Migrate from Magento to BigCommerce? Get it done in a few steps!
Magento has earned a solid reputation as one of the best eCommerce solutions for medium and large businesses. The Open-Source platform brings e-merchants powerful tools with endless customization possibilities as well as a top-notch security system. However, it does not come at a low price. A Magento store with standard functionality, no integration, or any external systems plus a simple free theme, starts from around $15,000.
On the other hand, BigCommerce is much more user-friendly as a SaaS solution. You don’t need to spend hours and hours writing code or learning how to add a function to your site. Besides, it only costs you from $30 to $300 to build a fantastic store.
If you’re struggling with your Magento store and want to find a better platform for your business, BigCommerce could be a wise option. This article will bring you a step-by-step guide on how to migrate from Magento to BigCommerce:
- Backup your data
- Set up a new BigCommerce store
- Migrate from Magento to BigCommerce with LitExtension
- Check the results after migration
- post-migration activities
Let’s dive into it!
Why move from Magento to BigCommerce
According to Builtwith, BigCommerce is home to more than two and a half million users and holds the 2nd position among the entire Internet’s hosted solutions. The CMS is well known for its amazing, professional, and eye-catching templates, along with a rich build-in set of features. Additionally, the ease of use is also one of its biggest strengths. So why choose BigCommerce for your new store? First, let’s look at some of the critical elements that make BigCommerce a more suitable choice than Magento.
Ease of installation
Setting up a Magento store is not an easy task when you have to work with technical stuff. Therefore, it would be best if you also found a way to integrate extensions and customize themes. This job requires a certain amount of technical knowledge. Consequently, you might need help from experts or developers to complete it fully.
On the other hand, you can easily set up your BigCommerce store in just three simple steps: Login or create a new account, pick your favorite theme, and you can start editing your store. Moreover, BigCommerce enables easy navigation on its interface, so you don’t have to worry about whether you can do it or not.
More features out-of-the-box
Being able to access the source code, Magento users mainly depend on third-party developers or extensions to give their stores a powerful pack of features. This may provide them with the freedom to customize their store to whichever extent they wish, but it’s troublesome if you want something simple to build and maintain.
On the other hand, BigCommerce is an all-in-one solution. The goal is to provide users with as much as possible out of the box. They will handle everything, including hosting and building your site and integrating a pack of essential features that gets your store up and running with ease.
Easier maintenance
Magento users will have to be solely responsible for the infrastructure and administration on their platform. They have to fix bugs or update their software themselves. Since you handle the hosting, if the server goes down, you must address the issue yourself. With Magento, you’ll have complete control of your site, but you also have to spend more time and effort on maintenance.
When using BigCommerce, you will be provided with hosting services, so this platform will repair and upgrade the software for you as needed. BigCommerce also appears to have a system uptime of 99.99 percent. If there are any issues, you can easily connect with the support team by email, phone call, or live chat. They provide SLAs to their merchants to ensure their confidentiality. Choosing BigCommerce is the optimal choice for you to save time and bring fewer risks during the store’s operation.
After considering all the aspects, let’s look at migrating your store from Magento to BigCommerce.
Step-by-step Guide to Migrate from Magento to BigCommerce
You can choose either of these three ways to migrate from Magento to BigCommerce
- Migrate Manually
Firstly, you need to export your data from Magento’s store into a CSV file. Then, when all the data has been successfully exported, all you need to do is import the data into the existing BigCommerce store.
It won’t be that hard if you are experienced with the process. Besides, you can save a lot of money and fully control your data when migrating manually. However, it can take weeks or even months, depending on the volume of your data.
- Hire website development experts or freelancers
You can recruit a web agency or a freelancer to help you migrate your data to the new shop. The pay rate ranges between $50 and $80.
However, it is difficult to find a web agency or freelancer that thoroughly comprehends a platform’s data structure, leading to many data and structure errors. If this arises, it will take them longer to correct the error, increasing costs.
This seems like a good way to migrate your data. However, there’re still some risks you need to face if you choose to work with a 3rd-party, such as leaking information or lack of connection between you and your agency.
- Use LitExtension automatic migration tool.
Thirdly, using an automated migration service is another method to transfer your current Magento store to the new one. Website-developer experts highly appreciate this as the most effective way of speed, security, and accuracy. Moreover, LitExtension experts assure 0% data loss or any unwanted errors during the migration process. There’s no need for any technical knowledge at all; provide your Source Cart and Target Cart information and go ahead.
LitExtension provides unique features for you to choose from:
- For example, you can select the entities you want to migrate from your Magento Store to the BigCommerce store, such as products, customer data, orders… without interrupting site performance.
- Moreover, you can also choose additional options like preserving product IDs on Target Store, Strip HTML from the category, product names, etc. You can also match Languages, Order Status, and Customer groups to ensure consistency in the BigCommerce store.
- Last but not least, LitExtension provides a Demo migration of 20 entities free of charge so you can get an idea of what the service is like.
Post-migration activities
Check the migration result
After you finish transferring all the data to the new BigCommerce store, you should click on the “Check result” button to double-check everything. Here are some of the critical points for your post-migration checklist
- Ensure all your products appear on both the front-end and back-end.
- Make sure all your products are in the appropriate categories and onsite search results.
- Examine every link that leads to menus, header, footer, and inside the pages.
- Sample a purchase in your new store.
Choose themes
BigCommerce provides 12 free themes and 100+ paid options. All of these themes are mobile responsive and effortless to customize. Unfortunately, you can’t transfer the theme from the old store to the new one due to the incompatible structures of these two platforms. Nevertheless, you can customize the new store theme to look similar to the old one and give your site a fresh look.
Configure tax and shipping settings
- The next step is setting up your tax, tax rates, and shipping options. Again, manual and automated tax configurations need to control how taxes are measured and presented on the customer app.
Set up payment
BigCommerce integrates with more than 65 payment gateways. They also provide integrations with some of the most popular digital and mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Paypal, Amazon Pay, and so on… BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees except for credit card rates. Still, you can minimize this kind of fee by purchasing a higher plan.
Deal with new data
Your old Magento store continues to run generally throughout the migration process. As a result, new orders and newcomers may appear while you are building your new BigCommerce shop. So how can you migrate these data into your new store?
- Recent data migration helps you transfer all the newly appeared data or added to your Shopify store during and after the migration.
- Smart Update allows you to update data that has been edited and, at the same time, migrate those that recently appear in your Shopify store during and after the migration.
The re-migration service enables you to migrate your data all over again.
Conclusion
And that’s all you need to know when migrating from Magento to BigCommerce. Migrating the store to a more optimized platform brings you the chance to level up your store. This job can be difficult and annoying, but everything will be a piece of cake if you choose the right method.
I hope you can find the information you need in my post. And here are some articles on the same topic if you’re interested:
Migrating from Magento to BigCommerce
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