Like many eCommerce store owners, you may have reached the point where you’re considering moving platforms. The decision to switch may be due to the fact that you feel you’ve outgrown your current one, or you need more features or functionality. In the eCommerce world it’s important that as your business grows, the technology behind it grows as well.
Over the past year, we’ve seen more and more store owners come to us to get our thoughts on moving to a different shopping cart. After speaking with them and learning about their business and goals for wanting to move, we make a recommendation to stay or leave.
We want to make sure that a major decision like this is not taken lightly. There are many variables that come into play with a migration and you need to be working with a partner who is going to be with you every step of the way to make sure it’s done correctly and efficiently with minimal impact to your business.
We recently completed a migration from Magento for a well-established etailer who came to us to migrate their store to BigCommerce. Their store was using V1 of Magento which the company has decided to put on the end-of-life list with support ending on June 30, 2020. Rather than upgrade to a new version of Magento, they decided to move to BigCommerce and reached out to us to make it happen.
Our team put together a comprehensive development plan that included a timeline outline of the process from initial data export/import to post launch training and support – something we do with all of our platform migration projects.
The month’s long project came to an end with the client turning on the new store and welcoming shoppers to a more organized and easy-to-shop website. On the backend, the client now has an easier way of managing orders, returns, inventory, and more as well as access to thousands of 3rd party applications to further enhance the store.
If you’re currently running your eCommerce store on Magento and are considering making a move to BigCommerce, here’s a quick breakdown comparing the two platforms with some of their key benefits.
BigCommerce
- Upgrades and patches are automatic so you’re always on the latest version and have no downtime with each upgrade.
- When BigCommerce rolls out an update that enables a new feature, merchants will have access to it immediately and can control when or if they want to enable that new feature.
- BigCommerce includes hosting without any bandwidth caps or limits.
- With BigCommerce’s automatic updates, merchants don’t have to pay for ongoing maintenance costs, and can focus on innovation or growing their business.
- BigCommerce has a drag-and-drop Page Builder available on all plans, which is not something merchants would get on Magento open source.
Magento
- Keeping up with the necessary security patches and version updates is time consuming and labor intensive.
- The more customizations a merchant makes, the harder (and more costly) their Magento store becomes to maintain. This has a huge impact on installing updates, security patches, and adding extensions.
- Costs can vary greatly on Magento: Paying for infrastructure, development, hosting and maintenance with adds up.
- With Magento, the complexity of the platform makes merchants reliant on developer support.
- The learning curve from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is significant, due to Magento 2 using a different architecture and newer technologies under the hood.
Your Store Wizards has migrated dozens of merchants to and from the leading eCommerce platforms including Yahoo! Store / Yahoo! Small Business, BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and more.
When it comes time to discuss whether or not a migration is right for you, contact us at support@yourstorewizards.com to schedule a free consultation. In the meantime, check out these additional resources for Magento users looking to move to BigCommerce and learn how you can get 4 months free when you migrate:
Magento V1 End of Life Survival Guide
Download this free guide to learn about how the end-of-life for V1 will impact your business and what you need to do to switch to BigCommerce.
BigCommerce -vs- Magento
Learn about what makes BigCommerce the choice for merchants moving from Magento and read case studies from merchants who made the switch.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.