When it comes to talking about eCommerce platforms, a lot of focus is (rightly) on the front-end customer experience. Speed and performance are critical for great experiences and increased conversions.

But when you’re evaluating a platform, the focus also should be on the user. You. Your marketing team. The team using the eCommerce platform on a daily basis needs a flexible, user-friendly experience to be able to respond in near real time to factors including the market, competitors, and data insights with timely promotions, flash sales, remerchandising and more.

Enabling this agility and creating a strong foundation to integrate new features over time as customer expectations and technology evolve is critical to providing great customer experiences – which are becoming more and more essential for brands as the eCommerce landscape becomes more competitive.

You’d be in good company

Shopify is growing. A lot. The company currently has the largest share of the eCommerce platform market in the U.S. (29%) and has grown the fastest in the last few years compared to its competition, including Magento (now called Adobe Commerce).

We’re not surprised.

Perhaps we’re a bit biased because we’re a Shopify Plus-only shop. However, we weren’t always a top Shopify Plus Partner. In the 20 years we’ve been in business, we’ve seen it all. Our decision to work exclusively with the Shopify platform is based on our years of experience and research.

Benefits of migrating to Shopify Plus

Since making the switch to focusing on Shopify Plus, we’ve worked with many brands to help them migrate from Magento. From our experience, following are our key takeaways as to the biggest benefits of migrating from Magento to Shopify Plus.

Turnkey SaaS offering

Shopify is a SaaS platform. This means customers pay to use the software and don’t have to worry about updates, maintenance or hardware. Most critically for eCommerce, Shopify hosting enables unlimited scalability at the drop of a hat. In other words, you don’t have to stress out that your biggest sales day might exceed expectations and overload your site – you can hope for record sales versus worry about them. This is huge, especially for DTC brands that might be small today, but have big plans for the future.

Easier and faster to integrate and innovate

Shopify talks a lot about its app ecosystem as a key differentiator. It’s true. The company has been investing heavily in providing tools and support for developers to grow its app ecosystem. In fact, the number of apps in the Shopify App Store has doubled in the last two years to more than 6,000.

This plethora of Shopify apps make it so much easier and faster to integrate third-party technologies, from email tools to loyalty programs. Being able to quickly deploy and launch new features fast is critical for supporting brands’ efforts to grow, stay ahead of their competition and deliver what customers need.

We love that we can help our clients take full advantage of all the Shopify app ecosystem has to offer to add functionality to their Shopify Plus sites in very cost-efficient ways.

Much easier to manage content and CX ongoing

The more time your team has to focus on the business and less on technology issues, the better. This is one of the biggest returns we consistently see when brands migrate from Magento to Shopify Plus.

We work hard to enhance the user-friendly Shopify Plus experience by developing custom themes with module-based templates and design elements. This approach enables teams to manage content themselves – without needing a developer. They can quickly and easily modify layout and change out marketing, merchandising and lifestyle content.

More cost effective

Magento is built for developers to manage. It’s so highly customizable that brands need a developer to manage the site and content. However, this flexibility makes it more complex and expensive to use and manage, including keeping up with bugs and patches.

With Shopify Plus, brands don’t have to worry about fixing bugs and installing patches. The marketing and merchandising teams don’t have to know how to code to manage the site. Additionally, the wide range of integrations available in the App Store also save on development time and cost.

Streamlines selling in multi-currency and international markets

The marketplace is global. More brands are looking for ways to reach customers around the world. Shopify released a product called Shopify Markets, which makes it more turnkey for merchants to sell internationally. Shopify Markets allows brands to sell in local currencies and with local payment methods. You can manage a single store with multiple currencies or set up separate expansion stores for different markets. You also can customize pricing, inventory and site content by market. Managing international stores through Magento is more complicated, requiring multiple store views and additional apps.

Constant innovation

We’re impressed and delighted by Shopify’s frequent eCommerce product releases designed to help brands deliver great customer experiences. Some examples include:

Shop Pay: This provides speedy checkout for eCommerce stores, in the Shop app and on social media platforms and browsers (i.e., Facebook, Instagram and Google). The product enables customers to save their information like address and credit card, and Shop Pay prefills all of that information for the customer.
Augmented Reality: Brands can load 3D models and videos to bring products to life using AR, such as with 3D product views and features such as “see it in your room.”
Hydrogen Headless: Shopify created this framework to help brands go headless faster, enabling developers to more easily decouple the front and back ends, and leave Shopify themes behind for custom storefronts, while still using Shopify for eCommerce on the backend.
Automation using Shopify Flow: This helps brands automate processes or tasks – which is very helpful when business scales up. For example, a brand could set up a trigger that when a customer makes a second purchase, they get a loyalty program email or SMS thank you.
Shopify Audiences: This segmentation tool helps brands do more targeted digital marketing through identifying customers with high intent to buy certain products, creating lists and then exporting them to the Facebook and Instagram ad platforms to run acquisition campaigns.

Work with an experienced agency for your Shopify migration

While migrating from Magento to Shopify Plus isn’t rocket science, there are many ways for things to go wrong, fast. It’s smart to work with an experienced agency to set yourself up for success and avoid common mistakes and pitfalls. One area brands often misunderstand is the effort it takes to clean and normalize data so it can be used by Shopify. Having these conversations upfront and developing a migration strategy with your agency will save time, money and headaches. We’re ready to help! Give us a ring.