How to migrate from Shopify to Magento | Guide

When you come into the eCommerce market, choosing the best eCommerce solution for building an online store is one of the most crucial decisions you will make. It is an important factor in determining your company’s future success or failure. 

Currently, you are the owner of a Shopify online store, you want to increase traffic, drive revenue, optimize your store’s speed as well as improve website performance. It is necessary for you to upgrade from Shopify to Magento, which has more features.

As a result, this article will focus on providing useful information to Shopify business owners about the factors that make Magento 2 stand out when re-platforming and provide instructions on how to migrate from Shopify to Magento 2.

The reasons why Magento may be better for you than Shopify

1.1 CMC and Open Source

The terms “open source” and “CMS” are usually used in conjunction with Magento. Here is a detailed explanation of what they do and why they are essential to your internet business.

Open source software allows users to modify the source codes to meet their needs. Retailers are able to receive the best experience when an eCommerce platform functions in this way.

Retailers can show their dissatisfaction with the design of online shopping platforms. However, Magento is open-source, and the right support and development team may revamp this layout to suit your individual preferences. Besides, Shopify is a hosted website, which is different from Magento. This implies that site owners have fewer options for customizing the website.

CMS is short for Content Management System. Through a single platform, content management systems handle all information pertaining to a good or service.

It is obvious that content management systems and open-source software are tightly intertwined. It’s another aspect where Shopify falls short. For a company, keeping up with trends is essential, the rigidity of its content management might be constricting.

Magento makes the transition from Shopify much simpler because of its flexibility. As opposed to doing this, choosing a new payment source is likewise simpler with Magento than it is with Shopify. You can’t afford to be held up by payment troubles in this specific online marketplace since it moves too quickly.

1.2 Extensions

You’ll probably need extensions as you manage your Shopify online store. These add-ons will expand the capabilities of your shop by assisting with various tasks like accounting and analytics. Over 2,500 of these extensions and programs are available through Shopify.

However, compared to Shopify, Magento offers a larger selection of extensions and applications. There are more than 5000 extensions, and they seamlessly integrate with the relevant backend.

1.3 SEO

While Shopify’s SEO is simple to handle, consumers are limited in their ability to choose URLs. However, you may customize permalinks for inventory objects when you use Magento. It makes the best use of canonical tags, redirects, and no-follow.

Search engines can index and comprehend your Magento site’s structure when you utilize these capabilities effectively. This is crucial for your search engine rankings. This will gradually enhance domain authority, which will bring a higher ranking on the search engine of result pages. 

1.4 Control

There may be regulatory requirements specific to your business’s industry or sector. You would be better off using Magento because it gives you greater control over the technology. Additionally, it provides extra options for handling your data more efficiently.

Both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) shops can benefit from using these solutions. A B2B shop, for instance, can use Magento to develop a distinctive user interface that offers a customized eCommerce experience for each customer.

Of course, not everything about Magento is sunshine and unicorns. There are a few potential obstacles to overcome if you’re switching your online store from Shopify to Magento.

The higher overall cost of setup is the most significant one. When compared to Shopify, Magento is substantially more complicated. The overall cost is undoubtedly influenced by this.

In a similar vein, you require a special server to meet your hosting requirements. To manage the increasing level of performance, this is essential. This may add thousands of dollars to the cost of migration, depending on the size of your website.

To top it all off, it could be challenging to find the ideal support group to assist with your Magento shift. It is your responsibility to exercise due diligence and make sure your crew is knowledgeable.

How to mitigate from Shopify to Magento

Step 1: Configure your Magento 2 shop

• You must first set up the environment and launch a brand-new Magento 2 store by checking off the following items:
• Configure the server environment. It is crucial for you to install the necessary applications, such as PHP, Apache, and MySQL, and go to the system requirements for more detailed information.
• Download the Magento software.
• Either the Web Setup Wizard or the command line can be used to install the Magento software.
• Viewing your storefront and the Magento Admin is the way to verify the installation.

Step 2: Back up your Shopify store data

Before making any significant changes to your store, you should establish a backup of everything. You need to go to your Shopify backend and export all of the crucial data to CSV files to create a backup of your Shopify data.

Step 3: Two approaches to move your site from Shopify to Magento 2.

There are two main solutions that help a retailer migrate from Shopify to Magento:

• Manual migration
• Using an automated migration tool

Every method of migration has its own advantages. Besides, several factors affect the optimal method for your migration-related needs. The size of your internet store and financial resources are the two most influential factors. Other determining criteria include your technical expertise and the vision you have for your store.

• Migrate from Shopify to Magento 2 manually

You must first export all of your Shopify data to CSV files and import them into Magento 2 to manually transfer your data from your present store to Magento 2.

Here are two things you need to get ready before you begin: Review your current data first, then choose the types of data you want to move such as products, categories, customers, manufacturers, orders, coupons, etc. Second, learn about which data types can be exported from Shopify in the form of CSV files and which can be imported into the platform via CSV files through the assistance of Magento.

There is a 9000-row restriction for each file when exporting. As a result, if your data has more than 9000 rows, you will need to use an export app from the Shopify app store instead of manually exporting the data. To import the data into your Magento 2 installation, you must export everything to CSV files if there are fewer than 9000 rows in the data.

Then you need to navigate to System, Import/Export, and Dataflow Profiles in your Magento admin dashboard. The CSV files you generated can be selected from here and imported into Magento 2. You can see, nevertheless, that you can only import Products, Customers, Advanced Pricing, Products, Addresses, Customers’ Main File, and Customer Addresses.

For instance, the order is one of the most crucial pieces of data, you must take this into consideration since you cannot manually import them into Magento 2. As a result, the only way to import unsupported data is to copy and paste text from your previous website. Additionally, when the data is imported into Magento 2, the relationships between the data tables will be messed up.

• Migrate with an automated migration tool

Another automated data migration solution that can be quite helpful to you is LitExtension. You can migrate all the necessary information from your online store by the square thanks to its structure.

Due to its way of operating, you can switch from Shopify to Magento without worrying about any security concerns. The amount of products that can be transferred via LitExtension is unrestricted. The many different data types supported by LitExtensions are products, orders, clients, and categories.

The entire migration procedure can be condensed into just three steps to make things simpler:

• Configurations are the initial step in your attempt to migrate eCommerce website data using LitExtensions. Of course, one of the criteria also needs to insert the Source Cart Type. Shopify is the Source Cart in this case.
• You need to supply your Source Cart URL after inserting the Source Cart Type on the website. You must treat your Target Cart the same as your Source Cart.
• You will choose the data you want to migrate in the next step. Products, categories, customers, and orders are all standard entities that are available. The LitExtension website also offers extra options, including data transfer from recent data migration, URL migration, password migration, and search engine optimization.

Additionally, you have the option to delete all of the data on your target store before migration. Data duplication will be avoided by doing this. You should make a backup of your data because this process is an irreversible reaction.

During the migration, you should make sure your source (Shopify) store is no problem in terms of function. Technical expertise is not necessary to use LitExtension, which is possibly its best feature.

Step 4: Check your store after migration

The first thing you should do after a full migration is successfully finished is to check the outcome right away. You want to see how both the front and the back of your new store will look. After the migration, LitExtension offers comprehensive instructions on how to check your online store. You need to read it to improve the migration

You should run the following command lines to clear the cache and reindex the data, especially with Magento:

• php bin/magento indexer:reindex
• php bin/magento cache:clean

One other point to note is that out-of-stock items can be nullified so that they aren’t displayed to customers on the front-end. Therefore, you must make some adjustments in the backend to fix it. 

Step 5: Migrate theme and customisation

To make themes  compatible with the Magento 2 structure, you must recreate them. Or otherwise, you should take into account feasible solution for Magento 2 theme creation:

• Install a free Magento 2 theme you downloaded.
• Purchase and deploy a pre-made Magento 2 theme.
• Create a new theme for your Magento 2 store or recreate the one on your Shopify website.

Step 6: Run recent data migration

Your current store should continue to operate properly during the transfer process and continue to receive new entities, such as new orders and new customers. You must therefore transfer all recent data from your old store to your new store after completing the whole migration successfully. Then, within three months of the original migration, you may quickly move recent data for free and without limits with LitExtension Recent Data Migration.

You need to follow 2 steps to get started:

• Select Recent Migration from your account on the LitExtension website.
• Take the same straightforward steps that you took when setting up the entire process.

Step 7: Switch Domain

After successfully migrating from Shopify to Magento 2, you should change your DNS settings and point your domain to your new Magento 2 store.

Some of these terms and features may appear intimidating and unclear if you are new to eCommerce. With a rent of cost, LitExtension provides a dependable Change DNS and switch domain solution.

Things to note after migrating from Shopify to Magento

Even when your store has successfully migrated from Shopify to Magento, the process is not over. After a lengthy and tough migration process, these recommendations might be used to avoid unnecessary blunders.

Your website’s link structure will probably alter when you attempt to move your products from Shopify to Magento. Maybe it happened when you were attempting to move categories from Shopify to Magento at the time. You can set 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones to resolve this problem.

Additionally, you need to adjust your order confirmations, shipping confirmations, and cart and emails to be suitable for the new website.