Let me know if i’m setting the stage correctly:
You are getting fed up with your Magento maintenance costs and bugs.
You hear about Shopify left and right and you’re thinking of switching.
You’re worried! You remember how difficult it was to build your Magento store, all the headaches and the stress, and the costs, oh my god the costs!
Am I onto something?
Well, I have good news! Migrating from Magento to Shopify has been regarded as an absolute WIN by 100% of our clients so far. Every one of them is happy with the decision they took and their stores have never been doing better.
This article was not generated with chatGPT :). I wrote it myself after having many conversations with business owners complaining about Magento who are worried about migration. The purpose is to address concerns and give you a basic plan with the most important steps.
First of all, let’s get the bias out of the way – between 2010 and 2019 more than 90% of our client base was made up of Magento stores. We KNOW Magento! We know the extension, Amasty, Aheadworks, BSS, you name it. Today, 95% of our client base is on Shopify and I’m going to explain why we switched our focus hoping it’s going to help you to make a decision.
What’s the store owner user experience on Magento vs Shopify?
You have a fully customizable website. Yes, but any design changes you make, any extensions you install, require development and maintenance. The more extensions you install and the more custom code you add to your Magento store, the greater difficulty you will have running security updates, Magento updates, and extension updates. You will get to the point where making small changes has huge consequences and costs.
Shopify on the other side gives you much more control from a design and functionality perspective. Design-wise you have similar control to page builder templates like Elementor or Divi. Drag and drop, and add a prebuilt section for sliders, products, lookbooks, videos, and social media elements. Just drag/drop and personalize. No development is needed. From a functionality perspective, you have many apps to pick from. You won’t get EXACTLY what functionality you want (but do you need sparkle effects when pressing a button? Do you??) but you will find pretty much anything you want ready to install and use. All you need to do is adapt your functionality to the best app and go with the flow.
Another great thing about Shopify is that it is trending. Every service provider wants to have an easy-to-install app for Shopify store owners to use. Do you know how long it takes to implement GA4 in Shopify? A few minutes going through a wizard. Do you know how long it took to get Magento stores on GA4? Weeks of tickets and debugging. Do you know how long it takes to get Consent Mode v2 implemented on Shopify? Another few minutes and another wizard. How about Magento? Weeks once more! And it’s not just Google and Meta integrations – it’s integrations with any popular/must-have marketing service out there. You don’t need devs, anyone on your team can add an app and start using it.
What’s the cost of Magento vs Shopify?
Well, you have a HUGE implementation cost (compared to the initial implementation costs on Shopify). We typically rolled out Magento stores starting with $15-20K minimum. Shopify stores of similar complexity can be built for a quarter of the budget. Easy!
Then, with Magento, you have to host your website. This means typically a few hundred $/month if you want a decent hosting server. Plus, you’ll typically need to scale during high season because most of the time, Magento stores go down on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. Upgrading and downgrading hosting typically comes with its hurdles.
With Shopify, you pay the subscription, and hosting is included in that. In 5 years we have NEVER had a Shopify store go down during a sale event because hosting couldn’t take it. It scales automatically based on your needs. No more hosting worries, no more stress.
What’s data security like with Magento vs Shopify?
Speaking of self-hosted vs SaaS and functionality. Yes, Shopify will limit what you can do on the checkout page BUT, in exchange, Shopify is responsible for the security of the checkout. If you have ever been hacked you know how bad it is. I’ve personally been on a call with the client, their hosting team, and two agents from FBI cyber crime and we did a post-mortem on their hacked site. It was a big site and lots of data was lost, thus the federal interference. Well, on Shopify our clients are much more relaxed from this perspective. With not-so-great limitations, come great perks!
Finally, what are some negatives we hear about Shopify?
Well, the average consensus with our clients in Europe is the high payment processing fees. Local payment processors in European countries can typically offer below 1% payment processing fees whereas Shopify goes closer to 2%. If you don’t use Shopify Payments you have to pay the transaction fee which is between 0.6% and 2% so all in all you end up paying at least 2-3 times more. Again, there are plenty of other savings plus Shopify Payments is a great solution – we’ve never had issues with it not working for starters and it’s easy to set up, offers Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Shop Pay by default and it makes international e-commerce and currency/pricing management a breeze. We always tell our clients and most understand that all in all the money they save from using a premium solution matches or exceeds the money they’d save with processing fees.
Did you know Shopify is a payments processing business at that core? That’s where it makes its money from :).
In the US, the only pushback we get is typically from clients that have customized checkouts that open various portals but this is typically resolvable if the clients are OK with adjusting their workflows so that those verification/optimization steps occur before the checkout step.
Globally, we get pushback from merchants on Magento that have lots of physical stores they need to connect, lots of other sales channels connected (Amazon, Walmart, etc), and many other systems on top CDP, ERP, WMS, and maybe some mobile apps. Yes, it’s complicated to rebuild all those integrations BUT it’s not the only way. With one client their Magento store continues to exist but only as a bridge – the admin is locked and it connects various channels to the ERP and Shopify is connected separately as another sales channel so there are always solutions.
What are important aspects you need to take into account when migrating from Magento into Shopify?
When switching CMSes you have to take into account that your URL structure will change and typically you’re supposed to see a 10-15% drop in organic traffic in the short term. This does not always happen, in fact, with a lot of Shopify migrations we completed we started seeing an increase in organic traffic as soon as right after the launch – but normally you should expect a dip. Because of that, we always recommend to our clients to not make major structural or design changes as well because they will not be able to accurately measure the impact of those changes.
Instead, we recommend to our clients to allow us to find a theme that closely resembles their existing layout and functionality needed soon. We migrate the current look and feel, keep the navigation and catalog structure the same, and implement UX changes only if they are critical. Once the migration is done have a list of design updates, functionality changes, and add-ons and add them slowly to test the impact.
Yes, we strongly recommend using a Shopify theme that has a strong development team behind it. Look at the release notes. Is that theme receiving updates regularly? If yes, the dev team is maintaining it, and adding new functionalities. If not, don’t even bother. It may look good now but by the time you’re ready to launch, it may already be obsolete.
The beauty of Shopify is the ability to launch, own, and use beautiful stores with minimal coding. Do that, don’t custom code everything. You’ll have a great store owner experience with seamless updates and no bugs. By custom coding your theme you are responsible for making all the updates that will be needed due to Shopify updates – why would you do that to yourself unless you’re a huge brand and are looking for very specific branding guidelines?
The migration from Magento is going to be very important and you need to plan it correctly. You will want to migrate products (don’t forget product reviews!), categories (into collections), customers, and order data. Migrating all this is typically done programmatically using scripts.
For SEO, you are going to have automated 301 redirects that you want to build when migrating the products, categories, and pages (from the old URL to the new URL) but what we also do is export the top 1000 landing pages from Google Search Console and manually redirect those as well. Yes, it takes a few hours but it’s so worth it!
We’ve done so many migrations – not just from Magento, but from WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Prestashop, Opencart, Wix and so many other CMSes into Shopify and I can tell you easily that the best experiences were with store owners who understood that the best way to use Shopify is by employing a “low-code” mentality. It’s not going to work EXACTLY how your previous system worked, it’s going to be more difficult in the beginning to get used to it, but IT IS WORTH IT! Every one of our clients that migrated into Shopify is still patting themselves on the back for their great move.
If you’re on the fence let’s jump on a call and discuss your concerns. Our core business is not to build and migrate stores and websites but to grow eCommerce businesses with our store management services. We know Magento very well, we still have clients on Magento. You can rely on us for an objective assessment of your situation and who knows? Maybe we’ll work together on your Magento store but I have my money on the fact that you’ll decide to switch to Shopify!
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