Magento Migration – The advantages and steps involved

It is obvious that eCommerce is taking up its head and changing the face of commerce world. The modern world is moving towards on-the-go shopping and many vendors and manufactures are trying to cope up with the same. The most important thing to consider before going online is “Data Security” and customer satisfactions.

The common backbone of every online business is the tool which they use in their backend. There are many eCommerce tools available which takes hold of everything you do with the online sales. Tools like OSCommerce, Volusion, PrestaSHOP, OpenCart, WooCommerce (WordPress Extension) and lot more are available in the market to take on your business online.

Magento leads the way as it is been used by thousands and thousands of online retailers. Over a period of time, Magento have gained the trust of many retailers and also have taken the responsibility of the retailers and customer data security. There have been many data security breach in recent times (Target’s data loss on last festive season was the major security breach) because of which many retailers are afraid of using tools with less security. The main reason people started migrating to Magento is that the advantage of Magento’s security.

The History:

Magento is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that especially operates for an eCommerce website. Varien Inc company form Culver City, California claims to be the original developers of Magento. In 2008, Magento was initially called as Bento and later they sold a substantial share to eBay.

2011 was the year when eBay announced that it has bought a share of about 49% from Varien and later on June 6, 2011, Magento was completely owned by eBay (100% ownership). Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner were the leaders of Magento and Roy Rubin, Magento CEO wrote, “Magento will continue to operate out of Los Angeles, with Yoav Kutner and me as its leaders”. Later in April 2012, Yoav Kutner left Magento.

The Platforms:

Magento is not a single platform rather it comprises two major platforms namely Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise Edition. It also had two other services called Magento Professional Edition and Magento Go which was later turned down from service (in this Magento Go was recent shutdown say on February 1, 2015).

Magento Community Edition has the core principles as stated that in the core Magento i.e. it is an open source CMS in which anyone can alter the core system allowing developers to move with freedom. On Nov 24, 2014, the latest version (1.9.1.0) was released. Magento Enterprise Edition was completely derived from the core principles of Magento Community Edition. The community edition is free of cost but the enterprise edition is not for free. But it has many professional features and functionalities that were useful for large businesses that require technical support.

The Migration:

Migrating to Magento is not an easy task. It involves many processes to avoid data loss and even the investment loss. But migrating to Magento is one fair and decent decision that most of the retailers and manufacturers do nowadays.

Why migrate to Magento?

Magento is considered as one of the top platforms which provides complete solutions and support to an eCommerce store. It has some incredible functions like the full technical support that helps businesses achieve their desired target. The main factors why many featured companies choose Magento are as follows

• The main reason behind Magento migration is that it offers major functionalities which have not been supplied by other eCommerce platforms.
• Magento increase your core sales. It has special features like up-sell, cross-sells and product reviews that drive sales.
• Magento does not take any transactions fess while many other major platforms charge a minimal percentage for every transaction.
• Using Magento, one can manage more than a store in the same account. This help saves money and time.

Here are some of the steps one need to follow before migrating your website from another eCommerce tool to Magento

• Inform about the migration to all your employees, stake person, regular website visitor and even your customers to get away from any unwanted hassles
• Migrate your website only when you have the lowest number of visitors (say, weekend). It is surveyed and recorded that high sales occur only during the mid-days of the week.
• Set deadlines in order to avoid unwanted drags and time delays and stop any further updates and additions to your website
• Backup the entire data (from the sales record to customer details, images to the product details) either in DVDs or external backup devices or even in a secured cloud server.