With so many ecommerce platforms out there online merchants are constantly tempted to switch to a more user-friendly and feature-rich platform. However, store migration needs much more convincing reasons to be carried out, since this task consists of smaller (but no less important) components, like data import, SEO migration, design, addons data migration, etc, which require careful preparation and double-checking to work out as expected.
If you’ve ended up reading this post, you clearly belong to the restless merchants who aren’t content with their current Wix ecommerce capacity, in spite of the growing popularity of this solution and prefer it to a more robust Shopify.
What are the most frequent reasons for migration from Wix to Shopify?
- Level up your business
- More control overstore theme and design
- More apps and additional functionality
- More powerful reporting and tracking
- Integrations and marketing options
- Pricing - not too cheap
According to Builtwith, Wix Stores can boast a staggering 808k live stores as of today, as it is an affordable and quick way to start a website literally in a few clicks. This makes it a frequent choice for those who want to start selling almost instantly. However, Wix hasn’t been designed as an ecommerce platform, but rather as a website builder. In order to scale their business when a stable growth is achieved on Wix, merchants choose to replatform to Shopify, which leads the competition with its 1,127,266 live websites and is a “true” ecommerce solution, used by businesses of all sizes.
The diagram demonstrates that Shopify beats Wix in terms of the market share among other hosted ecommerce solutions by 2%.
Shopify allows a lot more in terms of changing the look and feels of the store since you can modify HTML and CSS as needed, which Wix lacks.
Wix category of online store apps with its 49 apps clearly loses to the Shopify app marketplace, which offers stunning 3,700 solutions for all areas of store management, promo, and design.
Shopify equips you with everything needed to track your customers’ actions and behavior, enabling you to spot the bottlenecks and providing countless possibilities for improvement.
With Shopify, you can enable multichannel sales: sell on Amazon (Wix Amazon integration is pretty limited in this matter), and on social media, upsell and cross-sell, etc, while for Wix merchants these options are not available.
Taken the limited ecommerce feature set, one would expect Wix to cost little, but it’s not the case. Being based on support and storage level, Wix VIP plan for $25/month loses to Shopify’s Basic plan at $29/month in terms of support and available features.
All in all, Wix is a great turnkey solution for starting a simple website, but a growing business might soon hit a glass ceiling when it comes to expanding and multichannel approach.
The DIY Guide on How to Migrate Wix Database to Shopify
Prepare your Shopify store
- Basically, register a trial account at shopify.com.
- Сhoose a theme (don’t customize it, it should best be done after data migration).
- Find your Wix and Shopify store admin access details (they will be necessary during your data migration setup).
Set up Wix to Shopify data transfer
Cart2Cart is a way to save time and money for data migration and is designed with non-technical users in mind (we know you’re too busy developing your store):
Check out the Wix to Shopify page to see what data can be migrated and what are the extras (additional migration options).
Connect your Shopify and Wix stores by providing the necessary access details (we mentioned they will be needed above).
Choose what you need to transfer from the list of all data types that can be moved
Pick the necessary migration options. They are completely up to you to choose, but here are the things to pay attention to:
It’s recommended to select "Migrate Source Store categories into Shopify Automated Collections" option, which does exactly what it says
If you don’t plan to set up 301 redirects manually “Create 301 redirects on your target store after migration” option can save you tons of time.
Run your migration
Check the data to make sure everything’s where it should be.
Configure your new Shopify store
- Adjust your store appearance.
- Install the necessary apps(don’t get too carried away).
- Test your store functionality.
- Prepare your store for the launch.
- You can use this handy Shopify store launch checklist not to miss a thing.
- Invite your customers to reactivate their accounts.
We suggest the “Bulk Account Invite Sender” app for this job.
Well, you’re all set!
Store migration isn’t as hard as you might have thought, so go ahead and test it out without any delays!
