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Both Magento 2 and also OpenCart share a whole lot of common features as well. Some important features include:
- Developed in PHP
- Open Source and support several currencies and language packs.
- Highly popular with huge developer communities for assistance.
Startup E-commerce shops also often choose Opencart over Magento due to it's more user-friendly admin panel that doesn't need specific technical skills for management.
Furthermore, OpenCart also offers a simple to use command management interface and respective built-in payment and transport integrations to make life simpler for retailers who are stepping to the E-commerce ecosystem for the first time.
However, over the past 8 years of facilitating E-commerce development services, we've seen an increasing trend of migration towards Magento one of the Opencart merchant community.
Now, with this site, we attempt to share our expertise working with one client and answer:
- Exactly why the client felt the demand for Opencart into Magento 2 migration.
- Our strategy to Opencart into Magento 2 migrations.
- Challenges we faced during the migration.
So buckle up and let us start.
Why To Migrate From OpenCart To Magento 2
While Opencart does its job really well as an eCommerce CMS, it will have its own limitations which start becoming bothersome when the store starts expanding.
- During the span of time, the Opencart starts falling short on the operation front while offering basic capabilities like clients, orders, inventory and innovative store analytics management, in an effective way.
- Together with the growth in data, all eCommerce store requires effective caching.
With opencart, there is none by default and retailers ends up investing a lot of time and money in order to set one up.
- Customizations choices remain restricted in opencart even though it's open source.
When it comes to advanced customizations, programmers are seldom forced to create changes in the core files rather than the option to override it with extensions as opencart structure makes it extremely tough to achieve that.
All these disadvantages are the pros for Magento which is highly scalable, comes with inbuilt caching and gives a much more functional way towards customizations.
Although compared to Opencart, Magento is certainly resourced hungry and will push you to purchase that hosting program, it justifies it when it comes to the capabilities it provides to encourage company expansions.
Approach To Follow For OpenCart to Magento 2 Migration
The tasks had been laid down on the desk and the aim was clear.
- Migrating an E-commerce store from Opencart into Magento 2.1 using a new look and feel.
- Each of the data should be seamlessly migrated into the new shop including:
- 9000+ Products.
- 2,50,000 + contracts.
- 2,00,000 + Customer profiles.
- SEO should not be lost and the store should be made live within minimum time and off hours to ensure minimal downtime.
The Approach:
Step 1: Making a copy of the entire OpenCart store to remain ready for any unforeseen circumstances.
Step 2: Designing the HTML to your habit Magento theme about the staging server.
Step 3: Converting the HTML to Magento theme and installing the required extensions to achieve improved features on the front-end and back-end.
Once done, testing the theme under different pressure levels and apparatus for stability and performance.
Step 4: Developing a custom script for migrating products from OpenCart to Magento, for example, all product versions and attributes.
Step 5: Making a personalized script for Assessing all custom made information from Opencart into Magento including client details like Name, profile username, password, and password, and contact number, shipping address, etc..
Our script ensured that the passwords have been migrated while remaining encrypted and no information is endangered.
Step 6: Migrating order status and data are migrated from OpenCart into Magento.
Step 7: Setting up 301 redirects for lossless SEO migration of URLs.
Step 8: Establishing the payment and transport gateways as desired in Magento.
Step 9: Performing a comprehensive quality evaluation of both front-end and backend to make sure the migration has been done according to expectations and pre-written test instances.
Our QA's utilize both automated and manual testing techniques to ensure data validity.
Step 10: Analyzing and calculating the time needed for uploading the website live and re-examining it to get any redundancies.
Transferring the website live as per schedule with minimum downtime for customers.
Having a planned approach by our experts, the migration has been achieved as scheduled and the upgraded store was made live without any delays.
Challenges Tackled
As anticipated, there wasn't a single instance that burst out as a challenge during the Opencart into Magento2 migration.
The entire process was precisely planned and executed by our seasoned E-commerce programmers there weren't any anomalies through the migration period.
On the other hand, the only challenge which the team faced was as it was time to upgrade the stage out of Magento 2.1 to 2.2.
By now it had been planned to upgrade the store to Magento 2.2, you can find around 50+ extensions set up on the shop, these contained -- extensions such as Megamenu, Amasty POS, Affiliate program, Klarna voucher, Magento 2 banner slider and others.
On updating the shop, approximately half of those extensions have been found as incompatible with anti-inflammatory 2.2.
Since the client continued to stick to Magento 2.2, we took upon ourselves to override the false extensions with patches that resolving those compatibility issues.
Around 20 these spots were coded by our expert Magento developers which completely complied with anti-inflammatory criteria and didn't touch the core Magento files.
Conclusion
If you are running an eCommerce store with Opencart, then does it mean you'll need to finally migrate to a more reliable system like Magento? Yes No.
It completely depends on your business model and what your growth requirements are. Opencart will have its limits in terms of scalability and performance for large stores which you will need to be aware of.
Are you wishing to switch to Magento from Opencart or any other platform? Get in touch with our specialist Magento developers today and book a free appointment to receive your store prerequisites examined?
