Moving From Another Platform

What comes across, what does not, the order to do it in, and the things that go wrong at the switch.

Utilities, Data Migration brings a shop across from SunShop or WooCommerce.

What Comes Across

Products with their prices, codes and descriptions. Categories and their structure. Customers. Orders and their line items, as history. Coupons where they can be matched to equivalents here.

What Does Not

Images are the big one. A catalogue arrives with its text and usually without its pictures, and filling them in is the slow part of any move.

Passwords never transfer, because they cannot be read from the old system any more than from this one. Customers reset theirs the first time they sign in, which is worth warning them about before the switch rather than after.

Anything your old shop did with a plugin usually has no equivalent to come to.

Order of Work

1. Run the migration into a shop nobody is using. Not the one you are about to open.
2. Check the figures. Product count, customer count, order count. Compare against the old shop before looking at anything else: a count that is wrong means a problem to fix before you look at detail.
3. Spot check the awkward ones. A product with options, one with several categories, one that was out of stock, a customer with several addresses, an old order with a discount on it.
4. Set up what did not come across: shipping, tax, payment methods, email templates, your theme.
5. Add the images.
6. Place test orders, including one with an offline payment and one that you refund.
7. Set up redirects from your old addresses.
8. Switch the domain.

Things That Go Wrong

Counts that nearly match. A migration that brings 2,180 of 2,217 products has dropped 37 somewhere, and finding out why is easier now than in a month. Nearly right is not right.

Codes that got changed to keep them unique. Where an old shop had the same code on two things, one of them has to change. Check your codes against the old shop, because your warehouse and your accounts match on them.

Duplicate products where the old shop had several records for one thing. They arrive as several records here too.

Customers who existed twice with two email addresses arrive as two customers, and their history stays split.

Old Links

Years of links point at addresses that no longer exist: search results, other people's blogs, printed material, your own email archive.

Set up redirects from the old address patterns to the new ones before you switch the domain. This is the single highest value hour in any migration, and it is routinely skipped.

The Switch

Switch when you can watch it, not on a Friday afternoon. Then check: the shop on both www and bare addresses, a real test order, the confirmation email showing the right address, and anything registered with a third party such as a payment processor's callback addresses.

Afterwards

Keep the old shop readable, offline if necessary, for a few months. You will need it to answer questions about old orders, and to check anything that looks wrong against what it used to say.