When Shopify and Opencart come into the light, both the platforms are used widely for eCommerce, hold strengths and weaknesses, and meet distinct objectives. Well, which is the right choice depends on various aspects, such as SEO, ease of use, community, budget, and support.
As you are here, you may be well-versed with the pros and cons of both the eCommerce platforms, OpenCart and Shopify. But, if you want a quick recap then, let’s catch up with the pace.
About Shopify – A Quick Review
A hosted eCommerce platform, Shopify permits building and running an online store in just a few clicks. It comes with various features, like 99.9% uptime, compatible hosting, a highly intuitive admin panel, complete data security, and professional support. Moreover, with Shopify, just post-installation, your online store becomes business-ready. Apart from that, Shopify is also mostly chosen because of its user-friendly editor.
Top Benefits Of Shopify eCommerce Platform
- Shopify comes with amazing shipping options and multiple payment gateways.
- By default, it sets a mobile-version of your store.
- It facilitates various marketing tools, like coupon codes and discount systems, email marketing systems, free advertising credits, and social media integration.
- Moreover, Shopify includes the generation of automatic sitemap, SEO-friendly meta descriptions, and URLs.
- Shopify permits a blog establishment through its in-built CMS.
About OpenCart- A Quick Review
A free open-source eCommerce platform, OpenCart is widely known for its wide range of functionalities and features, and utmost simplicity. It is a self-hosted platform that holds an easy platform installation process. The advanced template system of OpenCart permits us to customize the look and feel of your eStore efficiently. But, when we talk about store customization, it may seem a little complicated and demands extra effort.
Top Benefits Of OpenCart eCommerce Solution
- OpenCart offers 100% store customization with free support and updates.
- It includes pre-defined designs, templates, and 6000+ extensions.
- Furthermore, OpenCart is SEO-friendly and enables the meta tags per product and per category.
- OpenCart supports various languages and currencies that are controlled from a single admin interface.
- Moreover, OpenCart supports unlimited categories, transactions, products, customers, and various store functionality.
Opencart vs Shopify – Why Should You Choose Shopify Over OpenCart?
Now, as you are here to know how to migrate from OpenCart to Shopify. We will make you understand every relevant aspect in a better way.
Full-Fledged App Store and Add-Ons – Demanding No Coding Skills for Installation
The best Side of the Shopify App Store is that you hold a plethora of choices when it comes to adding plugins or Shopify apps to your store. And, the best part is, you can achieve this without any code proficiency.
The extensions at OpenCart App Store may be cheaper than Shopify, but coding skills are required to develop custom fields to add them with the extensions. Such addition of fields will provide you with limitless customization possibilities to come up with a robust website.
Great Customer Satisfaction/User Reviews – To Choose Better eCommerce Option
Across the internet, OpenCart, and Shopify, both are rated consistently. But, most review sites revealed that Shopify holds a slightly higher rate as compared to OpenCart. In fact, generally, Shopify has more reviews crafted online.
Easy To Use – Simple To Install & Develop “Business-Ready” Stores Faster
When it comes to easy usage, Shopify wins the race as its installation process never asks for much effort and comes with a friendly management system.
On the other hand, OpenCart is extra complicated in its set-up phase as you will need to have basic technical proficiency in FTPs, hosting, security updates, and more.
Store Management – Improves Cash Flow & Makes The Business Grow
Store Management, Well, Shopify is ahead of OpenCart on this. Apart from permitting various sales channels, Shopify wins with more additional robust tools for recovering the abandoned carts, engaging leads, and enhancing conversions.
Well, OpenCart holds various advanced features, various shipping methods, and more intuitive features but not in its basic version like Shopify. You need to go premium to reap the benefits of its additional features.
Marketing – Effective Marketing Tools To Promote Business
Shopify comes with a plethora of marketing tools, such as a discount system, coupon codes, and email marketing systems. In fact, it offers free advertising credits as a bonus. Shopify follows a simple approach while switching to other marketing channels.
On the contrary, OpenCart clutches a weaker marketing system and uses dynamic marketing. We need to find a suitable extension or a skilled OpenCart developer to achieve good results.
Security – Enhance Brand Trust, Magnetize New Customers
Shopify offers users a lot of security solutions for your store, your customers, as well as, your finance. This is one of the main benefits of Shopify vs self-hosted solutions.
Using an open-source platform like OpenCart needs the effort to set up and secure your own store. OpenCart is not responsible for protecting your website. Therefore, there are several tasks you need to perform to ensure the security of your shops, such as directory and folder protection, and file permission. With OpenCart, you will need to put a lot of effort into creating a security system.
Mobile App – Offers Basic Mobile App
When it comes to mobile capabilities, both the eCommerce platforms are different. Shopify provides a basic mobile app that permits you to complete orders, manage email, inventory, and track trends. Also, Shopify mobile app syncs entire data from your eStore. Even you can get benefitted from the Shopify POS app to process orders and to accept the payments in-person. Furthermore, Shopify Ping assists in managing messages from customers.
In contrast, in such a case, OpenCart doesn’t prefer offering any downloadable mobile commerce applications to handle your account.
Customer Support – 24*7 Personalized Support To Get More Repeat Customer
Shopify comes with round-the-clock personalized support (complete support) all through the platform. Moreover, it includes a plethora of self-service tools, like video tutorials, a Help Center, API documentation, etc. Right now, Shopify has such support channels – 24/7 phone support, 24/7 live chat support, Social media support, Email support, Community forum, and more.
Whereas, OpenCart provides self-service support through community forums and extensive documentation. For customer support, you need to pay monthly or one-time.
Best For Newbies – For Fast & Easy Beginning
eCommerce businesses and new businesses may start better with Shopify to grab better sales online as quickly as possible.
On the other side, OpenCart is best for the businesses that are looking for customization potential, need to handle various stores with one platform, and holds technical knowledge.
Free and Professional Themes – Allow Easy Customization to Non-Techies
Shopify Theme Store exhibits 100+ free, as well as, premium, eye-catching, professional, and mobile responsive eCommerce site templates that can be used for eStores. Also, Shopify provides better flexibility to your online stores as comes with an efficient admin panel.
On the other side, OpenCart permits us to modify any website component but demands technical skills to emerge with a highly interactive online store.
Hosting – Compatible Hosting with 99.9% Uptime, Professional Support, & Full Data Security
Shopify offers web-based software that includes hosting, plan-based features, and updates. Apart from that, Shopify permits access to the in-built blog, multiple sales channels, and instant platform updates.
Whereas, for launching your OpenCart store, you will have to pay for your web hosting, which varies with your provider and the size of your business. Moreover, you need to pay for maintenance and extensions also.
Extensions – For Extended Functionality of Shopify Store
The Shopify App Store holds a collection of free as well as paid plugins that expand the functionality of eStores. It’s the best way to include more specialized features in your Shopify store.
With OpenCart, to take the advantage of the advanced features, you are required to extend the capabilities with paid extensions as this eCommerce platform doesn’t come with various options in its standard version like Shopify.
SEO-Friendly – Enhance Your Search Engine Visibility
When it’s about SEO, Shopify wins the battle. Its chief target is to serve the store owners better. It provides excellent Shopify SEO service with an entire range of basic SEO features and assists in enhancing customer experience.
OpenCart doesn’t offer the required SEO support. It is not perfect for the newbies who are looking for advanced SEO solutions. It offers a few native marketing and SEO features.
Full-Blogging Platform
Shopify holds in-built blog and SEO tools that permit you to engage in content marketing.
Opencart, on the other hand, provides various eCommerce tools, but the in-built blog feature is not included.
Hire Shopify Developers To Migrate Your OpenCart Store To Shopify
Approaches To Follow For OpenCart to Shopify Migration
You may follow any of the below approaches to migrate your OpenCart eCommerce store to Shopify.
1. Manual Migration
For beginners, the process of migration from OpenCart to Shopify may not be straightforward. It would be more than just copying the data from the Source Store and pasting it subsequently to the Target Store. Despite this, you need to program separately the entities and next, configure the website framework to smoothly integrate everything.
In brief, that’s why the entire process of manual migration is much complicated and it may take days to completely import to Shopify from OpenCart.
On the other side, at least this process of migration from OpenCart to Shopify is the cheapest as you are going to perform it yourself.
2. Automated Migration
Well, if the manual process is not of your type, then automated migration from OpenCart to Shopify would prove to be better for you.
Similar to manual migration, automated migration offers you the strength to control with no inclusion of any technical complexities. This states that you need no technical proficiency to import OpenCart to Shopify.
Here, you need to take the help of a specialized tool, extensions, plugins, or apps to perform the transfer of your entire data. You are only required to link with the respective cart directories and the rest will be handled by the system automatically.
3. Through Technical Assistance
When you don’t want to try either manual or automatic ways, you may opt for technical help. This will let you focus on the other important jobs of your business.
This alternative method of migrating OpenCart to Shopify necessitates seeking professional assistance from leading eCommerce Migration Experts and Shopify developers.
An eCommerce migration specialist will perform the migration of the whole data on your behalf.
Which Approach You Should Choose To Migrate From OpenCart to Shopify?
- Manual Migration: Well, the risks are high with this approach as when it comes to the manual way there are chances of errors, like data omission, incompatible theme application, forced restarting the process, and more.
- Automated Migration: When you adopt a specialized tool for migrating, at the final stage of billing, you may need to pay insurance charges.
- Technical Assistance: However, this approach may demand the required time and resources to fulfill the migration process, but the result would be as per your expectation.
So, to kickstart perfectly, you should favor investing extra time and money, i.e move ahead with skilled technical assistance and achieve your business objectives.
Also Read: How To Migrate from Magento to Shopify: Complete Guide
How To Turn Your OpenCart Store To Shopify – Steps to Follow
OpenCart to Shopify migration is quite simple when carried through the right Shopify migration solution. Let’s now, put some simple steps in front of you that will ease your transfer from OpenCart to Shopify.
Step 1. Register An Account (On Chosen Migration App)
There are a few apps that can help you migrate your OpenCart ecommerce store to Shopify. However, if your ecommerce store holds a lot of data then you might face some errors in the migration process. So, some of those migration apps are:
In this article, we are using Cart 2 Cart app for migrating from Opencart to Shopify
Step 2. Set-Up Your Source Cart (Here, OpenCart)
Next, type your current store URL. Then, download the “Connection Bridge” file (a mediator to get data and offer interaction between stores), unzip it, and upload it to the root folder of your store.
Step 3. Set-Up Your Target Store
Next, click on the “Install Plugin” button and get a “Migration App” that will permit you to take your process ahead and set it up straight within the Shopify Admin Panel.
Step 4. Pick The Entities
Choose that you want to move, along with additional options (optional). You can migrate Source Store categories in Shopify automated collections & create 301 redirects on your target store.
Step 5. Launch Free Demo Migration
Check the working of service in action and determine the results.
Step 6. Next, Perform Full Migration From OpenCart To Shopify.
After migration begins, you may even turn off your browser, it will not interrupt the process.
At last, You will get your data moved as per your expectation.
What To Do Post Migration From Opencart To Shopify?
- Select a new theme and customize it as per your requirements
- Install required apps from Shopify app store
- Test your store and checkout process
- Invite your customers to reactivate their accounts
Data That You Can Migrate From OpenCart To Shopify
You can migrate the following data from OpenCart to Shopify:
- Products: SKU, Name, Full Description, Manufacturer, Status, Price, Special Price, Product Tags, Meta Title, Meta Description, Variants, Manage Stock, Additional Images
- Product Categories: Name, Description, Image, Meta Title, Meta Description, Status
- Manufacturers: Name
- Customers: First Name, Last Name, Billing Address, Shipping Address, Email, Newsletter
- Orders: Order Details, Customer Name, Billing Address, Email, Shipping Address
- Coupons: Coupon Date, Coupon Code
- Reviews: Title, User Name, Created Date, Rate
- CMS Pages: URL, Title, Created Date, Description
Additional Options – Things To Consider While Migration
- Before Migration Clear Data on Target Store: Well, if your Target Store is empty then it’s fine, but if it holds something, like customers, products, etc. then, this option will permit you to delete the existing data automatically depending on the entities you select manually. After Demo Migration, the Test Data will also be deleted.
- Preserve Order IDs: Using this option you can preserve your Order IDs on the Target Store post-migration. Just you need to select this option, if you don’t do this, your Order IDs on the Target Store will appear to be different from what’s on your Source Store.
- Migrate Additional Images: Apart from the thumbnail images, this image assists in migrating additional images of the products also.
- Strip HTML Tags: It will strip all HTML tags from product names and categories.
Wrapping Up
Well, the aforementioned information would prove to be very helpful to you while migrating from OpenCart to Shopify. Following the steps and approaches mentioned above will make your migration process easier without any data loss, and seamlessly.
Now, it’s your turn, let your eCommerce expand and grow flawlessly. If you find it hard to conduct, you can take technical assistance from an experienced and professional Shopify development company.
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