OpenCart to Magento Migration – All You Need to Know
Selecting the right eCommerce platform for your online store is pivotal for a business’s success. Multiple open-source eCommerce platforms are available today that can assist you in building and running your eCommerce store conveniently.
For instance, Magento 2 and OpenCart are the widely used platforms today to manage products, inventory, and other functions of an online eCommerce business. Therefore, retailers may find themselves in a dilemma when it comes to picking up the best among them.
Why is Magento better than OpenCart?
Both Magento and OpenCart share a few common characteristics, such as multi-lingual, multi-currency, and more. However, Magento is more viable than OpenCart because of the below factors:
- Flexible customization to manage varied features
- SEO-friendly platform and allows to create custom URLs
- In-built payment options like PayPal Advanced
- Numerous theme options and feature-rich, open-source extension support
- Extensive community support, and more
Migrating OpenCart to Magento
You can migrate your digital store from OpenCart to Magento platform in many ways. However, the migration process needs to be done in a specific way to handle the challenges such as data security, loss of order history, and more. Therefore, it is recommended that you take the help of an expert Magento development service provider.
Let’s look at the migration process, significant challenges that can occur during migration, their solutions, as well as the business benefits after moving to the Magento platform.
Process:
Stage-1: Data Backup
In the primary stage, it is essential to take the data backup of the online store to prevent any unforeseen circumstances. It allows you to proceed for migration without any worry of data loss.
Stage-2: Design Theme & Install Extensions
The next step is to select the theme and design elements as per the requirements to build a Magento Store. Also, the implementation of useful extensions is necessary to achieve improved system performance at both front-end and back-end.
Stage-3: Migrate Products & Customer Data
This stage is crucial as it contains the transfer process of all the customer and product data from one platform to the other. A custom script is required to migrate the product information, including product code, description, price, category, and more, as well as customer details, including name, shipping address, favorite payment method, and more to Magento.
As both the Magento and OpenCart have different encryption techniques, a distinct encryption script needs to be deployed to perform the task securely.
Stage-4: Migrate Order History, Vendor Info, and Payment Gateways
Once you transfer products and customer data, it’s time to migrate order information (order ID, status, and more) strategically. Then, you need to perform URL migration, which is essential from an SEO standpoint. After that, transfer vendor details, which should be followed by a payment gateways migration.
Stage-5: Testing and Analysis
After the successful migration process, you need to test the store performance and stability on various devices and platforms under different pressure levels.
For this, a QA team can help to perform manual and automated testing. It allows them to analyze the eCommerce store's performance, functionality, and responsiveness. Further, they can provide valuable insights for store up-gradation and enhancements.
Possible challenges and their solutions during migration
Risk of Customer Data Loss – It is one of the most common problems that occur during a migration process. As a solution, the developer can export the customer details manually from OpenCart to Magento platform during the initial stage.
Loss of Order History – Retailers need to retain order history for analysis purposes. To keep the order history secure during migration, developers can integrate third-party systems like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software in the Magento platform.
Business benefits of migrating to Magento
- Robust admin panel with integrated business metrics assists in making more strategic decisions for the online store
- Integrated marketing features such as up-sells, cross-sells, coupons, related products, and more help boost conversion rates
- An improved loading speed allows to attract and retain more users
- Improved checkout process with guest login & multiple payment options enables to reduce shopping cart abandon rates
Conclusion
OpenCart is a popular eCommerce platform that helps run digital stores efficiently. It allows you to manage the products, inventories, and other functions of your businesses conveniently. However, as your business grows and the necessity to handle a massive amount of products arises, you need a behemoth like Magento.
Once you migrate OpenCart to Magento, you can leverage the Magento eCommerce ecosystem to boost your online store efficiency and increase sales. Toward this, a reliable technology partner can help to complete the migration process without affecting your store performance and keeping the data secure.
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