ben­e­fit from decid­ing to leave Shopi­fy Plus and replat­form to anoth­er eCom­merce solution. 

Shopi­fy Plus is prob­lem­at­ic for B2B mer­chants who need to eas­i­ly cre­ate dis­counts and pro­mo­tions with­out involv­ing devel­op­ers or man­age com­plex prod­ucts while main­tain­ing inven­to­ry accu­ra­cy. It’s also not easy to pro­vide a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed shop­ping expe­ri­ence for B2B and B2C cus­tomers with Shopi­fy Plus, as it does not sup­port dif­fer­ent cat­a­logs or store­fronts in a sin­gle instance. Replat­form­ing to an eCom­merce solu­tion that sup­ports mul­ti-store­front func­tion­al­i­ty will def­i­nite­ly be an advan­tage for B2B and hybrid businesses.

Per­for­mance

Shopi­fy Plus relies heav­i­ly on its app store to fill gaps in its core func­tion­al­i­ty, which can impact store per­for­mance. The more third-par­ty apps and scripts added, the hard­er it becomes to con­trol and man­age store per­for­mance, result­ing in slow­er per­for­mance and a neg­a­tive user experience. 

If you need some­thing that can sup­port a high vol­ume of API calls per sec­ond, Shopi­fy is not it. Its lim­i­ta­tions (10API calls per sec­ond) can make it unsuit­able for busi­ness­es that han­dle large amounts of data and require a high vol­ume of API calls neg­a­tive­ly impact­ing per­for­mance. For exam­ple, sync­ing a prod­uct cat­a­log with 25,000 SKUs can take over 2 hours on Shopi­fy Plus. Replat­form­ing to an eCom­merce solu­tion that offers bet­ter per­for­mance and scal­a­bil­i­ty can sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve the over­all speed and effi­cien­cy of your store.

TCO

While Shopi­fy Plus offers a range of native fea­tures, access to robust B2B fea­tures like cus­tom pric­ing, bulk order­ing, or quot­ing often requires third-par­ty apps, dri­ving up costs. This can result in addi­tion­al expens­es in terms of app costs, cost of own­er­ship, and pay­ment inte­gra­tion fees. Accord­ing to the 2021 Gart­ner Mag­ic Quad­rant for Dig­i­tal Com­merce, many enter­prise cus­tomers find that they require addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty not includ­ed in a basic Shopi­fy Plus store, such as faceted search and cus­tomer reviews, lead­ing to addi­tion­al costs through app sub­scrip­tions or cus­tom integrations. 

Replat­form­ing can get you more and bet­ter func­tion­al­i­ty, bet­ter per­for­mance and scal­a­bil­i­ty, and advanced B2B fea­tures to pro­vide a supe­ri­or shop­ping expe­ri­ence, improve oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy, and reduce costs. Here’s our sug­ges­tion, com­pared to Shopi­fy Plus. 

Migra­tion from PrestaShop

If you want a ful­ly cus­tomiz­able solu­tion that gives you total con­trol over both design and func­tion­al­i­ty, if you can count on an advanced tech­ni­cal team to imple­ment those cus­tomiza­tions, and if ​“mon­ey is not a prob­lem”, there aren’t many rea­sons for you to con­sid­er migrat­ing from PrestaShop. 

Busi­ness­es that ini­tial­ly choose PrestaShop are usu­al­ly drawn to its open-source nature and the promise of com­plete cus­tomiza­tion and total con­trol over design and func­tion­al­i­ty. Unlim­it­ed flex­i­bil­i­ty and con­trol sound great, but come at a sig­nif­i­cant cost, includ­ing com­plex­i­ty, hid­den expens­es, and ongo­ing main­te­nance challenges.

It’s a bit of a catch-22: using the flex­i­bil­i­ty of open source means increas­ing com­plex­i­ty, which in turn requires exten­sive resources, high­er devel­op­ment costs, and longer imple­men­ta­tion times. For exam­ple, the abil­i­ty to add func­tion­al­i­ty is good, but the bur­den of nev­er know­ing what might break when is not. So per­haps you don’t need to be able to edit the source code to get cus­tomiza­tion. You could migrate to a plat­form with the most com­mon­ly need­ed core func­tion­al­i­ty that also offers the flex­i­bil­i­ty to scale the plat­form to meet spe­cif­ic needs if or when they arise. Here’s our sug­ges­tion, com­pared to PrestaShop.

The only worse thing than high costs are unclear costs. Costs are more than licens­ing fees. Cal­cu­lat­ing all expens­es accu­rate­ly with PrestaShop can be chal­leng­ing, as they include host­ing, tech­ni­cal sup­port, main­te­nance, devel­op­ment costs, and addi­tion­al exten­sions. If you invest­ed sub­stan­tial devel­op­ment resources on the ini­tial build and then real­ized that even minor updates require dev resources to make the changes, and that the more you want to cus­tomize, the hard­er it becomes to man­age ver­sions and patch­es and stay on top of things, you know exact­ly what we are talk­ing about.

Replat­form­ing is the new freedom

PrestaShop can become cum­ber­some to man­age and main­tain over time. Minor updates often break cus­tomiza­tions, requir­ing addi­tion­al devel­op­er resources. Unlike PrestaShop, oth­er eCom­merce plat­forms offer com­pre­hen­sive built-in tech­ni­cal sup­port, which elim­i­nates the need to pur­chase sup­port blocks from third-par­ty providers or use agency part­ners for sup­port and ensures time­ly tech­ni­cal assis­tance when tech­ni­cal issues arise. And they will. 

Replat­form­ing from PrestaShop doesn’t mean giv­ing up free­dom. On the con­trary, it brings dif­fer­ent kinds of free­dom, that you can actu­al­ly enjoy. For exam­ple, free­dom from the tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ties and unex­pect­ed costs asso­ci­at­ed with open source solu­tions. Also, you won’t spend valu­able resources mak­ing — or wor­ry­ing about — minor tweaks, installing patch­es, updates, putting out fires, just to keep the engines run­ning, so you’ll gain the free­dom to choose what to focus on and where to allo­cate your time and talent.

Replat­form­ing may also give you the free­dom to make finan­cial plan­ning deci­sions, that comes with a clear­er under­stand­ing of the total cost of own­er­ship. Free­dom from sur­prise costs. Always a good thing.

Migra­tion fromWooCom­merce

If you’re using WooCom­merce, the pri­ma­ry plu­g­in used to pow­er ecom­merce stores on Word­Press, and con­sid­er­ing it leav­ing behind, you are most like­ly wor­ried about two things: scal­a­bil­i­ty and cost. 

WooCom­merce is not mod­u­lar or built to scale, so large or grow­ing brands that start on WooCom­merce even­tu­al­ly have to replat­form. The fron­tend and back­end share resources, which makes it hard to scale with­out slow­ing down the live store, an issue you will not have with a SaaS solu­tion. This also means dai­ly activ­i­ties of run­ning your store (such as pro­cess­ing orders or run­ning reports can affect the uptime & speed of your live store, which is also not great for your con­ver­sion, SEO, and brand in general.

And then there’s cost, a poten­tial­ly sig­nif­i­cant issue, poten­tial­ly being the oper­a­tive word because the main issue with cost in WooCom­merce is that it’s unclear. Although the plu­g­in is tech­ni­cal­ly free, total cost of own­er­ship is not easy to sort out because of app and devel­op­er costs. Also, mer­chants are respon­si­ble for host­ing and security/​PCI plu­g­ins, reg­u­lar main­te­nance & secu­ri­ty patch­es. This could mean thou­sands of dol­lars in fines, in case of PCI com­pli­ance vio­la­tions, as well as dam­age to your brand reputation. 

WooCom­merce stores also rely heav­i­ly on apps and plu­g­ins (some are free but oth­ers have an instal­la­tion fee plus annu­al paid updates) for some core func­tion­al­i­ty, which adds up to the devel­op­er costs of an open source plat­form. Set­up can be time con­sum­ing and exten­sive, and man­ag­ing updates can be costly.

Replat­form­ing FTW

Break­ing free from the tech­ni­cal bur­dens asso­ci­at­ed with self-host­ed solu­tions and thus being able to focus more on your business’s core oper­a­tions is one advan­tage of replat­form­ing to an eCom­merce solu­tion than can han­dle plat­form main­te­nance, secu­ri­ty updates, and PCI compliance.

Anoth­er advan­tage of migrat­ing from WooCom­merce would be to get access to more fea­tures for ship­ping, sales tax, pay­ments, prod­uct options, and omni-chan­nel sales, which reduce the required cus­tomiza­tion and low­er devel­op­er costs. Choos­ing a solu­tion with bet­ter and eas­i­er options to do what you’re cur­rent­ly doing, or begin doing what you’d like to do? What’s not to like? Well, replat­form­ing can be challenging.

Chal­lenges to consider

Migrat­ing to a more effi­cient and scal­able solu­tion may present chal­lenges in data migra­tion and require some adap­ta­tions. Adapt­ing cus­tomiza­tions or themes to the new frame­work, which means eval­u­at­ing whether to repli­cate those cus­tomiza­tions or imple­ment alter­na­tives is one. Also, users and admin­is­tra­tors will need to adapt to the new plat­form, which means you will have to fac­tor the train­ing and learn­ing curve asso­ci­at­ed with the migration.

None of these are sig­nif­i­cant draw­backs if you con­sid­er, as you should, an eCom­merce solu­tion with sol­id train­ing and onboard­ing process­es, and enlist the sup­port of an expe­ri­enced agency to help with the migra­tion. Don’t try this at home. It is essen­tial to assess the unique require­ments of your busi­ness and part­ner with experts to ensure a seam­less tran­si­tion and max­i­mize the ben­e­fits of replat­form­ing. We will get back to that later.

Com­ing soon

In our next install­ments, we will cov­er the advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of replat­form­ing from Adobe Com­merce, Suit­eCom­merce and Com­merce­tools, the ben­e­fits and chal­lenges of migrat­ing to Big­Com­merce, and how to over­come the lat­ter. All good stuff. Stay tuned.