A Guide For Secure Magento to Shopify Data Migration

The choice of the eCommerce platform can create a huge difference in the way a merchant operate their online business. Hence, traversing from one platform to another is an important and inevitable stage for merchants with expanding businesses. 

Such common platform migration scenarios are very popular among Magento merchants. Magento is a complicated platform and it mostly requires a certain degree of technical expertise for store management, which might be problematic for merchants. In such cases, Shopify can act as a perfect alternative, as it is user friendly and provides almost the same functionalities as Magento. Hence, adopting Magento to Shopify migration has become a common choice among merchants seeking affordable and convenient store management. 

Why Shopify?

Shopify is one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms apart from Magento. Shopify has an easy to use dashboard for merchants along with a wide variety of themes and apps as well.

Further, it is as flexible and secure as Magento and supports custom made apps as well. Below is a list of few benefits of Magento to Shopify migration:

• It has an easy to use backend for store management which can be handled easily by merchants with zero technical knowledge
• Shopify contains plenty of premade solutions for extending functionality and improving user experience, which is a very cost-effective alternative. 
• Shopify is also highly flexible and allows merchants to extend their store’s functionality by using custom solutions.

Magento to Shopify Migration process

There are several ways to migrate from Magento to Shopify. It can be either done with the help of software, plugin, or custom Scripts. The final choice ultimately depends on the size of the website and budget.

Recently, our Magento expert developers at The Brihaspati Infotech had a chance for assisting our client’s store to migrate from Magento to Shopify. In this project, we used custom scripts for performing Magento to Shopify data migration efficiently.

Speed breakers to Migrate from Magento to Shopify

Our client had a pre-made Magento site which was running successfully on Magento. Evidently, the website stored immense data for products, orders, and customers. It was thus imperative that no data was lost during the migration and the complete data is replicated in the Shopify Platform smoothly. 

Also, Magento had separate categories and subcategories which is not available in Shopify. While doing the migration we had to make sure that the categories in Magento are restored in the Shopify platform. This was not possible through any pre-made plugin or third-party solution.

So we decided to migrate Magento to Shopify platform manually using custom scripts. 

Our experience with Magento to Shopify migration

We have migrated eCommerce websites from Magento to WooCommerce in the past, so we were familiar with the drill from the beginning. After going through the Magento website and filtering the data that we were supposed to migrate and making a backup of it, we followed the following steps for migrating the online store from Magento to Shopify.

For Data migration

We began the migration process with Magento to Shopify data migration. As data migration is a very crucial and time-consuming process. We followed the following procedure for Magento to Shopify data migration.

Transferring data from Magento to Shopify via Local DB

Our eCommerce development company firstly transferred data from the Magento store to our local database to proceed with the data migration process, instead of directly migrating data from Magento to Shopify. For this, we used Magento API to extract data from Magento’s DB and stored it accordingly in the local DB.

Once the data was saved in the Local DB we had to access it from the Shopify account of the client to begin the data transfer process. For this, we used Shopify APIs which allowed us to access data from the Local DB with ease for further process.

Deploying the Data Sequentially

After creating the connection of the Shopify store with the local DB we created a custom script for deploying the data sequentially. Through our custom script, we were able to sequentially access the data with ease.

The custom script accessed collections, its categories, and products from the categories sequentially. It also helped in accessing and Urls of products in the database. Furthering with Magento to Shopify data migration process,  we were able to store customer information and their order details using the custom script.  

Running the custom scripts for Data Transfer

After creating the custom script and establishing the connection between Shopify and Local DB we had to run the custom scripts we created for deploying the data. However, it was a time-consuming process and we needed to use a software tool that would aid us in running the whole process in the background.

For this we used Cron, it is a time-based scheduler that is capable of running custom script and importing the data sequentially. Hence, with the help of Cron Jobs, we executed our custom script in the background efficiently.

For Frontend

The frontend section was comparatively easier to manage, as we didn’t have to perform any major customization. The client had bought a premade theme for this purpose and we just performed a few minor customizations to make it look presentable and interactive. 

Conclusion 

Migrating from Magento to Shopify can be a turning point for any online store. Shopify allows merchants to let loose on the store maintenance and focus on their business strategies. However, to make this possible, performing the store migration cautiously and carefully is very important.

If you are also planning to migrate your Magento store to Shopify, contact us or drop us a mail at any time. With our Magento to Shopify Migration services, we can aid you in recreating your online store in the Shopify platform with ease.