Shopify is the trending eCommerce platform, no doubt. Over the last decade, this platform has gained tremendous popularity (according to BuiltWith):
You already have your own online business and want to make a switch? Shopify migration is the mutual story of business owners who want to make a change. We would like to meet you to take you through the Shopify migration process step-by-step. The Shopify Migration checklist we provide will help you follow the process properly to avoid missing any key tasks.
Let’s walk through each of them to move your store to the new home using:
Table of Contents
Shopify Migration checklist
Step 1: Review & Consider
Before starting adding products and setting up your payments, the first and foremost task you need to take into account is reviewing your online store. In other words, you need to decide on what to migrate?
There are lots of considerations you should be aware of when migrating to Shopify. In the best way, list down all types of data that you track in your old platform. Don’t forget to include how much data you have for each amount. Types of data you might want to keep eyes on:
- Products (categories, catalog, collections)
- Orders
- Customers
- Address
- Shipping
- Payments
- Taxes
- Loyalty
- Gift cards
- Certificates
- Store credits
- Discount codes
- Blogs
- Pages (shipping policy, contact…)
- Product reviews
After listing all the assets you need, you should know about the migration import order. The order you import your products, customers, and orders are important. If you need to import these kinds of data, follow this order:
- Products
- Customers
- Historical orders
If you find this process is confusing, you can drop us a message and we will help you to run your migration process smoothly. Shopify Migration service is a safe choice but requires people who have experiences to do it.
Free Checklist Available Here.
17 steps to help you re-platform your store!
Step 2: Prepare alternative solutions
As migrating has lots of things to consider, which means there might be lots of changes. Maybe your theme from the old store isn’t compatible with the themes that Shopify provides. The same is true for the apps. Maybe your old eCommerce platform offers an app with particular features you like, but Shopify doesn’t. At this step, you might want to consider hiring a partner to help you create a private app that meets your requirements.
So, make sure you do proper research to find out the most suitable alternatives for your new store.
Step 3: Decide to pick a plan
You need to decide to choose a Shopify pricing plan to have your store alive!
By choosing a plan, you can avoid any disruption to your business and make it run smoothly.
Currently, Shopify offers different plans for merchants:
Depending on your business size, you can choose the most suitable Shopify plan. The Shopify Plan, which goes for $79/month, is the most popular solution. You can receive pretty much every feature Shopify has to offer with this plan.
If your business is big, you might want to consider Shopify plus plan with the enterprise-level system.
If you need more time do decide, Shopify gives you a 14-day free trial. Then, you have more time to consider and pick the most suitable Shopify plan.
Step 4: Set up your Shopify store
It’s time to make your website look great! Make sure you create the initial setup for your new store on Shopify. Give your business a store address, email address, and other settings.
To get started, take some time to understand how to set up a Shopify store from scratch!
Free Download
Magento to Shopify checklist
Step 5: Add stuff accounts
If you want to let more than one person access your Shopify admin, why don’t you set up staff accounts? You can set staff permission to let other people access your Shopify admin, without giving them access to sensitive information.
The number of staff you can create depends on your Shopify pricing plan:
- Shopify Lite plan: 1 staff
- Basic Shopify plan: 2 staff
- Shopify plan: 5 staff
- Advanced Shopify plan: 15 staff
- Shopify Plus plan: unlimited staff
A staff member can have different levels of permissions: Owner permissions, Full permission, and Limited permissions. Depending on your business model, and as a store owner, you have the right to assign suitable permission for your staff.
Step 6: Select a Migration solution
There are a few options for you to choose from:
- Manually copy and paste content from your old store site
- Use migration solution provider (like LitExtension)
- Hire a partner to create a private app to do the migration for you.
- Use a Shopify publish app (like Excelify. We include an instruction video right below this part. Make sure you check it out!)
- Manually transfer using CSV files (this option is only applied to migrate customers and products)
Migrate to Shopify from Magento using Excelify:
Step 7: Organize your products
If you select a migration Shopify public app to import your products to Shopify, it’s important to check that all your product information was correctly imported.
To verify, follow these steps:
- Check your product details (images, variants, descriptions and meta descriptions)
- Create collections to organize your products
- Get familiar with product inventory to keep track of the products that you have available in your store.
Download Now: Free migration checklist
Step 8: Pick a theme
You’ve successfully signed up for a Shopify account, choose a pricing plan, and you want to make it look nice. There’s no need to worry even if you’re not a web designer, as Shopify offers lots of customizable theme templates, both free and paid.
A thorough theme customization instruction will help you a lot in making your Shopify store look nice and impressive.
Step 9: Set up your domain
When setting up a Shopify store, you can either buy a new domain or transfer the current domain of your existing store to your new Shopify one.
Get a new domain
You can also buy a new one from a domain provider or from Shopify. But we recommend you purchase from a domain provider for a better price.
If you have no idea of this, check out our guideline on Buying a domain name. If you have an existing domain, you can also find out how to Connect the existing domain within our guide.
Step 10: Set up your shipping
It’s important to set up shipping information correctly before launching your store. You don’t want to refund customers for overcharging them or to email customers asking them to pay more because of your missing charge.
Find the detailed instruction on Shipping information set up to make sure you don’t miss any key tasks.
Step 11: Configure your taxes
When running a business, it’s worth taking into account tax. Depending on where you are, there are different rules and regulations on sales taxes that apply to your products. It’s a good idea to always keep track of your taxes to avoid any issues that may arise. To make sure your store meets those rules, take some time to understand Shopify’s tax setup process.
Step 12: Configure Payment providers
Absolutely, you want to set up a payment provider to make sure customers can pay you. A payment provider helps you to accept credit card payments securely. Shopify offers its own payment provider (Shopify Payment) as well as a variety of supported third-party payment providers. There are so many options to choose from, but we suggest 2 most popular: Credit Card and Paypal. The reason for this recommendation: Paypal is widely used, and some people prefer using a Credit card rather than Paypal.
Step 13: Set up checkout
After setting up your payment providers, you need to configure your checkout page to process customer orders.
To set up your checkout:
- Decide how you want to work with customer orders
- Add your store’s policies
- Edit your checkout’s customer information settings
One tip to configure your checkout: add a sense of urgency to it. Lots of merchants suffer abandonment at the checkout page. One way to avoid this by urging customers to purchase unless they miss a good offer.
Step 14: Run some test orders
Now that you’ve set up your payment and checkout settings, take some time to try out a few transactions to make sure that everything is running. Placing some test orders will help you understand how your customers go through when buying products. You can access all the orders that customers place from the Orders page in your Shopify admin.
A few different types of transactions for you to test orders:
- Completing a successful and a failed transaction
- Refunding and canceling an order
- Fulfilling or partially fulfilling an order
- Archiving a successful order
As you create, refund, and fulfill orders, you can see the emails your customers receive for each action. The Notifications page in Shopify admin allows you to edit the templates for these emails.
Step 15: Invite your customers
Now that you’ve migrated your customer data and you’ve launched your store. It’s time to invite your customers to create an account in your store!
If you have lots of customers, then you might want to take some time to visit the Shopify app store to find out an app that helps you to send invites. If you’re in the Shopify Plus plan, then the Shopify Bulk Account Inviter app is a perfect match.
Step 16: Set up URL redirects
At this step in the Shopify migration checklist, you need to redirect your URL to redirect traffic from your old store to your new store. Take some time to understand how to redirect your URLs.
Step 17: Go live!
Now, you should have your Shopify store live. Go ahead and get your sales!
Parting words…
Now you can take advantage of Shopify to grow your online business in the best possible way! We hope this Shopify migration checklist will help you go through the migration process easily. Keep in mind, there’s no one-for-all solution. The process of migration depends on your goals and objectives.
Can you quickly migrate to Shopify? Of course, you can. However, are you sure it’s perfect without data loss? It’s possible if you know technical thoroughly.
Feel free to ask any questions. We’re open to talking. Our Shopify development experts are ready to help you smoothly go through the Shopify migration process!
FREE Checklist is available
17 steps to help you re-platform your store!
