As a Magento agency, we’re often approached by clients wanting to migrate their current ecommerce website to the Magento platform.
This is great: we love working with ambitious clients, and we love working with Magento, but clients can approach migrating to Magento as a solution to all of their ecommerce woes, such as low sales volumes, low search engine rankings, poor conversion rates, and non-intuitive order management.
Magento is part of the solution, not the solution
Working with an experienced web design agency can – and should – resolve those issues, but Magento itself is only part of the solution:
- Magento provides a solid, feature-rich platform to start from, but it typically requires more work to solve these issues: migrating to Magento is a long-term investment in your business and is just the start of developing your ecommerce business further.
- Analysis of your existing ecommerce website should provide the data you need to migrate to Magento sensibly, informing how customers currently act on your website, and where they are perhaps becoming stuck, and you can improve on them.
- A Magento website, built correctly, is a great tool, but without a marketing strategy and regular work behind it, there is likely not very much point in migrating to Magento.
The hump of migration
Migrating an established online store can be a daunting, and even painful, experience: successfully moving product and customer data, and considering a new website design is considerable pressure to a business. After years working with clients around the world and helping them migrate to Magento Community or Magento Enterprise, we see these issues appearing repeatedly:
- Teething issues: even after launch, your new website will require maintenance and fixes of issues as they appear. These can be minimised by thorough testing during development, and keeping a very close eye on your store after launch, and having a development team on hand to deal with issues as soon as they are identified.
- Unfamiliarity with the Magento backend system, meaning staff are unable to process orders. A comprehensive Magento training course is essential for staff who will be managing the website day-to-day.
Magento is not a magic bullet
Magento is not a magic bullet, but it is a very powerful ecommerce platform you can leverage as part of your sales strategy, and businesses around the world successfully sell millions – and billions – of pounds (or dollars, or Euros) in products every year with Magento. Understanding how Magento fits in to your business, and its limitations, will help ensure your new website is a success.