Saturday, 20 September 2014 | Written by qtriangle |


Migrating your existing store to another ecommerce platform is much like moving a brick-and-mortar shop. It requires meticulous consideration and planning that takes care of several critical areas or elements for ensuring at least the same or superior user experience. Here are these basic elements to consider, which are common irrespective of source and destination carts of migration.

Discovery

 

This is where all information is collected to understand the requirements for a new store. A critically wide review of the present business processes is done keeping the future goals in mind. The focus is usually on scale of data migration. You will usually define the features along with the extra capabilities required after the initial deployment. The result of this process is a new system design specification acting as a blueprint for developers striking a balance between customer needs and business goals.

Design

 

Well, this is exactly where you come up with the store structure having catalogues, order forms, and navigation options. Here, you need to look for a fully flexible, unique, and customized store design so that it reflects your brand as well as the requirements of your customers.

This is also the time to make some visual decisions such as what will be the color theme, how the products shall be arranged, where the signage will be, how navigation will be, how checkout will happen, and what will come in window display. Remember, it is design that renders your online store its character, attracts old and new customers, and persuades them to buy from your store. Therefore, it should be capable of rendering a supreme user experience for helping your customers to get what they want.

Consider redesigning your logo or modifying the store settings in this phase. The latter is essential to adapt with the changed platform and templates. As a tip, explore within the new platform, watch some migration videos, and read some e-books for getting acquainting with the new cart.

Data Relocation

 

This is perhaps the most crucial task wherein you identify data for migration to the new store. It basically includes importing your products and orders along with customer details, enriched product catalogue, and updates to servers. The result of this step is the catalog architecture definition.

Security

 

This is another critical aspect to consider for migrating to any new platform. Your new store should be such that it makes it easier to accomplish PCI compliance. Further, any updates you perform on the platform should not affect this compliance. You will also have to create and implement a security policy for daily operations, in terms of privileges for updating different data such as of products and orders.

Quality Assurance

 

This is assured through thorough testing done at the stage of deployment. The testing areas normally cover functional, conformance, and compatibility. The tester needs to be check compatibility with configurations, browsers, and operating systems as per the migration scope defined in the discovery phase. Moreover, at the time of going live, proper technical support must be ensured by the new platform for dealing with any last-moment issues.