Have you considered migrating from your current eCommerce platform? Have you been putting it off because you’re worried about how long it will take or how much it would cost?
Maybe you’re concerned about selecting the incorrect platform for your business or executing the migration incorrectly, knowing how much damage it might do to your company if you do something wrong. Perhaps you’re unsure if you can accomplish it in-house with the expertise you presently have, or you’re looking to outsource the migration (which is the safest way), maybe you wonder where should you even start?
It’s natural if these or other similar fears have kept you from ever taking a step or even bringing up the subject. However, there are resources available to you to help you make the best decision for your company.
Most Common eCommerce Migration Reasons
The business world is changing at an unimaginable pace. In order to remain competitive, you need the right tools and resources for your company’s success. This often means re-platforming to a system that better suits your business’ needs and helps you scale your business for the better in the future.
Some common reasons for an eCommerce migration include:
- Maintenance costs too much.
- You can’t optimize your platform for mobile, which is a concern considering that half of the customers make purchases on their smartphones.
- Your previous system is sluggish, difficult to browse and search, and has little information, resulting in a poor customer experience (CX).
- Your legacy platform system is failing and is more expensive to maintain than to replace.
- You’re attempting to transition your operations from on-premise to the cloud.
- You require a new website, but your existing platform’s design possibilities are restricted.
- On your current platform, you cannot adequately handle security concerns.
- Your present platform is incapable of integrating with other third-party systems, such as payment processors or analytics software.
- You can’t scale your platform to keep up with your growth
Now that you are certain you need a re-platforming, the question becomes: do you do the project in-house, or do you hire third-party professionals? This decision is up to you, but in this article, we’ll lay out the risks so that you can decide if you will take your chances or not — and you must know if your in-house team is up to the task and has the required skillset.
What are the Risks of Doing a Migration In-House?
In truth, there are several eCommerce migration risks that you must avoid no matter what to ensure that there won’t be any drawbacks for your business in the future. These risks include deficient or incorrect data migration, incorrect mapping, loss in SERP rankings, compromising data security, and inadequate testing, to name a few.
The list goes on, but here, we’ll go over the most lethal risks that you’ll take when doing an in-house migration, and why you should let a professional handle it to avoid these risks.
You Could Hurt Your SEO Visibility and Lose SERP Rankings
You’ve put a lot of time and effort into, not just building and maintaining your present system, but also into ensuring that your platform appears at the top of search engine results. Now, you risk losing your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank if you don’t pay special attention to your SEO.
If you’re going to be re-platforming, make sure that all of your old URLs are mapped to their new platform counterparts and import high-quality metadata. You should also update any XML sitemaps or robots.txt files when switching eCommerce platforms; this will help ensure better performance for search engines like Google, which may index these documents more quickly than before!
Before launching your new platform, try not to update your title tags, since this might jeopardize your SERP rank. Also, remember to keep your old platform up and running while making your new site unavailable to search engines.
When you partner with an eCommerce Development Agency to migrate your site traffic from the old URLs onto new ones, there is no need for concern about losing product or category SEO. This way of optimizing will make things much easier on yourself in terms of redirects and not worrying too much over downtime!
If something goes wrong, your old site can still be accessed and restored quickly with the help of the eCommerce agency you are working with. If you plan on migrating with your in-house team, ensure that your in-house staff is up to speed on maintaining the SERP positions and has a certain level of knowledge before re-platforming.
It’s quite common to be discouraged by the daunting tasks of re-platforming when it comes to SEO. While these problems are frightening at first, they are typical with every re-platforming and migration project. An experienced eCommerce development agency has probably done these tasks a hundred times. Re-platforming is not that time-consuming, expensive, and hard if you choose your partner right.
Data Loss or Security Compromise
While the idea of losing customer data may seem like the second worst thing to happen, it’s not insubstantial and can have serious consequences. You should prepare for this possibility by having backups in place before beginning any kind of in-house migration process — whether that means backed-up by servers or cloud storage services.
When partnering with an eCommerce agency this possibility is really low since agencies have certain workflows to prevent these mistakes from happening in the first place. Additionally, you must avoid shutting down your website until you are done transferring your data, as this will seriously hurt your SEO and will result in Data Transfer Mistakes.
When you’re migrating your data, it can be helpful to create a parallel or swing environment, which is when the old system stays in use while we migrate our information onto temporary servers on new platforms. Once these tests are complete, then one of them might go live as normal with no mistakes committed before its time!
During a system-wide migration to a new platform, company data is exposed.
Any loss here has the ability to severely damage your business operations and reputation. Furthermore, if it involves user information, the consequences might even have an impact on your company’s public image.
Vulnerabilities in migrations are frequently utilized by cybercriminals, and an agency will take precautions for this. However, if you plan on doing the migration by yourself, then you’ll need the technical skills to make sure your data is protected during the migration.
Wasting Too Much Money and Time
Moving your store from one platform to the next takes time and money, so it only works if you have enough of both. Working together with your agency will allow you to evaluate the project as a team, and to be completely honest about what is feasible, and what isn’t an excellent idea for your business.
Working closely with your agency will allow them to give you the best alternatives for applications, plugins, themes, and other goods that would meet both your requirements and your budget since they will be aware of your budget.
With the help of an agency, you’ll be informed thoroughly on how to distribute your money in an equitable manner and guarantee that it is spent where it is most wanted or required. Make sure you talk with them so you can prioritize requirements and ensure that you’re investing the correct amount of money in the appropriate areas.
Delays in Your Timeline
All eCommerce shops will have various timetable needs when it comes to re-platforming. The length of your timeline is mostly determined by the breadth of your project and the type of your shop.
Having a good strategy in place is essential for preventing any delays or timetable concerns. While ideas for projects of this sort tend to alter over time, having a comprehensive strategy and timetable in place to follow may make a tremendous difference and keep things moving forward.
Not Utilizing Unique Features Of The New Platform
Each eCommerce platform, as previously said, has its own set of built-in capabilities as well as a network of third-party integrations. Taking a thorough inventory of your present website’s features and third-party connections is critical to accomplish throughout the planning process to ensure that they are copied correctly.
Many of the most popular third-party connectors work across various platforms. You should, as stated above, create a list of your connectors and integrations that you already use on your eCommerce site to ensure that your migration can be done seamlessly.
If you are using an in-house team for your migration, make sure they are up to the task of setting up integrations and connectors on the new platform.
Sloppy Testing
When you’re re-platforming your business, time is always a luxury. You want everything to go smoothly and without any hiccups so that the new system works well from day one.
But sometimes there are just some things which can’t be helped! It’s important not only that you give yourself enough testing time but also enough testers to find any potential problems.
Inadequate testing usually results in failures at launch or, even worse, errors just when traffic is booming on your eCommerce site. So proper and professional testing is a must for any type of eCommerce migration.
What Will You Possibly Gain From Migrating Your eCommerce Site?
Better Customer Experience
While migrating you’ll be able to make changes to your website’s design. The customer experience from start to finish is critical for satisfying customers.
Make sure you think like one of them for your site navigation, search functions, and URL syntax all being in place before they even get onto your page! Your landing page also needs some work done on it; make sure that it’s bright & dynamic because this will be what catches their attention first which influences future decisions made about purchasing products or services offered by your business.
Increased Security
Your shop and platform must ensure that your information, as well as that of your customers, is secure. If your current eCommerce platform’s security is weak, one of the biggest benefits of re-platforming is increasing the security of your store.
A Scalable Platform That Can Help You Grow Your Business
Naturally, your demands, as well as the needs of your customers, will increase and change. Perhaps your eCommerce platform limits the number of products offered in your shop or the SEO adjustments you need to make.
So migrating to a more scalable eCommerce platform will make sure your business can grow with no limitations.
Why You Should Hire Professionals for your eCommerce Migration?
Why would you pay a development agency when you can do it yourself or have a staff that can accomplish it for you in-house with no problems? Outsourcing any project may not be needed at first when you’re small and just getting started.
However, as your company grows, it becomes more complicated and demands additional time and resources to help you navigate the continual changes. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a global corporation, an eCommerce development firm has the ability and expertise to assist, if they have enough experience in bringing digital projects to life.
Here are the reasons why you should hire a professional to do work for you:
No Data Loss
One of the scariest and most infuriating things that can happen to a website is data loss. When migrating your website, you always face the risk of losing data. Depending on the nature of your website, you may have sensitive information that has to be kept secure. Customers may lose faith in your company if you lose it. Furthermore, deleted data might prevent your website from functioning correctly. A competent specialist, on the other hand, can assist reduce the danger of things going wrong. They will also be well-versed in dealing with any problems that may emerge.
They Know the Best SEO Practices
It’s possible that your website’s SEO will be damaged if it isn’t migrated correctly. If you’ve put a lot of effort and money into developing an effective SEO strategy, you’ll want to make sure the transfer process goes as smoothly as possible so you don’t start to see your ranks drop.
Less Time and Money Spent
As previously said, it might be quite tempting to want to do everything yourself, especially if the alternative is paying someone else. Hiring a professional to handle your website migration is one of the best ways for you to use that time and energy in other areas. You can free up time to focus on other aspects of your business by hiring a professional to handle your website migration.
Less or No Downtime
Any amount of time during which your website is unreachable or unable to function correctly is referred to as downtime. Visitors will be unable to visit your site as a result of this, which may result in a loss of sales or money from visits. In some sectors, firms might lose tens of thousands of dollars in only a few minutes of downtime. Although downtime is inevitable during website migrations, a professional can ensure that your site is only unavailable for a short period of time. The sooner you can get your website back up and running, the better for your visitors.
In summary, if you outsource your migration project to professionals, you will:
- Increase your SERP rankings with proper SEO practices
- Cut your costs over time
- Scale your business faster
- Consolidate your systems
- Keep your system secure
- Optimize your site across devices
- Give your website a fresh, modern look
- Avoid glitches and data loss from failing legacy systems
- Provide more, and better, online features
- Provide a better customer experience
Optimum7 Can Painlessly Migrate Your Store to a Better Platform
Setting up an eCommerce store or migrating an existing one can be daunting, but you don’t need to worry. Hiring a professional development agency will help take care of your needs and overcome any challenges that arise along the way!
With the right agency by your side, you can focus on what matters most — growing business. They’ll handle any technical challenges that arise with ease and make sure nothing gets in your way when scaling your business!
Contact us and let’s start growing your business today!
