Migrating from Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce) to Shopify Plus: Reasons and a Roadmap to Follow

Global ecommerce is growing at a break-neck speed, offering entrepreneurs tremendous opportunities to go big time and carve themselves a share of the huge revenue pie. 

To maximize the efficiency of your online store, you should select a robust platform for it. Maybe you have already had certain experience with Magento, and some of its cons, like prices or resource intensity, make you consider migrating from Magento (Adobe Commerce) to Shopify. Measure twice, we’ll help you to form an opinion if re-platforming is a worthwhile option for you. 

Why Moving to Shopify Plus Makes Sense?

Magento is a behemoth in the realm of on-premise ecommerce platforms that is universally praised for its high degree of customization and exclusive flexibility. However, these unquestionable boons may become a serious problem when it comes to their practical implementation. Building, deploying, and maintaining a Magento ecommerce website requires much effort and should be handled by IT professionals. Besides, Magento-based stores are subjected to all limitations and shortcomings on-premises solutions suffer from.

The advent of the concept of software as a service (SaaS) has changed the way ecommerce agents look upon their online footprint. They are eager to minimize technical aspects of e-store development and support but focus on providing a satisfying customer experience for their clientele. Modern e-store owners prefer to channel resources into sales strategies, social influence, data-driven marketing, and customer engagement but want to spend little time on handling a simple and manageable website. And this is what Shopify Plus excels at. 

But before making the final decision on migrating Magento to Shopify, it is necessary to weigh all the pros and cons of each platform. 

Magento vs Shopify Plus: A Side-By-Side Comparison

As a seasoned vendor specializing in the development of ecommerce websites, we at Elogic Commerce recommend considering the following parameters of both platforms.

Pricing

For cash-strapped startups and small ecommerce businesses on short commons, this is often the tipping factor, and Shopify Plus has the edge in it. The platform’s monthly fee is $2,000. This minimal number will grow as soon as you begin earning $800,000 per month when you switch over to the revenue-based model. It means you will be charged an additional 0.15% of monthly revenue, but not exceeding the maximum of $40,000.

In comparison with Shopify, Magento is a big-ticket item. The annual licensing starts at $22,000, but in fact, you will have to fork out much more if your Gross Merchandise Value exceeds $1 million. If it is between $1 and 5 million, the fee is $32,000, and it will increase progressively and reach $125,000 in case your enterprise earns over $25 million per year.

Deployment

Shopify Plus as a fully hosted SaaS solution handles traffic and volume changes by itself and free of charge, enabling entrepreneurs to attend to their core responsibilities and work on expanding their business. 

Unlike Shopify Plus, Magento doesn’t include a hosting service fee in its charge, except Adobe Commerce Cloud, which has a lot of pros but painful pricing. Ouch. Simply put, Shopify is a more “out-of-the-box” solution that still needs customization but incomparable with setting up Magento (Adobe Commerce).

Both platforms allow entrepreneurs to broaden their customer reach by employing social networks, blogs, apps, third-party marketplaces, and other sales channels. Yet, with Shopify, it is quite easy to set up. Thanks to its Sales Channel SDK and Buy Button, you can add eCommerce to any of these channels using just a snippet of code. Moreover, the platform provides unified reporting on all media and ensures synchronization of customer profiles across them.

With Magento, you can do the same, but you will have a greater headache. First of all, you should choose the proper Magento solution that enables omnichannel ecommerce. Second of all, it takes much effort to establish and maintain omnichannel sales in it, including connecting all your sales channels to Magento (typically via extensions), keeping the data in sync across all of them, centralizing inventory control, providing consistent branding, adding a CRM system to centralize customer data, etc.

Mobile

Given the heavy reliance of contemporary people on their gizmos in doing shopping, both platforms pay serious attention to making their products mobile-friendly. Their themes and templates are responsive on any gadget, regardless of screen size. While the quality of the final result is quite high both in Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce, the effort required for implementation differs, and Shopify has the edge in it. Developing a Shopify e-store is much simpler because of more complicated page development and QA testing procedure required for Magento products.   

As you see, Shopify Plus has considerable perks in comparison with Adobe Commerce in many aspects. Besides, there are some unique characteristics of Shopify Plus, which were absent in earlier Shopify versions and which Adobe Commerce lacks.

First of all, it is the cloud-based nature of the platform that allows for upscaling of the website with the expansion of the enterprise. Second of all, it is the B2B functionality geared for companies working in this business domain. Third of all, Shopify Plus enables mobile POS. Finally, it offers a number of exclusive features, including Shopify Flow, Launchpad, Shopify Scripts, and more. All of these, together with its simple and user-friendly employment, make Shopify Plus an excellent choice of an ecommerce platform for enterprises that want to obtain a robust e-store and save on total ownership costs. 

If such assets are crucial for your company, migrating your Magento e-store to Shopify becomes a rational step to make.

An Algorithm for Migrating a Magento Site to Shopify

Elogic Commerce has delivered numerous projects in this niche, implementing which we have devised a five-step strategy of e-store re-platforming.

Step 1. Setting up a Shopify account

On the vendor’s website, you press the Get Started button and enter all the information you are asked for, such as email, password, and store name. Take your time to choose among the pricing plans Shopify offers. 

Step 2. Creating a backup copy of your Magento store

You don’t want to lose all your product and customer data or payment details just because you pressed the wrong button somewhere, do you? To forestall any accidents, you should click the Admin sidebar of your Magento site and follow the System > Tools > Backups chain. Then, you can choose the type of backup you want to get (database, database + media, or system). The latter is the best option.

Step 3. Configuring export settings

Shopify offers a range of apps that can help you complete re-platforming quickly and smoothly. They can be found on the Shopify admin page where you click “Apps,” then “Import Store,” and follow further instructions. By way of alternative, you can make use of third-party migration apps, such as Matrixify, OEasy AliExpress Import and Order, or CedCommerce Importer. Also, there exist specialized plugins for moving certain data types, like the Magento Blog Export to Shopify Blog extension, which is instrumental in migrating a Magento blog to Shopify.

Step 4. Data migration

In fact, this stage consists of two processes. 

First, you should export your data from Magento. It is done via the same Admin sidebar you utilized for Step 2. There, you choose “System,” then “Data Transfer,” and then press “Export.” Don’t forget to select exported entity types (like products or customer addresses) and choose the right file format (for the Import Store app, it is XML). As a result, all your data appears on the spreadsheet that Shopify tools can easily read.

Second, the data should be moved to Shopify. On its admin page, you click “Apps” and then “Import Store”. In the drop-down menu, you find Magento, choose “Add file,” and select the files you need to migrate. Then, you press Continue import > Import, and voila – your data is transferred.

Step 5. Reviewing the results

When the data is located at its new home, you should ensure there are no errors or missing items. Sometimes, you may discover that the imported data has other values, products have no dimensions, or some product information failed to import (like size was migrated but not the color). Other issues that occur during migration are sending historical orders to archives or lack of product visibility (when it was hidden on Magento). All these discrepancies and inadequacies should be corrected manually. 

Although this migration plan is quite straightforward, the procedure it ushers should be carried out with all due diligence and meticulous attention to detail. Besides, there are some fine points and bottlenecks that require a professional approach and relevant tech skills. Elogic Commerce can lend a helping hand in it.

Migrate Your Ecommerce Experience with Elogic!

We are a high-profile IT company with 14 years of experience in software development behind us and over 500 completed projects under our belt. Having accumulated vast theoretical knowledge and multiple hands-skills in dealing with various ecommerce platforms, we can bring maximum value to migration projects we tackle. What do we prioritize while performing Magento-to-Shopify re-platforming?

• Keeping business on the roll. By moving the mission-critical elements and functionalities of your e-store first, we make sure your operational pipeline isn’t affected.

• Re-creating Magento’s features. The essential capabilities and features you enjoyed in a Magento website will find their way into your new Shopify e-store.

• Consistent UI/UX. The visual side of your Shopify web page will replicate your former Magento experience. 

Contact us to implement a safe, fast, and issue-free migration of your Magento e-store to Shopify.

Key Takeaways

Magento, with its products of all shapes and sizes, and Shopify Plus are the world’s leading platforms for creating ecommerce websites. The latter has more boons in comparison with Adobe Commerce as an enterprise-level product by Magento, including scalability potential, simplicity of page development, 

and availability of some unique features, especially for B2B ventures. If the owners of a Magento-based e-store realize that it is a misfit for them because of high total ownership costs and inadequate feature roster, they should migrate their website to Shopify Plus. 

A smooth and foolproof process of Magento-to-Shopify migration includes setting up a Shopify account, creating a backup copy of the Magento store, configuring export settings via a specialized app, exporting data from Magento and moving it to Shopify, and reviewing the outcome. For non-tech entrepreneurs, such a task may prove a bit of a tall order, so enlisting the assistance of a qualified IT company with extensive experience in the niche is a wise step.