Moving a Custom eCommerce Store to Shopify: A 10-Step Planning Framework

With the Cloud movement going strong, more and more businesses are switching to Shopify as the tools and the platform becomes increasingly more inviting to make the transition.

A Shopify Store is a lot more than just a shopping cart platform — it adds all aspects of your digital marketing strategy into your website design, social media, and pushes out your brand awareness with your color palette. In today's world, social media marketing on various platforms is a core component of your online marketing, where internet users are exposed to your brand and are funneled back to your online store. So, when you are evaluating migrating your store to the Shopify platform, consider the full picture: your marketing campaigns, types of social media, and all the way through how your content marketing will reflect with search engines — keep in mind that it will change everything you do.

Shopify Market Share

Looking at USA data between 2018 and 2019, Shopify grew its market share considerably from 24% to 31% (source: Builtwith). Businesses are deciding to reduce their cost, minimizing their maintenance and hosting work by going to the cloud. With Shopify having an endless pool of Themes, Tools, and card processing options — what looks easier to manage, actually is.

Key Shopify Considerations for Custom Store Owners

While there are plenty of migration "How To's" published, discussions of whether it's right for your specific business model are not as well covered. What is great about Magento and WooCommerce is the ability to take an eCommerce framework and modify it to your business model. This means that behind the front-end marketing, there is back-end processing of client engagement — how that gets handled is not standard.

What's considered standard in eCommerce on product-based sites is a fulfillment delivery of a purchase. Non-standard are customizations of products, or added services alongside products. These custom processes — such as custom-printed T-Shirts where you upload a photo and get a proof before printing — can be quite involved. However, not all is lost when considering Shopify in these more complex scenarios.

Custom processes can be mapped and, thankfully, Shopify has an API. Back-end processes can be handled outside of Shopify on its own server, then hand the order back to Shopify when these processes are done to finalize the shipping and delivery steps. These are hybrid setups, but you get to enjoy all the front-end goodness of Shopify while maintaining your business processes that are customer-centric.

The 10-Step Planning Framework for Custom Store Migration

If you have a custom back-end for your business and are considering Shopify for the benefits in cost, tools, and time-saving, here are the steps to consider:

1. Process Map — from front to back, document the customer journey, annotating all details of how an order is handled, what the client must provide, and how the business processes the order. Include systems, permission levels, staff roles, departments, and clearly identify hand-offs between departments.

2. Draw up the architecture of how your current eCommerce store operates for that process.

3. Plan the NEW architecture with Shopify as your front-end — define what information will be handed off to the back-end processing after the order is placed.

4. Define the architecture of the back-end processing to support your custom process.

5. Investigate the new architecture with your development team, even venturing to prototype a test to reach a level of confidence that the steps can be preserved.

6. Once a Proof-of-Concept is reached, budgeting and timescales can be drawn up for the business to consider the ROI and benefits this direction will yield.

7. Project Planning — document "how" this is being executed, with agreements, roles, and responsibilities all laid out. The above steps provide the "why"; this step communicates the "how" to all stakeholders.

8. Using an Agile, IEEE, or Microsoft Framework, the development takes place until all modules/components are coded, reviewed, and delivered to the process defined and the plan's goals.

9. After several reviews, refinements, testing, bug fixes, and mirroring of your current site, prepare for launch. This requires minor training on where the new system is and how staff can continue to process orders.

10. Once you are ready — set a deployment time, swap out IP addresses to your domain, and get the staff to start using the new system.

Note: Always replicate first, then improve — treat them as two different steps. Doing both at the same time confuses staff and delays deployment.

Conclusion

Where it might be daunting to take on a change of eCommerce platform, reviewing the benefits and risks can be worthwhile when taking the business to the next level of technology. You don't have to give up how your business operates to get these benefits — software is a tool that needs to serve the business, not the other way around. Taking this in steps will yield a very satisfying outcome where you can further your marketing, get the speed and features for your site, and maintain production while having a new architecture to enhance your processes.