February 24, 2023
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15 min read
Migrating to Shopify Plus doesn’t have to be a complex and costly task, but sometimes, it is – usually down to a lack of planning. And one thing that often gets forgotten is your tech stack and the data they hold. Whether you want to migrate your Magento tech stack to Shopify or if you think it’s time to switch your third parties up, you need to consider the impacts this will have on your customer data and user experience. We’re covering some of our favorite tech options for your e-commerce store and how you can easily migrate onto, or integrate them with, Shopify Plus. So let’s get into it.
A payment gateway is the backbone of your e-commerce store. Customers who buy from your site need a reliable payment gateway that provides for their choice of payment, be it credit cards, pay on account, or cryptocurrency. There are a ton of payment options out there, but if you want a seamless transition when you migrate from Magento to Shopify Plus, Stripe and Mollie Payments are set up on both platforms.
From ASOS to Monzo and everything in between, Stripe powers some of the world's biggest brands' payment gateways, allowing them to accept and send payments on a global scale. For e-commerce, Stripe’s continuous API updates and back-end security checks ensure merchants reduce fraud risk while maximizing checkout conversion with an optimized checkout experience.
Shopify integration
Conveniently for brands migrating to Shopify Plus, Shopify Payments is powered by Stripe. But rather than having two separate accounts, your Shopify Plus admin and your Stripe business account, you manage all transactions through your Shopify admin account. In addition, where Shopify Payments isn’t available in certain regions, you can use Stripe only as your checkout.
While Stripe provides payment gateways to various industries, Mollie Payments hones in on e-commerce, offering a plug-in and API with the big players in e-com platforms - WooCommerce, Magento, Wix, and, of course, Shopify. With Mollie, your store can accept all major payment methods, including those all-important BNPL, with one single integration - globally and securely. For merchant handling, Mollie allows you to find orders, amounts paid, and customer information easily, using ready-made filters that help you gain insights into your transactions immediately.
Shopify integration
Mollie has excellent integration with Shopify and, as a platform-agnostic solution, can seamlessly be migrated from Magento to Shopify when you replatform.
Your type: embedded-entry-inline id: c4LJ3QjEzNS9IsP8XR2zmFtis your most important asset. By migrating your customer subscription data to Shopify Plus, you protect that value by ensuring customers can continue enjoying their subscription services - uninterrupted and without having to re-create their profiles. You’ll also retain the recurring revenues from customers signed up on your previous platform instead of losing them completely.
While Magento offers integrations with apps such as Subscription Pro to handle customer subscriptions, the Shopify Plus go-to is ReCharge.
Recharge is a platform-agnostic subscription provider that does what it says on the tin - and quickly. Recharge allows merchants to set up their subscription program in a matter of minutes, connecting with their existing tech stack and payment processors. Then, integrated into your e-commerce store, you can offer subscription services to your customers. Customers can manage, skip, or delay their subscription via SMS or a handy customer portal, plus have the ability to swap out products removing the risk of subscription cancellation.
Shopify Plus integration
As a platform-agnostic service, Recharge is available on Magento, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and can slot nicely into a headless build. Although platform-agnostic, Recharge is highly compatible with Shopify and Shopify Plus. They have a Shopify integration that works with Shopify Checkout. Rather than going through separate checkouts, customers can pay for products, subscriptions, or a mixed cart all through Shopify, with Recharge as the subscription management tool.
Recharge understands how important a frictionless migration is for subscription businesses. Uninterrupted service, whether you have 20 or 200,000 subscribers, is important to continue to build a successful subscription program. Our migration specialists have built extensive documentation & tools to ensure a smooth transition in partnership with your agency.
Kris Clinard
VP of Solutions at Recharge
Speaking of type: embedded-entry-inline id: c4LJ3QjEzNS9IsP8XR2zmFt, loyalty programs are a great way to retain your best customers - whether it’s rewards and discounts based on purchases, frequency, or ratings. With a solid loyalty program, you create an environment of appreciation for your customers, making them want to come back for more. This is why, with such an important role in your users' experience and your understanding of customer behavior, it’s essential to ensure any points and customer accounts are migrated with you when moving over to Shopify Plus or any e-commerce platform.
If you’re already using loyalty programs like LoyaltyLion or Yotpo, you’re in luck. These platform agnostic solutions can be easily migrated from your old Magento site to your new Shopify plus store seamlessly, and any historical customer data will be preserved.
LoyaltyLion is all about narrowing down your most loyal customers and creating the best and most personalized experience for them. Rewards for referrals, birthdays, data sharing, social shares, or likes can be traded for discounts, free shipping, products, or gift cards that make the most sense for your brand.
Shopify Plus integration
LoyaltyLion is platform agnostic and a Shopify Plus Certified App partner, so migrating your loyalty program from Magento to Shopify Plus will be a breeze. In fact, on Shopify Plus, LoyaltyLion offers exclusive features unique to the platform.
Hailed by Steve Madden, Princess Polly, Brooklinen, and more, Yotpo’s loyalty solution offers merchants data-driven loyalty programs created to target multiple audiences.
Using their advanced segmentation tool, merchants can reward their customers based on their interactions with their site, including their points balance, number of referrals, last purchase date, and VIP tier. Plus, to keep your customers engaged and excited, you can run time-sensitive rewards campaigns, scheduling in advance to take the edge off your in-house teams during busier times.
Shopify Plus integration
Again, as a platform agnostic solution, you can migrate easily from Magento to Shopify Plus, or if you’re on a different tool, you can switch to Yotpo seamlessly. With their Shopify Plus integration, you can import all your existing points and accounts from your previous platform for customers to use on your new store.
Every e-commerce store needs to manage customer reviews to keep its business running. Positive reviews can improve Google search rankings and help bring in more traffic, while negative reviews can chase away customers.
You can manage reviews internally, but to ease the stress on your in-house team and to ensure you get it right every time, you need a third-party app. With Shopify Plus, you have a wide range of apps to choose from, including Yotpo, which is conveniently platform agnostic.
We’ve covered what Yotpo does in the loyalty space, but there’s more. For reviews, Yotpo allows you to collect customer reviews via email and SMS. It also allows you to create prompts that encourage engagement and display responses on high-converting topics.
User-generated content provides ample opportunity for you to connect with your customers in meaningful and authentic ways.
With reviews, Yotpo has a UGC feature that allows you to display customer images and videos of your products across your site, whether they’re directly pulled from social media or uploaded as part of a review. By allowing your customers to give feedback using pictures and videos, they can garner rewards points with the Yotpo loyalty program, and it allows for community engagement on your site.
Shopify Plus integration
Yotpo is a platform-agnostic tool and has integrations with both Magento and Shopify, so you can migrate your reviews tech stack from Magento to Shopify Plus without losing any data from the previous platform. You can also syndicate reviews across multiple domains with Yotpo, ensuring you don’t lose any valuable UGC in the migration process and giving you greater flexibility if you’re a multi-store brand.
Personalization is one of the most important aspects of any e-commerce store, especially when achieving the right experience for your customers. With personalization, customers don’t need to waste time browsing through products and services they aren’t interested in. Instead, personalization allows your site to create a tailored experience that is focused on what matters most to them, helping you make a long-lasting impression and extend CLV.
One of the best personalization apps in the game is Nosto Solutions.
There’s a heap of functionality included in Nosto’s personalization offering. But, to put it simply, Nosto enables you to customize filters for different products and search parameters to make locating and browsing through a wide selection of products on the platform easier for your customers. They also offer an impressive on-site search function that ties in seamlessly with their AI-based personalization engine.
Shopify Plus integration
Nosto offers its personalization functionalities in the same format on Magento and Shopify Plus. Making it easy for tech stack migration when you need to re-platform while keeping your customer's preferences and shopping history intact. On Shopify Plus, Nosto is hyper-personalized. It gives your customers real-time recommendations on prices and other product details based on the brand or categories they view most on the platform.
Want some extra advice from the team at Nosto? We've got you:
Most personalization solutions use both product and customer data. But when moving this to your new platform, you’ll appreciate how big an undertaking it can be to migrate product data to Shopify in a mirrored format.
The good thing is, for personalization, at least, product data is arguably less important. Products are often seasonal and will be replaced, and also, your personalization vendor won’t need much traffic (if any) to get firing again. Product recommendations powered by VisualAI, for example, can build relations and fuel recs independent of this, based purely on visual similarity.
Customer data, however… way more important. Though any personalization provider should have import capabilities for customer data that will allow you to create the same customer groups again, enabling use cases like loyal customers seeing something different to new shoppers on your new store.
Aside from data considerations, our other tip would be to set expectations and note measurable goals for your personalization provider for go-live. For instance, you might want to create customer segments out of your imported customer data, or have product recommendations live the minute your new store launches. Then you might begin exploring other functionality the following quarter.
Once a simple tool for customers to navigate your site, search has become a make-or-break feature. Without a great onsite search experience that suggests products, accounts for typo tolerance, filters, and more, you could easily miss out on a sale and lose a customer for life. When migrating to Shopify Plus, you want to ensure your search is ready and not just in the beta phase. If you want to hit the ground running, we’ve got two platform-agnostic options with exceptional Shopify Plus integrations.
While Magento offers search extensions like Fast Simon, platform-agnostic solutions like Algolia and Klevu are available on both Magento and Shopify, allowing you to safeguard your existing customer search data when migrating. We go into more detail on both of these solutions in our article on optimizing site search, but to cover the basics:
Klevu uses AI to recognize customers’ needs and offer them a personalized experience. It can adapt search results to account for customer behavior, spelling errors, and intentions. For example, if a US customer is searching on a UK site and searches for ‘Pants,’ the AI will recognize their intention is to view trousers. Their AI also automatically updates the product ranking order on category pages to match customer behaviors to increase the chances of conversion.
Shopify integration
Integrated with Shopify, merchants can recognize high-intent customers and personalize their search experience, keeping them retained until checkout. Plus, Klevu is a headless compatible technology that can be integrated into your Shopify platform whether you’re using monolith or decide to progress to a headless structure, so you’ll never need to go through the process of re-platforming again.
Shopify Plus is built with customer personalization and merchant customization in mind, which is why Aloglia is a Shopify Plus Certified Partner. Algolia allows brands to customize the sort order on their search and the search section design, so when you migrate from Magento, your search aesthetic doesn’t have to change - only improve.
Shopify integration
As a platform agnostic tool migrating Algolia from Magento to Shopify Plus is seamless. Once you migrate to Shopify with Algolia as your search tool, you’ll also benefit from additional best-in-class resources, including exclusive early access to beta features and Black Friday scaling. Moreover, Algolia has a headless integration that allows fast, scalable, and flexible search on top of Shopify’s Hydrogen framework, creating hyper-personalized experiences for customers.
Email marketing should still be a big focus for your brand. It’s a simple but effective way to engage with your customers, from updating them on their orders to promoting products and loyalty programs. But you don’t want to fall into the trap of annoying your customers with too many emails that aren’t personalized or don’t serve a purpose. And that’s where your email marketing third-party comes in; pick a good one, and you’re on to a winner, make the wrong choice, and you could risk churning customers.
If you’re unhappy with your current solution, migrating gives you the perfect opportunity to pick a new email marketing third party. On the other hand, if you are happy with your email tool and worried you won’t be able to move it to your new platform, Shopify has integrations with some of the best in the business and is home to excellent email solutions alternatives – including Klaviyo and Dotdigital.
Klaviyo is one of those all-rounder solutions, but their stand-out automated email and SMS messaging places brands using their service in good stead with their customers – sharing marketing emails as and when customers want to hear from you and should hear from you. In addition, they have handy pre-built email templates that have been created based on best practices that will boost your revenue and, with no coding necessary, takes the pressure off your teams.
Shopify integration
Shopify and Klaviyo have always had an easy integration. However, very recently, they took their partnership up a notch with Klaviyo, now the recommended email solution for Shopify Plus, allowing Klaviyo early access to Shopify updates and improvements. For brands migrating over to Shopify, a seamless one-click integration with Shopify Plus and Klaviyo allows you to sync all your historical and real-time data.
As part of the partnership, Klaviyo will now serve as the recommended email solution partner for Shopify Plus, a plan for merchants with higher-volume sales that offers additional functionality, scalability, and support from Shopify’s base-level offering.
Phil Greenwood
Klaviyo Agency Partnerships, EMEA
Dotdigital allows you to create email templates for your customers from scratch. From email design to segmentation and cross-channel automation, you can create marketing emails for your products or services to reach a wider audience, and custom after-purchase emails for your customers quickly. They also focus on data-driven insights, providing analytics to help you understand which marketing emails your customers interact with most. With this data, you can optimize your marketing efforts, allowing you to switch things up if you find your customers' needs have changed.
Shopify integration
Dotdigital has an easy one-click integration with Shopify and works seamlessly with Shopify Flow. As a platform agnostic tool, you can migrate your customer email data from your Magento store to Shopify Plus.
A good customer support feature lets your customers directly engage with you while interacting with your site or, with some tools, reach out to you using their favorite social media platform at their convenience. Plus, as more brands expand internationally, you want to make sure your customer service tool supports multiple languages and adapts to different regions. While there are many customer support solutions out there, we’ve picked out platform agnostic services Gorgias and Heyday to cover your migration concerns.
Gorgias is all about quick responses from your teams to your customers, answering their questions and queries in the place where they communicate most. Whether it’s their favorite social platform, SMS, or your website, Gorgias has integrations with them all. Plus, with their helpdesk, you can see your customer data in one place, meaning minimal wait times for customers looking for fast answers. And with repetitive questions, Gorgias allows you to automate responses.
Shopify integration
Magento and Shopify Plus have integrations with Gorgias, making it easy for you to re-platform.
Brands using Gorgias for customer support can connect to Shopify in under a minute, complete with historical customer and order history, so you can pick up where you left off. Likewise, brands using an alternative solution on Magento and hoping to move to Gorgias alongside their Shopify migration can expect the same easy transition.
Heyday, a conversational chatbot, uses clever AI to create the ultimate customer service solution, particularly for your international customers. Heyday’s customer support bot offers round-the-clock responses to customer FAQs. It also provides a personalized experience by capturing customer preferences like product price, color, size, and materials shared through product suggestions - helping to keep customers engaged and convert sales. Although AI, your teams can take over your customer support when needed.
A nice feature of Heyday is their internationalization tool. Their AI chatbot can detect customers' writing in French or English and respond in the same, creating the ultimate experience and smoothing any challenges your customers might face. You can read more on this in our guide to localization article.
Shopify integration
Heyday is platform agnostic and has integrations with both Magento and Shopify Plus, meaning an easy solution and customer data migration.
The above agnostic third parties are but a few of many that allow for smooth data migration from Magento to Shopify Plus. However, with so many options in e-commerce, you may not be using the apps listed above. But don’t panic. This doesn’t mean migrating you to Shopify Plus is an impossible task or that you’ll be left with clunky alternatives to your existing tech stack. Shopify Plus has over 6000 apps on their app store, so it most likely has integrations with your existing tech solutions ready to be installed.
If you are looking to migrate and need an expert agency to support a seamless replatform, reach out to our team. We can migrate your customer data over from Magento to Shopify Plus with your existing apps, or if you want to switch, get you set up on these best-in-class, third-parties and so much more.
