7 Dreaded Enterprise Ecommerce Platform Migration Pitfalls (And How to Avoid Them)

Terrified of taking the big step? 

Planning to drop the ecommerce replatforming idea? 

Time to realign your plans.

Well, there’s no doubt that updating your enterprise ecommerce platform can be challenging. 

Replatforming is not a vanity move, it calls for a clear understanding and clarity on the process. 

A few slips and misses in your ecommerce platform migration can become the reason for catastrophe. 

Yup, it can be that serious!

But you are safe, with StoreHippo to watch your back.

As you plan for an ecommerce platform migration, we at StoreHippo bring up the top 7 most-dreaded pitfalls that can be damaging for your business.  

And if you are already wondering how to avoid them, keep reading to find your answers.

Ecommerce Migration - Everything you need to know

Ecommerce migration is when an enterprise brand shifts the front end and back end of its online marketplace to another platform anticipating better business performance and growth. Such shifts are conditioned to take the business on an upward growth trajectory with a more advanced technical infrastructure, and features that help provide a seamless buying experience. 

As the brands plan to move their products, content, pages, etc. from one platform to another, they need to understand the process, and its requirements and find a scalable platform to migrate to. 

Don’t know how to determine if your business needs ecommerce migration? Let’s find out: 

When does your enterprise ecommerce platform need ecommerce migration 

Your enterprise ecommerce platform needs an upgrade when it is no longer able to hold customers and grow sales. There are various parameters to judge the need for a new platform for your enterprise business. Here are a few limitations that indicate the need for replatforming:

• When the abandoned carts increase or the bounce rate increases meaning that your site is not performing at its best. You might have outdated technology, unresponsive designs etc.
• When you are unable to scale the business and handle an increase in sellers, pages, products, or customers
• When it becomes tough to offer customizations to run marketing campaigns, and discounts, or build landing pages for their different buyer segments
• When there is limited scope for personalizations in payment gateways, currency, language etc. 
• When it becomes tough to pivot to new business models to create out-of-box business solutions on your enterprise ecommerce platform
• When you are unable to capture insights and customer behavior data to strategically plan your business moves 

As you plan to shift your ecommerce platform, you open up a vast horizon of opportunities and growth potential for your business. StoreHippo helps businesses move from their existing platform to its ecommerce platform in quick easy steps. With 300+ inbuilt features, it makes the entire migration process seamless. 

7 Dreaded enterprise ecommerce platform migration pitfalls 

Gravitating toward ecommerce migration? Afraid of making the wrong choices? 

But what is more scary is losing customers, which we are sure you wouldn’t want. So let us look at the top 7 pitfalls to avoid during the relocation process and how to successfully avoid them.

Choosing a rigid platform

The decision to choose a platform to migrate to does not come easily. Finding the ideal enterprise ecommerce platform that offers the right set of features and tools to accommodate the current business needs and meet future requirements can make or break your business. As the ecommerce industry is driven by new technologies and customer demands, the transformative phase needs a rigid ecommerce platform.

How does StoreHippo help?

• Use a well-rounded ecommerce platform designed for businesses across industries and geographies like StoreHippo.
• StoreHippo offers 300+ in-built features and tools that support any business model, setting up the perfect platform for ecommerce migration of any and every business model. 
• StoreHippo offers Channel Migration solutions for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento that are designed to migrate your entire business to StoreHippo in a few steps. 
• The plug-and-play solution from StoreHippo supports a variety of business models like B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C, hyperlocal stores, marketplace website, multi-store networks etc. 

Data loss or wrong data mapping  

During the process of transferring your ecommerce platform, there is a high risk of data loss. A slight error in data mapping during the move can cause data destruction or damage, identity theft, data breaches etc. Or suppose you miss out on the most important data during the process. Enterprise ecommerce platforms, therefore, must focus on complete data backup before moving over to a new platform. An advanced ecommerce solution with the right tools can help you migrate your data from one platform to another smoothly.

How to avoid data loss with StoreHippo?

• Offers channel migration tools for popular ecommerce platforms like Shopiy, Magento, and WooCommerce etc. which are designed to accurately pull data in a few easy steps
• Only that data is added which is provided by these platforms which automatically eliminates errors
• For custom built sites detailed replatforming processes and check are done to ensure right mapping
• Error handling is done to ensure data pulled is accurate 

Disruption in customer experiences on different channels

As you plan to migrate to a different platform, disruptions are quite inevitable. It can be frustrating for your customers to shop on your enterprise ecommerce platform during the move, causing a loss of sales. To neutralize the potential for business disruption, you need to minimize downtime and offer a better experience to your buyers than what they were used to. Wondering how to do that?

How to minimize disruptions with StoreHippo?

• StoreHippo ensures 99.99% uptime with its autoscaling, redundant server architecture
• Built-in omnichannel solutions and headless architecture enable you to create uniform buyers journeys across channels
• Peak load tolerance and auto provisioning of servers ensures seamless buyer experience irrespective of the traffic size
• Cloud- infrastructure ensures consistent high performance even when you grow to any number of channels, customers, products, geographies etc.
• Consistent high-performing, fast sites due to multi-tier caching and advanced optimizations

Budget overrun and delayed launch 

The process might take longer than anticipated and cost more than calculated. This is one of the worst nightmares of ecommerce replatforming. To avoid the situation, you can prepare a checklist that aligns with your budget and stick to it. As you gear up for higher conversions and increased sales, make sure to build your technically advanced platform that makes your brand future-ready.. Lost time is equal to lost sales.

How can you avoid falling into this pitfall with StoreHippo? 

• StoreHippo offers quick launch and faster go-to-market time 
• ZERO coding needed to add new pages, products, or entities
• StoreHippo saves time with automatic software upgrades and application monitoring
• Transparent migration costs and built-in solutions eliminate the need for additional expenses
• End-to-end ecommerce subscription plans for different budget make it easy to choose the best plan for current needs during ecommerce platform migration 

Loss of SEO juice

SEO juice is no doubt a hard-earned asset. Ecommerce platform migration should not wash away the efforts you have put in to get your SEO sorted and increase your flow of traffic. The typical reason for lost rankings and SERP positions could be an inefficient visualization of the SEO efforts and a lack of SEO strategy ahead of the ecommerce platform switch. With proper mapping and monitoring, you can keep your traffic intact.

How to retain SEO juice with StoreHippo?

• Make SEO simple, smart, and result-oriented with built-in SEO tools from StoreHippo
• Use SEO-ready platform to rank faster on SERPs 
• Powerful blog engine to build your brand narrative
• URL redirect feature to retain all your previous SEO efforts easily

Difficulty integrating existing business software and services

Ecommerce migration should not limit your integrations. To seamlessly run your business operations and cater to your customer needs, integrating with the needed software should never pose a challenge. However, there would be unexpected challenges with new or old integrations. To avoid such challenges, what you can do is, create a map to execute and test the integrations when you replatform. The move should not impede your ability to leverage new technologies, marketing tools, CRM, accounting solutions, payment gateways, or shipping providers on your ecommerce platform. It can lead to multiple problems and a time-consuming need for reintegrating. 

How does StoreHippo help avoid the pitfall?

• Support for third-party integrations, unified notifications and multi-channel social integrations
• 120+ pre-integrated solutions and with its 300+ API endpoints to seamlessly integrate the software of your choice
• 60+ pre-integrated domestic and international payment gateways to offer a frictionless payment process to your customers
• 30+ shipping partners to offer customized shipping rates and provide faster deliveries to the customers 
• Easy integrations with preferred software and tools for ease of managing business 

Inadequate security and compliance

Well, ecommerce businesses should take matters of security quite seriously. The increasing security breaches and data theft indicate the need for multiple layers of protection. Enterprise ecommerce migration should not be an excuse to endanger your customers' data. A secure shift helps you avoid running into security problems. Secure checkouts, regular security audits, etc must be put first while replatforming.  

How does StoreHippo ensure security during migration?

• Fully-hosted and managed, cloud-based, PCI-DSS compliant solution with 99.99% uptime
• Multi-level security to carry out secure ecommerce transactions
• Secures and safeguards your data and network using the Azure cloud computing platform and services
• Offers robust ecommerce security with strong one-way encryption to protect and store all sensitive information like passwords
•  Keep track of the changes made to the store with StoreHippo’s audit log
• Get a free, renewable SSL certificate directly from your StoreHippo admin dashboard 

Conclusion

Before getting on the process of ecommerce replatforming, enterprise ecommerce businesses need to consider the planning and implementing. With a reasonable amount of changes happening to the core structure of your business with ecommerce platform migration, the process is surely complex. 

StoreHippo, the best online store builder in India, helps you migrate your business seamlessly in just a few easy steps. To take away the pain of ecommerce migration, StoreHippo comes with a well-designed migration solution and channel integration that helps you align your brand for growth like never before. You can easily import your product, pages, customer data etc from your existing enterprise ecommerce platform to an advanced platform with StoreHippo. Explore StoreHippo’s migration solutions by starting your 14-day free trial now.