Step-by-Step Guide to Migrating to Shopify

Owning an e-commerce store and maintaining it is an arduous task. There are multiple things that businesses have to keep their eye on continuously to be the best in the market. To maintain it, there are multiple online platforms that promise to work smoothly but end up confusing and with zero results. Often, business owners think of switching to another platform. 

So, if you are thinking of migrating your e-commerce store from one platform to another, Shopify is the best consideration, and to make it perfect, some things need to be considered. There are cases when the migration is simple, but the migration process can be complicated when the particular business store has a large amount of data. Thus, the best way is to consider a top shopify development company to help you with the process. Let’s get started with the store migration process! 

Benefits of Migrating Your Store from One Platform to Shopify

There are multiple benefits related to the migration of old stores to Shopify. Here are the top ones mentioned below-

1. User-Friendly Interface

Shopify is a platform that is highly user-friendly and simplifies the process of creating and running an online store. Because of its intuitive user interface, it can be used by anyone with different degrees of technical skill. Without important technological skills, adding products, managing inventory, processing orders, and updating websites are all simple tasks. This ease of use reduces the learning curve and allows you up to concentrate on expanding your business rather than battling the platform.

2. Design and Customization

Shopify has a wide range of expertly designed themes to assist you in building a visually appealing online business. It stands out due to the extensive customization it offers. These themes can be modified to fit the unique look and feel of your brand. You can alter the look and feel of your website using drag-and-drop applications, CSS, and HTML. This flexibility guarantees that your online store stands out and provides a seamless client experience, increasing the recognition and trust of your brand.

3. App Ecosystem

The Shopify App Store is an invaluable source of third-party plugins and apps that increase the functionality of your store. These applications offer a wide range of features, such as marketing, inventory control, analytics, and customer service. The advantage of this is that if your company’s demands change, you can quickly integrate new features. This scalability gives you the freedom to modify your online store to suit shifting consumer preferences and market trends without requiring a lot of special development work.

4. SEO-Friendly

Search engine optimization is essential for online visibility and attracting organic traffic to your store.  Best practices for SEO were considered when designing Shopify. It provides tools and features like editable title tags, meta descriptions, and clean URLs to help you optimize your website for search engines. Furthermore, Shopify’s content management system (CMS) makes sure that the organization and content of your website are search engine-optimized. This increases the possibility that potential clients will find your products by making it more probable that they will appear higher in search engine results.

5. Hosting and Performance

High performance for your online store is ensured by Shopify, which makes hosting hassle-free. Because Shopify hosts on its own servers, you don’t have to worry about server uptime, server maintenance, or site speed. This reliable architecture ensures that your website can handle increases in traffic and gives your clients an ideal purchasing experience. Additionally, Shopify continuously refreshes its servers for increased security and efficiency, minimizing your operational effort and guaranteeing a positive shopping experience for your customers.

Now as we know, there are quite good things that can be gained by switching. Let’s move on to the steps of how one can migrate their old store. Although things can be though if the store has a huge amount of data, considering a good Shopify development company can be a good idea. 

Getting Started with Your Store Migration 

Step 1: Configure Your Basic Administrative Settings

One should keep a few administrative tasks in mind before starting to add products and setting payments. 

1. Review the considerations of store migrations beforehand to make things as smooth as possible. A number of considerations you should be aware of when migrating are:

• Protocol- independent assets
• URL redirects 

For further details, you can go through this guide made by shopify. 

2. Complete the initial setup so that all the settings, store addresses, email addresses, and everything are up to date. 

3. Make sure to know where to manage your account and access your billing transaction. 

4. Also, ensure to add the details of the staff so that each staff member has a personal login, and all sensitive information remains secure. 

Step 2: Import Your Store’s Content and Data to Shopify

When one decides to migrate their store from any platform to Shopify, there are things that need to be migrated, such as the content of the products, blog pages, and data such as customer transactions. Here, data refers to both data and content. 

So, if you are planning to do so, start planning right now, as data will require an appropriate amount of time to transfer. Evaluate everything that is needed for the migration of your data. List all the data that you want to transfer, such as products, customers, historical data, blogs, pages, discount coupons, store credits, certificates, and product reviews. Now, after finding out what data you want to migrate, decide how to migrate this data and what it will be. 

Here are the ways you can consider:

• You can easily copy and paste the content from the past site.
• From the shopify app store, use existing migration apps.
• Create an app that uses the Admin Panel, or you can hire a team to do so. 

The option you can select as per the resources you have and the amount of data you want to move. If you need to move a lot of data, then you go for the app-building process. But do not fail to see the copy and pasting option, especially when you need to migrate a small amount of content, such as policies and shipping pages. 

If you are importing your product, historical, and customer data, then you have to make sure to import them in the following order. By following this, you can get access to your customers’ complete transaction history. The orders will also be linked to the customers and products. 

• Products
• Customers
• Historical orders

Temporarily Disable the Order Emails

When you migrate your data from another platform to shopify, then the historical orders are triggered as for new orders. So if you do not want to continue getting each and every migration, email disable order notifications. But remember, this will also disable the notification of the new order that you can check on the shopify admin. After the migration is completed, enable your order notifications. 

Find a Store Migration App

Often, the migration apps reduce the amount of work that you have to do for the migration of every product information and the store content. There are multiple free and paid apps present on the Shopify App Store you can consider. You can also use the third-party migration apps available on the store if migrating your online store to Shopify. 

Import Your Store’s Data Manually Using CSV Files

If you are choosing to manually import all the product and customer data to shopify,  then you can use CSV files to import data to the shopify store. 

Step 3: Organize Your Products After Migration

Now, when you have imported your product to the Shopify platform, make sure to check all the product information that is imported is correct. After migration to verify your product, do this-

• Check all the meta descriptions, product details, descriptions, images, and variants. 
• Make categories for the customers to make it easy for them to find each product. You can also create links and add drop-down menus to the collection of the storefront. 
• Get familiar with transfers and product inventory to keep track of products that you have available in store. To help with tasks, you can find the inventory apps in the Shopify apps. 

Step 4: Make Your Website Look Great

When you sign up for a Shopify account, a default theme is already set up on the Themes area of your admin to assist you in getting started. You must add a new one to your admin if you wish to customize a different theme for your online store.

Here is the step to add the theme to the online store:

• You can either buy a paid theme from the theme store. In spite of the fact that the paid theme needs to be purchased before you can publish them to your online store, you can try a paid theme before buying.
• You can also go for the free theme from within the admin.  

Add Themes from the Store

Third-party designers create paid themes. The theme creator offers assistance with third-party theme customizations.

To add a theme from the Shopify Theme Store 

• Select a theme by opening the Shopify Theme Store. Select a free theme if you’re still utilizing your free trial time to avoid paying any fees.
• Click Add Theme or Start with this theme if you’ve selected a free theme. If you’ve selected a premium theme, click Buy theme to purchase it. The themes purchased are not returnable. You can test a premium theme out before purchasing it to make sure it meets your needs.
• To authorize the payment for themes that cost money, click Approve Charge. The theme will be posted to your admin’s Themes page.

Add a Free Theme from the Admin

These free themes are developed by the Shopify platform. Shopify supports customization for free themes. You can go through the Shopify Guide for the steps to add a theme from Desktop, Android, or iOS devices. 

Step 5: Set up Your Domain

There are two ways you can figure out the domain for your ecommerce store. You can either buy a new domain or transfer the domain from your existing store to your new Shopify account. 

You can go through the steps mentioned in the Shopify guide for buying a new domain or transferring the old one to the shopify platform. 

Step 6: Set up Your Shipping

Before you start selling online, it’s crucial to set up your shipping costs and options properly. Otherwise, you may end up having to issue refunds to consumers who were overcharged or send them emails asking them to pay more.

To start up your shipping, here are the steps:

• For correct delivery costs based on your area, enter your shipping address.
• To enable shipping to various regions, states, and nations, create shipping zones.
• If you’re utilizing shipping rates calculated by the carrier, set your shipment dimensions. To determine shipping costs, several carriers employ volumetric weight, which takes into account a package’s height, weight, and depth.
• Set up shipping costs for the created shipping zones.
• Choose a shipping plan that is effective for your company. Before selecting a choice, you might find it useful to browse through a few possibilities to see what suits your needs.
• Decide if you’ll manage order fulfillment yourself or hire someone else after looking over fulfillment services.

Step 7: Configure Your Taxes

One of the important parts of running your business is charging sales tax. Depending on the location, there are different rules, regulations, and taxes that apply to the product. To understand this, take the proper time to understand Shopify’s tax setup process. 

The charges, according to the customer’s provincial, state, or regional tax regulation, are automatically calculated by Shopify. If you want to make any changes, you can do so with a tax override. 

Also, You should consider how you will track your taxes throughout the year as you arrange the tax settings for your products.

Review some accounting apps in the Shopify App Store if you are unsure of the system you plan to employ to manage your taxes.

Step 8: Set up A Payment Provider

You must set up a payment provider to ensure that clients can pay you. You can securely accept credit card payments with the help of a payment provider. Shopify provides a number of supported third-party payment providers in addition to its own payment processor (Shopify Payments).

To set up a payment provider.

• Choose a payment processor from Shopify or a recognized third party.
• In your Shopify admin, enable Shopify Payments or another payment processor.
• Select the method you want to use to collect and authorize payments from consumers who make purchases from your store.

After setting up your payment processors, you must set up your checkout page in order to handle customer orders.

Organizing your checkout:

• Make a decision about how you will handle customer orders so that you have a plan for completing the orders.
• The policies for your shop should be added so that customers are aware of them before checking out.
• Choose if you want to gather email addresses from consumers to inform them of events and specials by editing the customer information options in your checkout.

Step 9: Place Some Test Orders

After setting up your payment preferences, you should test out a few transactions to make sure everything is functioning properly. You can better comprehend the procedure your consumers go through when purchasing your products by placing a test order. From the Orders page in your Shopify admin, you can see every order that customers have placed.

• Several distinct sorts of transactions are eligible for test orders, including:
• Finishing both successful and unsuccessful transactions
• Archiving a successful order, fulfilling or partially completing an order, and canceling and refunding an order.

You can examine the emails that clients get for each activity as you initiate, refund, and complete orders. From the Notifications page in your Shopify admin, you can modify the templates for these emails.

Step 10: Invite Your Customers to Create Accounts on Your New Site

You can invite your customers to open online shop accounts once you’ve transferred your customer data and established your store.

If you have a large customer base, you can issue invitations using an existing app from the Shopify App Store. Use the Shopify Bulk Account Inviter app if you have the Shopify Plus package.

Step 11: Set up URL Redirects

Now, it’s time to redirect your traffic from the old platform to new stores. 

Cost to Switch the Store and Hiring the Company Cost

There are three different pricing plans Shopify offers a business owner can go for. The business owner can start with free and then enjoy at $5 per month. Here is the table showing the pricing. To switch your store, you need to be very careful so that you can hire a good shopify development company and get your work done in no time. 

Other than the basic plan, there are also three alternative solutions businesses can opt for. 

1. Starter 

This pack starts from $5 GBP/ month. With this pack, your store is ready to go. All you need is an image and a slick description of the product or service you’re selling. 

2. Retail 

You can get a free trial for three days and then get three months for $1 /month. The price of using this is $69 GBP/month. In this, you can sell in person, sell everywhere, or manage POS locations. 

3. Shopify Plus 

It includes all the standard shopify features, plus additional resources that are designed to help support merchants with higher revenue and sales. The starting cost of ShopifyPlus is $2000 USD/month.

How Can EmizenTech Help You Switch Your Store to Shopify?

Are you thinking about moving your e-commerce site to Shopify but concerned about how to do so? You won’t need to worry since EmizenTech, a Shopify development company, will make the transition easy for you. Whether you want to switch to Shopify from your old store or want to start a new one to do it efficiently, we have a team of knowledgeable Shopify developers to assist you with all of the problems.

Many of the best multi-dollar Shopify projects are completed by us. One of our top projects is Rebellious Fashion, which had a number of problems that our team successfully fixed. To get your store switched, contact our team of experts now and discuss the details and receive the necessary advice.

Conclusion 

Shopify is indeed one of the best e-commerce platforms you can consider in 2024. Businesses can manage multiple things on the same platform without worrying much. In this guide, we hope you got all the information on switching stores to shopify. For more details, you can go through the shopify guide, or you can contact our team of experts for updated details.