It’s our first time migrating our e-Commerce platform to magento, and here are the things I would like to share during the process:
1. Migration of data
It’s really not as straightforward migrating the database, there are some compatibility issues. Like in our case, password cannot be migrated due to it’s encryptions, which means we need to ask all our customer to reset their passwords. You would more likely also to encounter problems with the variations of product,for example sizes of apparels and others. Make sure to know which data are non negotiable in terms of migration.
2. Simulate the process
If you’ve been used to your current ecommerce platform, you would need to do some adjustments in terms of processing new orders with magento. From the time you change status of your order until you create your waybill for shipment. Magento in itself may not be complete in terms of features you would need which means you might need to get plugins or request from you developers additional features.
3. Schedule
Do your migration on a off peak. During migration you would encounter tons of issues, no matter how well you have prepared the migration, worst case scenarios will always arise. At least during off peak disruption will only affect a few customers.
4. Understanding
Running eCommerce does not require some programming skills, but because of the complications behind the system it requires you to understand the logic behind the system. I’m fortunate enough to have understanding with programming and I can’t imagine running the site without understanding the functions behind. You would ask me why, well you would need to understand how the following works: shipping fees, layout design banners, etc. Especially with Magento, it’s like using Android, there’s a lot of modifications that can be done.
5. Backup
Make sure your old website or old CMS is still accessible. Transition will be hard, and there will always be back orders pending from previous website. So it is best to keep access to your old system, even if you have migrated all data to the new system, there may be some items left out.
