Transitioning your ecommerce store from a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce to BigCommerce can seem daunting. However, with careful planning and execution, it is possible to make the switch while minimizing disruptions to your business. This step-by-step guide will walk you through key considerations and best practices for migrating to BigCommerce.
Why Migrate to BigCommerce?
Before jumping into the migration process, it’s important to understand the key benefits of moving to BigCommerce:
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
BigCommerce’s pricing structure is straightforward and competitively priced, with no hidden fees. By bundling hosting, security, and other services, BigCommerce can save merchants up to 50% compared to other solutions.
Enterprise-Level Features
BigCommerce includes powerful built-in features that enable you to scale, such as advanced promotions, user permissions, and APIs for customization. Additional apps and integrations are also available.
Better Support
Expert support comes standard on all BigCommerce plans. The support team has experience dealing with complex technical issues and migrations.
Improved Security
BigCommerce invests heavily in security, with standard features like SSL encryption, site backups, and DDoS protection. Compliance with PCI DSS makes BigCommerce a secure choice.
Optimized for Growth
With enterprise-level capabilities secure hosting on Google Cloud, and scalable architecture, BigCommerce provides a platform primed for business growth. Expanding to new sales channels is easy.
Clearly, there are compelling reasons for merchants making six or seven figures in annual sales to choose BigCommerce. The benefits typically outweigh the initial efforts of migrating. Next, let’s look at how to migrate while minimizing disruption to business operations.
Step 1: Planning Your Migration Strategy
The first step is determining key details of your migration plan, including timeline, data transfer approach, and rollout strategy. Having a documented strategy keeps all teams aligned throughout the process.
Important aspects to define upfront:
- Migration timeline – How long will it take to migrate fully to BigCommerce? Factor in preparation, data migration, theme development & testing, staff training, and go-live. Allow 2-4 weeks minimum.
- Data transfer method – Use an ETL tool or export/import? Plan how data like products, customers, orders, etc. will be ported over.
- Rollout strategy – Transition all at once (“rip and replace”) or run both platforms in parallel temporarily?
- Resource needs & budget – Estimate project costs including theme customization, data migration, employee training, etc.
- Team members & roles – Who will own and be involved in the migration? Clearly define responsibilities.
- Success metrics – Track KPIs before/after move to validate business benefits like revenue growth, efficiency gains.
Having a well-constructed migration plan is crucial – don’t shortchange the planning process. Resist the temptation to jump right into implementation. Spending time upfront identifying needs, costs, risks and timelines pays dividends later.
Step 2: Data Extraction & Migration
Migrating your products, customers, orders and other key data from your existing ecommerce platform onto BigCommerce is one of the most critical and complex steps in the process. There are two main approaches:
- Use an ETL (extract, transform, load) migration service
- Export data from old platform & import onto BigCommerce
ETL Migration Service
Using a specialized migration tool like Cart2Cart or LitExtension can accelerate transferring data and minimize business disruption. ETL services automate much of the heavy lifting like extracting data from the old platform, transforming to the appropriate format, cleansing records, and loading onto the new database.
Though ETL services have an upfront cost, for mid-sized and larger merchants they greatly simplify data migration. The automation frees up internal resources to focus on other aspects of the BigCommerce implementation and rollout.
Export & Import Data Manually
The DIY approach involves exporting CSV files from the old ecommerce platform, doing any necessary data cleanup or transformation in Excel, then importing onto BigCommerce.
This works well for small data sets but can become extremely complex and time-consuming at larger order volumes or with multiple sales channels. Data normalization and mapping errors may also occur affecting data integrity. Proceed with caution taking the manual route.
In summary, work with IT staff to formulate a data migration plan tailored to your business, using ETL tools strategically. Seamlessly and securely transferring customer transaction history, order data, product catalogs etc. makes the switch to BigCommerce much smoother.
Step 3: Designing and Building a New Theme
Since Shopify and BigCommerce use different templating languages and frameworks to control site design, you’ll need to create a brand new theme for BigCommerce.
Your existing Shopify theme and functionality can be a guide, but the BigCommerce theme will be built from the ground up. This ensures full compliance with BigCommerce’s platform standards and provides opportunity to improve upon your current site design.
Some best practices as you develop the visual design and layouts for your new theme:
- Optimize for conversions – Structure pages and elements to guide visitors towards desired actions like purchases or email signups. Apply principles like visual hierarchy, contrast, negative space properly.
- Mobile-first design – With over 70% of ecommerce traffic now on mobile devices, ensure themes are mobile-responsive out of the box. Check renders on iOS and Android.
- On-brand aesthetics – Maintain consistent branded colors, fonts, imagery and other visual elements from previous site design, to ease customer transition.
- Match core functionality – Audit most accessed features and pages on current site and exactly replicate the core workflows & capabilities on BigCommerce using template files, scripts, and UI elements.
Investing in professional theme development is highly recommended, rather than tackling in-house. Experienced developers will create pixel-perfect designs faster while adopting best practices. Be sure to heavily test the visual design on both desktop and mobile before launch.
Step 4: Setting Up Domains and SSL
An essential both technical step is configuring your domains and SSL certificates properly on BigCommerce.
Domains
Point your root domain (e.g. yourstore.com) and any variant domains like www.yourstore.com to BigCommerce’s servers following DNS instructions provided in the store control panel. This handles routing web traffic to your new BigCommerce storefront.
You don’t necessarily need to transfer domain registration itself to BigCommerce, just update the DNS values your registrar has on file. Check that domains are pointing correctly prior to go-live.
SSL Certificate
Install an SSL certificate spanning your main domains to enable HTTPS and encrypt all traffic to the BigCommerce store.
BigCommerce provides a free shared certificate covering common domains (.com, .net etc) on all plans. If using custom domains, you’ll need to purchase and install a custom wildcard SSL covering them specifically.
SSL must be configured before launch for security, SEO benefit, and to avoid browser warnings.
Step 5: Testing and Iterating
Before launching your live BigCommerce store, conduct testing to catch any bugs and identify opportunities for improvement:
- Functionality testing – Thoroughly test forms, integrations, payment processing, checkouts etc. Confirm core flows behave as expected.
- Visual regressions – Compare screenshots of old platform vs new BigCommerce site to catch subtle design issues.
- User acceptance testing – Get input from merchants, customer service and other internal stakeholders using the platform. Incorporate feedback.
- Performance testing – Validate site pages load quickly with tools like PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest even under peak traffic levels.
- Security scanning – Scan for vulnerabilities like SQLi, XSS, etc. remediate any medium or high risk issues.
- SEO audits – Run technical SEO checks ensuring clean URLs, structured data, alt text etc. Resolve warnings before search engine crawlers index URLs.
While testing, refinement of the theme design, layouts and functionality is common. Create a punch list of tweaks and enhancements then systematically address. Thorough testing now prevents headaches down the road.
Step 6: Going Live and Post Launch
Once testing confirms all critical platform functionality behaves as intended, it’s time to cut over to BigCommerce!
On launch day:
- Redirect traffic from old platform URLs to corresponding BigCommerce pages
- Point DNS records to BigCommerce servers
- Enable any marketing campaigns driving to the new site
- Decommission old platform if not running both in parallel
- Closely monitor performance and error rates
Shortly after going live:
- Submit new XML sitemap to Google/Bing for reindexing
- Create 301 redirects for any orphaned URLs
- Import additional historical data in batches
- Review site analytics – bounce rates, desktop vs mobile usage etc.
- Address any new issues uncovered
Be extremely vigilant the first few weeks after migration, as traffic patterns may shift unexpectedly or new edge cases surface. Have technical personnel actively support go-live and conduct regression testing.
Why Choose Anchor Group for BigCommerce Implementation?
If undertaking a DIY migration to BigCommerce feels overwhelming given all the above considerations, partnering with ecommerce experts is wise.
Anchor Group specializes in helping growing brands map out and execute BigCommerce migrations smoothly while preventing business disruptions.
Our dedicated team takes care of the entire process – from strategic planning, design & theme development, data migration, testing, to go-live support. We become an extension of your team.
Key reasons Anchor Group can accelerate your switch to BigCommerce:
- 150+ successful BigCommerce implementations completed
- Built 30+ custom BigCommerce themes aligned to best practices
- Migrate data seamlessly with our in-house tools (or via Cart2Cart)
- Certified BigCommerce designers, developers and solution engineers
- Completed Complex migrations for clients selling $5M to $50M+ online
- Proven launch methodology to minimize downtime risks
- Post-launch support with 60+ 5-star Google reviews
Running lean internal teams means you need seasoned experts with BigCommerce migration experience in your corner. Anchor Group helps ambitious brands upgrade to an enterprise-level ecommerce platform positioned for the future.
Schedule a call today with our team to explore how we can make your migration to BigCommerce smooth, on time, and on budget.
