A huge number of Magento merchants migrate to Shopify Plus. In this article, we review the key reasons for this so that you can upgrade your online retail with confidence.
Magento has been a strong contender in the e-commerce world. As of June 2020, Magento 1 became officially obsolete. This means that support, security patches, and quality fixes that businesses relied on are now unavailable.
It makes a vast amount of brands taking their online stores to Shopify Plus. For scalable growth, this migration can be the best choice.
There are 6 key reasons Shopify Plus is the preferred platform:
1. Time to market
Migrating to Shopify Plus takes around 3-4 months while upgrading or migrating to a traditional platform can take 8-12 months.
2. Lower cost
While license fees are lower on Magento 2 Enterprise than on Shopify Plus, these do not include hosting fees. So the cost of ownership on Shopify Plus comes out in total around 50% less than on Magento.
3. Ecosystem and integration
Shopify Plus has a wide range of world-class technology partners - from reviews to search, payments, and shipping. Shopify’s ecosystem of pre-built integrations means allows quickly plug it into your existing tech stack.
4. Effortlessly secure
Magento has security issues surrounding the platform. Shopify Plus has a closed backend ecosystem, which means that any attacks that happen are contained and managed quickly.
5. Flexible design
Shopify has a fully customizable storefront; you can design and build whatever your brand needs.
6. Powerful automation
Shopify gives powerful automation tools such as Flow, Scripts, and Launchpad.
Theme Migration
As Magento and Shopify Plus have different frameworks, migrating your existing Magneto theme to Shopify Plus is impossible. It will need to be re-coded on Shopify. But the theme's development cost of Shopify Plus is much lower than that of a Magento. Migrating over from Magneto, we would run their site through a UX and design exercise to capitalize on the migration investment.
Code Migration
Because the two platforms' infrastructure is different, migrating over customized code is not as simple as copying and pasting.
Extension to App Migration
Shopify Plus has an extensive ecosystem of technology partners. So if you have an extension to migrate over, there will likely be a solution ready to go. For instance, such partners as Klaviyo, Klarna, and ReCharge have integrations with both platforms.
Custom apps with the required functionality can be developed and hosted separately to Shopify Plus. The development time and cost for custom apps are usually lower than on Magento 2.
Data Migration
There is an extensive library of Magento data migration tools out there. The two platforms handle data differently, but matching up the fields and transferring the data allows a seamless transition.
Most data fields, including customer data and order data, can be migrated over with ease, however, with passwords it can be difficult. Data can be assigned to a certain client, so any order queries or customer services are seamless between the platforms. Migrating the data is a complex task so we suggest hiring experts for making it painless.
Redirects
Before you launch a storefront on Shopify Plus, make sure to create a map 301 URL with redirects. By doing this Google will pass over the ranking power to the new URL, and your users with saved links will still land on a relevant page.
Higher speed
Shopify Plus is a SaaS and it ensures the speed and website load time. Typically after moving from Magento to Shopify you will see an increase in page loading times and gaining high-quality organic traffic for SEO. Also, you can expect to see a much better conversion rate.