18 Experts Reveal: How to Migrate Your Ecommerce Platform to BigCommerce
We constantly share our expertise on different e-commerce platforms. If you still haven't made up your mind on the which platform is right for you, make sure to take a look at our Shopify migration expert roundup.
BigCommerce is one of the major players in the ecommerce industry, and with good reason. This platform has earned a reputation among ecommerce business owners for being flexible and scalable with strong SEO performance.
So, you have evaluated the best ecommerce platforms and made the decision to migrate to BigCommerce. Congratulations! You are on the right path to reaching more customers and selling more products.
That said, there are a few important things you will need to consider when replatforming your online store to BigCommerce to ensure a smooth transition.
Migrating to BigCommerce? Here’s What You Need to Know
Making a change to your ecommerce platform is a big decision with many moving parts. For instance, what functionality will you need? What about design, SEO, and mobile optimization?
To help guide you in the right direction, we asked the top BigCommerce experts in the industry to share their tips for a successful site migration. After all, who better to share their knowledge than the pros who use BigCommerce everyday?
Below, 18 experts answer the question “What is your best advice for ecommerce shops looking to migrate to BigCommerce?”
18 Ecommerce Experts Answer: “What is your best advice for ecommerce shops looking to migrate to BigCommerce?”
Our chosen BigCommerce experts share their best advice for ecommerce business owners looking to migrate their sites to BigCommerce.
Paul Rogers
Vervaunt
Managing Director
BigCommerce is a great platform and the SaaS nature of it brings a lot of benefit around TCO and agility, amongst other things. For me, one of the biggest recommendations when migrating to BigCommerce is really understanding the eco-system around it - as there are a lot of existing third parties and new ones that are starting to build out integrations with the platform that can help to give users a lot more flexibility and generally help you scale more without necessarily needing to go down the headless route.
Solutions like Shogun (content), Klevu (search and category merchandising), Aftership (post-purchase comms + tracking), Glew (reporting) can help to improve certain key areas, help make managing multiple stores more efficient and generally help businesses to scale. The other one would be using something like Akeneo as a PIM, which again can help if you have multiple stores (in terms of pushing data between different stores) and also generally help to scale large catalogs and make product management more efficient. I wrote this piece a whilst back as an introductory overview of the native features.
Isaiah Bollinger
Trellis
CEO & Co-Founder
Determine your requirements in as much detail as possible up front. How do you plan on structuring and importing your product data into the platform? What pages and templates do you need to build out the entire design and upload all your content appropriately? How do you plan to handle payment, shipping, and overall operations? These are just some of the many questions we ask and need concrete answers for to implement BigCommerce.
Igor Nesmyanovich
Eradium
CEO
There is no single automated solution that performs comprehensive migration services from one e-commerce platform to another. There are tools that can migrate some of your data and content. They achieve this through import and export processes, but there isn’t a single tool that can provide an online store migration from start to finish. Partner with an ecommerce agency to get critical help from experts. Working with a BigCommerce partner agency helps you to avoid costly mistakes and navigate through this challenging journey.
The ecommerce store migration process involves a wide range of technical, content marketing, and customer service activities. Here is an abbreviated list for some perspective:
Domain and URL migration
SSL certificate
Product Catalog conversion
Promotions and price discounts
Shipping and tax
Content migration
Customer and order database
Marketing automation connectors
Data feeds in and out
POS integration
External links and redirects
SEO
Justin Tidrow
Lone Star Templates
Founder
I would start by finding a premium theme that will easily allow your customers to find the products they are looking for.
BigCommerce themes are very editable so adjusting the colors and other visuals can come later. After you’ve determined the template, you can store and showcase your products effectively. Once you've picked a couple themes, start a trial store and start testing. Ideally you would upload most, if not all of your products to your trial store so you can test the user experience of the themes. Test all product options you'll be using and how they display on the product page. Diligently test the store on mobile devices!
Next go through all of the theme editor settings. Set all colors to match your branding. Create an upload banners showcasing your products and categories. Contact a certified BigCommerce partner if customization is needed.
Brian McGovern
iMedia
Partner
When migrating to Big Commerce consider these 3 elements to ensure success and cost savings.
Complexity and size of skus & variants
ERP Integration
Staging Site
BigCommerce has multiple options for handling skus, composite skus, and variants that will work for most stores. They also have a catalog transfer team that can handle migrating from the common players like Magento, Shopify etc. But details are important. There are cases where a different approach might be more cost effective.
ERP Integration – We’ve integrated to countless ERPs and have a plug and play blueprint for such work.
A weakness of cloud based eCommerce platforms is a lack of a staging or test site. We’ve added a new app to the BigCommerce marketplace that does just that and its exclusive to BigCommerce. The app is called StoreReflect and it allows you to sync your product catalog, categories, pages, and blogs to and from multiple BigCommerce environments.
NJ TheCoder
NJTheCoder
Founder
When migrating your shop over to BigCommerce, make any big adjustments beforehand. Update your old platform to the latest version before exporting and importing into BigCommerce.
Once the BigCommerce store is live, add your Google Analytics, tracking pixels and web consoles to the new BigCommerce store so everything is trackable.
Note your current SEO rankings and prioritize maintaining or improving those rankings when moving to BigCommerce.
Nigel Poole
Matter Design & Digital
Director
If you are looking to migrate to BigCommerce, first workout what you are looking to achieve from the project.
Think through and document your requirements in a way that paints a clear picture of the project. This should include brand and customer experience goals, as well as technical requirements such as existing systems in your tech stack, or systems you are looking to add as part of the migration process (Eg. CRM, PIM, DAM).
Next step is to talk with an Elite BigCommerce Partner, these are the agencies that are most experienced and knowledgable about the platform and how to migrate your business to a BigCommerce based ecommerce system.
Feargal Harris
Numinix Web Development
Product Owner
The most important thing that any store owner should consider is their SEO landscape before and after the migration. Most technical aspects of migration can be controlled by you, your developer or Big Commerce themselves. What can't be controlled is how Google and Bing etc's Search Engine's bots will index your site after the migration, but it can be mitigated against with the right expertise. Having a full understanding of SEO best practices is key, and we would never do a migration or redesign without it.
I've seen thousands of dollars lost in a day due to a missed 301 redirect, or a misunderstanding of Google's requirements. If you get help from an expert with this, it can be worth its weight in gold.
Drew Poland
Spotfin Creative
Senior Developer
The absolute best advice I can give a client migrating from another platform to BigCommerce, is to meticulously plan and map out the entire process. A fully detailed Migration Plan would include detailing out the process of exporting products, categories, special customer groups (B2B vs B2C if applicable), and giving these a test run at the very beginning of a project.
This will give you plenty of time to work out any kinks or make any migration notes on components that may need to be completed manually. So come launch day you are ready to pull a fresh copy of all the current platform products, customers, and order data knowing with confidence the migration to BigCommerce will go smoothly.
Beyond that critical component, making sure you and your development partner understand your entire process from order to delivery and find ways to mimic or improve on that process.
Chase Bowler
Arctic Leaf
Solutions Consultant
BigCommerce is an extremely strong eCommerce platform which offers a ton out of the box including a robust category taxonomy and has the strongest API of the bigger SaaS eComemrce players.
My first bit of advice is, back up your data, people! Although this advice sounds simple we have had many merchants get burnt from not backing everything up. Following that simple advice, the best advice I can give is make a detailed plan. Layout your migration and understand all the different players and moving parts. Know who is going to handle what and discuss all needed integrations with the wonderful BigCommerce support team. Once you have a strong plan, it's time to execute. Lastly, don't forget to have fun!
AJ Hauser
The Hauser Design Group
Partner & Senior Design Lead
Plan on more planning! Think it will take two weeks to prep for your migration? Plan on double that. Really do your due diligence. Make checklists, and lean on your partners experience. Ask them to explain their process. Proper prep work will be the difference between a smooth, orderly migration... and a train wreck.
Kal Wiggins
Epic Design Labs
Ecommerce Consultant
Make sure you create new pages for every page, category and product you had on your prior platform, and use 301 redirects to point your old URLs for each, to their new URLs. This is the biggest thing I see people miss and it's an SEO killer.
Ash Ome
MOTIF
Founder & CEO
Data migration is really crucial for any eCommerce migration project. For this, you must ensure that the requirements are defined and match exactly what you need. After all, the scoping of a project will directly influence the timeliness of delivery, the budget and or the costs, and the quality of work.
After the requirements gathering face, your new site must be designed. Even when you decide to migrate ‘as is’, a design phase is necessary to accommodate for adjustments resulting from the new platform’s characteristics. Ensure that you create a new, unique site experience which matches your brand identity.
Then you need to think carefully about the data that you want to migrate. Prepare your data before a full migration to BigCommerce as the data requirements will be different with BigCommerce. Create a sample set of data to test migration scripts. This will also help you create an iterative process of migration which you’ll need to make sure the latest products, prices, customers, URLs and potentially orders are available in your new platform.
Lori Appleman
Redline Minds
Ecommerce & Online Marketing Consultant
Build a roadmap that includes any content or navigational changes, as well as detail what features and functions you will want. Use this migration as a chance for improvement of your user experience.
Data is your friend. If you have time before your big move, install software that offers insights into how shoppers use your old site. Tools like Lucky Orange show you where people look, how they scroll, and where they click. Plus you can make session recordings and map out your purchase and checkout funnel. This information can be a real eye opener! Use this information to fine tune your plan to better plan your store for a better conversion rate.
Last tip - pay attention to your mobile experience. For most stores, mobile is now more important than your desktop. Helping your shoppers get to the product and through checkout on mobile fast and with minimal clicks is a key priority.
If you're unsure about all of this, use a partner that has a strong background in conversion optimization. It will be money well spent.
Kate S.
Penguin E-Commerce
Project Manager
Keep on the lookout for having all the pages, products, categories, and website URL redirects to be in place before you move.
Jonathan Ybarra
JOMA Tech
Co-Founder
My best advice for shops migrating to BigCommerce is to first understand why. What additional functionality are you needing? Why do you need it? What business objective can you tie to your project? The more we can tie projects to business objectives, the greater chance we have of succeeding.
Migrations can be long and arduous; you need a road map to continually refer back to. Start with 'why' -- this will dictate the 'how', and the 'how' will dictate the 'who' and 'when'.
That’s the philosophy behind it, now for some practical advice. If I had to narrow down my top 3 MUST DOs, they would be:
Take care of your 301 redirects. If you don't, your SEO will suffer and you'll have fewer customers.
Find a quality BigCommerce partner with certified developers. Stencil can be a bi**h to customize and you have to remember first impressions are super important. Without a professional looking site, no one will trust you.
Use BigCommerce support to help you create your tech stack. They can tell you what systems play best with BC and can help you vett solutions.
Jim Cook
Avid Brio
Ecommerce Consulting Professional
BigCommerce is a great solution not only for B2C businesses but has also been equally fruitful for B2B businesses or a combined one that targets both types of customers.
The first thing on your checklist should be SEO 301 redirect since that is the main key towards migration, if you don't do that you will lose on search rankings that obviously no one would afford to do. The next thing on the list should be the migration of scripts or service integrations that you currently have with your store which could be your reviews system, Google Analytics, POS, Inventory Management solutions etc.
We believe that the two things mentioned above are of the utmost importance when taking on the migration of the store, and if you are able to achieve these things correctly the other stuff should be rather pretty easy.
Once the migration is done, do not forget to run a broken link checker tool on your website.
Alex Silverberg
Whitecap SEO
SEO Specialist
BigCommerce allows more flexible URL configurations than some other ecommerce platforms out there. Whether you are replatforming from Volusion, Magento, or another ecommerce platform, you’ll want to use this opportunity to make sure your new URLs are keyword-relevant, shopper-centric and 301 redirected properly.
Also, whenever migrating your site to a new platform, be sure to keep track of all your old site's URLs and data through exports from Google Analytics and site crawls with tools like Screaming Frog. This is especially critical for SEO as details like meta titles, meta descriptions and H1 tags can sometimes get lost in the shuffle of moving things over, causing your new site to have less than stellar organic traffic numbers upon migrating.
For sites that are receiving significant organic search traffic and revenue prior to migration, we highly recommend working along side a trusted ecommerce SEO agency with a history of successful SEO migrations to BigCommerce in order to supplement the work of your development team.
Apply These Expert Tips to Your BigCommerce Migration
Migrating to your new ecommerce platform is an exciting process. Make sure you do it right and set up your website for success with these expert tips.
Our 18 BigCommerce Experts shared their best advice for a smooth site transition. Here are the key takeaways from the interviews:
Establish what you are looking to achieve from the migration — Think through and document your goals and requirements so that you have a clear picture of your project.
Meticulously plan and map out the entire process —A fully detailed migration plan will give you time to work out any issues before launch day.
Consider your SEO before and after the migration — Failing to have a plan to preserve and strengthen your SEO through the migration can lead to thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Work with a BigCommerce Partner Agency — Working with a BigCommerce expert can help you avoid costly mistakes during your migration.
Check your URLs — BigCommerce may have different URL configurations than your current solution, so use this opportunity to make sure your URLs are keyword-relevant and redirected properly.
Make the most of the BigCommerce platform by setting your site up for success from the very beginning! We can help with our SEO migration services.
Are you migrating to BigCommerce? Be sure to read Why Ecommerce SEO Matters More Now Than Ever.