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Re-platforming from Magento to Shopify

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Ed Swain

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Apr 11, 2018
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Hi there,

Looking for some advice/first hand experience of people that may have re-platformed to Shopify from another platform. I'm mainly interested with SEO impact on the websites that have moved because Shopify doesn't have a standard URL structure.

Our website is hevily reliant on SEO for traffic as we work in a sector where PPC isn't available.

We've had meetings with Shopify but they are very blasé with there opinion on how it will affect ranking over the short / mid / long term.

If anyone has any first hand experience it would be welcomed.
 
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That's quite a bold move, and maybe why Shopify is being a bit blasé about rankings, shopify is quite well documented as not having decent SEO built in

You'll tend to find that trend on most of these build your own pay monthly type setups

Don't have first hand experience so can't comment, but do a few searches and you can find the comments relating to shopify and poor SEO performances, PM me if you want details on other options avialable
 
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Ed Swain said:
Hi there,

Looking for some advice/first hand experience of people that may have re-platformed to Shopify from another platform. I'm mainly interested with SEO impact on the websites that have moved because Shopify doesn't have a standard URL structure.

Our website is hevily reliant on SEO for traffic as we work in a sector where PPC isn't available.

We've had meetings with Shopify but they are very blasé with there opinion on how it will affect ranking over the short / mid / long term.

If anyone has any first hand experience it would be welcomed.
Click to expand...

Also might be worth posting this in the Shopify forums. Lots of good information over there at the moment.

https://ecommerce.shopify.com/forums
 
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Magento =/= Shopify. Not even close. All the reasons why you needed Magento in the first place will become null and void if you move to Shopify.

Like @HC-Samuel said, what's the reason why you think you need to do this?
 
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I suppose though a lot of people started out with Magento 1 before Shopify became a mainstream contender so the "need" for Magento wasn't real other than it was only a handful of accessible systems to use for e-commerce.
 
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HC-Samuel said:
I suppose though a lot of people started out with Magento 1 before Shopify became a mainstream contender so the "need" for Magento wasn't real other than it was only a handful of accessible systems to use for e-commerce.
Click to expand...

We're looking at the Shopify Plus enterprise platform. Key reasons for considering it is the build time is dramatically reduced compared to Magento 2 migration. Also the server uptime and page speed is fairly impressive for most of the sites we have tested.

Main issue is around SEO, which might be too big of a risk for us to take.
 
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We are currently going through the phase of choosing an e-commerce platform right now for a startup and the two choices are Magento 2 or Shopify. At the moment we need nothing complex or custom outside of what both the core Shopify and Magento 2 features offer and I have to say I have been impressed by what Shopify has to offer, the page load speeds etc have been very good indeed. I do believe that for SEO there are a number of addons for Shopify and that is where myself I have a slight unease, I am not a great fan of these paid monthly addons but on the other hand most decent extensions for Magento 2 carry a higher initial payment and then additional payments if support is required after a set period of time (I am guessing you know this).

I have also been impressed myself with the build time for Shopify and the backend has been well received so far by those that have used it, the reports are excellent and the ability to use a mobile or iPad to connect to the Shopify admin is also great.

Now I don't have the answers in relation to your query about the impact on SEO on a re-platform but do have a look at the Shopify forum and post on there. There are many larger brands migrating to Shopify and places like GymShark tried to move to Magento and it was apparently a disaster

https://ecommercemasterplan.com/switching-magento-1-whats-happening-options/
 
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What is the problem - why do you have to move to Magento 2 or Shopify

Either will swallow up a lot of time

And could lead to lots of problems
 
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My tuppenny worth.

I moved to Shopify because I had been repeatedly told that a move to M2 HAD to be done before September as M1 would not be maintained. My developer who had originally done my M1 website so trusted. I'd already bought a M2 theme and they suggested I move to Shopify for various reasons. Shopify maintains, cheaper overall cost, no external cash processing, no external hosting and similar SEO.

Moved across beginning April.

Page loading speed very quick - half as long as M1, Moving seemed seamless, loading new products a breeze, processing orders a breeze.

DOWNSIDE, For years my principal keyword that most people type in was sitting between 3-5 has now slipped and disappeared onto the second page over the month, visitors has slid from 270/day to 150/day over the month.

WHY: Asked Tin who gave me some suggestions after abusing me terribly.......
Website now hosted by Shopify in the USA?
The backend change will have changed the code to content ratio so that may have prompted the ranking move ?
 
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@Clodbuster are you happy with Shopify overall? do you expect your ranking to improve or are going to have to take further action such as replatforming again to improve your ranking. Reading up on this it seems that regardless of platform etc a ranking hit will always happen anyway but how bad it is depends on how well the move is planned.

As I understood it Google isn't much bothered about the location of the server but will look at the gTLD and your using a .co.uk so I would expect that it would play a small roll if any. I would suggest its probably more to do with the URL structure that shopify uses that perhaps hurt your ranking as this often the most painful point in the migration /collections/ and /pages/

https://webmasters.stackexchange.co...ation-and-geo-location-based-on-ip-impact-seo
 
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Clodbuster said:
WHY: Asked Tin who gave me some suggestions after abusing me terribly.......
Click to expand...

This comment was meant as a joke as Ray is the most helpful person and correctly told me I had done some things wrong. I understand it has been taken the wrong way so I do most sincerely apologise. I had forgotten how to do something and he picked up on it.

If anyone thought I was being nasty, I apologise.
 
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We are seriously considering moving to shopify or at least away from Magento for many reasons. A lot of businesses we work with seems to be using shopify also and with regards to SEO they are not amazing positions but the sales speak for themselves.
Before / if we do though we are working on a smaller site using woocommerce and so far I am very impressed with the page load time, ease of use and extension availability plus the price of these, compared to shopify add ons, worth taking a look at.
 
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Just to throw a spanner in the works I have also been testing BigCommerce and have been very impressed with its "out of the box" features.
 
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I am still mystified why when you have a working solution you want to spend time and money moving

There has to be a reason

So what is the reason
 
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I did a similar thing to you. We have magento 1 and got sucked in to the ease of Shopify and was also told it works treats when it comes to SEO. I purchased a decent theme on shopify and had things live quite quickly - thankfully i also kept my magento store running (did not move it) - but started a new store on shopify.

To my suprise - i noticed shopify category pages indexed and no product pages showing up in the search results. Some time went as i thought it may be a time issue - which to my suprise - it wasn't.

So in my experience - i couldn't get google to index my product pages via shopify which meant hardly any traffic coming through directly to the products. I pull the plug on shopify. I don't think i would go back to it.

We even had shopify support saying that it will index - but 4 months later (nothing happened). They couldn't put their finger on it but a quick google saw how i was not the only person facing this issue.

Couldn't find a solution - tried lots of different things so gave up on Shopify. Whilst it looks great - i don't think it is there yet in terms of seo.

Magento 1 site - no problems being indexed. Nearly all our products and pages are indexed.

But i do know one day i will have to move to magento 2 - that will be the real test.
 
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Page said:
I am still mystified why when you have a working solution you want to spend time and money moving

There has to be a reason

So what is the reason
Click to expand...

Because everyone said we had to move away from M1 - it would not be supported, suspect to intruders blah, blah blah. I am not a developer, merely a shop owner, I do what I'm advised to do. I don't really appreciate being labelled an idiot, thanks very much.
 
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So I find myself right now back to where I started with reading this thread so I Shopify or magento. My take away from Shopify is it’s nice and easy to use but it’s very US centric as features are missing from the U.K market that the US have had for months.

Amazon U.K. integration
eBay U.K. integration
Address autocomplete

It also seems to be that you need apps for the simplest of things, for example for a customer to update their email address ion their account it needed an app that costs $6. Adding additional SEO functionality an extra $20 per month and the list goes on.

Then there is the control of data to worry about as often the data is sent off Shopify network to the “app” provider network and that is a worry about what really happens to that data.

Don’t get me wrong Shopify is pretty good and I do like it, question is can and do I like it enough to overcome my reservations above.

I don’t know how much research you have done into each platform but that’s just my opinion about Shopify thus far.
 
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Clodbuster said:
Because everyone said we had to move away from M1 - it would not be supported, suspect to intruders blah, blah blah. I am not a developer, merely a shop owner, I do what I'm advised to do. I don't really appreciate being labelled an idiot, thanks very much.
Click to expand...

Very bizarre reply - I am not sure where it said you were an idiot - but hey ho

Go and read the links that I posted - it is NOT about to be end of life

So maybe everyone is not saying blah blah
 
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My opinion on shopify - without having used it - is ...

Newish to the game and no specific demands etc then great and cheaper to get going and run in house etc - but locked down

Magento more demanding but you can customise as needed

Which is best for you all depends

But I personally would not be moving from a working Magento build to shopify

And unless some very specif need - nor the other way around
 
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The main reason I see people switching to shopify is because they get fed up with the complexities and costs associated with Magento. Of course it doesn't help when even the core Magento 2 code comes with such silly bug...

The store will no longer set a FROM address on the e-mails it sends.
Its not possible to update the store settings in Content > Configuration

As before we are in a unique position in that we have a site built on both platforms and I have had to refer to devs almost three times as much with Magento than I have had with Shopify.
 
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Well I've moved to Shopify from 01/4 - I've not recovered my position on the Google organic listing although I have moved up to the top of the second page and sales dropped away this month. I have increased my PPC spend to try and mitigate that with not a great deal of success. I'll just have to bite the bullet for while.
 
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Clodbuster said:
Well I've moved to Shopify from 01/4 - I've not recovered my position on the Google organic listing although I have moved up to the top of the second page and sales dropped away this month. I have increased my PPC spend to try and mitigate that with not a great deal of success. I'll just have to bite the bullet for while.
Click to expand...

@Clodbuster Have you taken professional advise on this to see if your ranking will improve? its interesting you've lost search position and sales but your going to stick with shopify, so either magento wasn't for you or just gave you too many problems that you would rather not switch back or you expect things to improve in the long term.
 
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My developer (who advised me to move) and Shopify assure me it will recover. I've outlaid a fair bundle to just throw it away now. Yes I did ask around for opinions but not many were able to help much. Now that I've dropped I would not necessary recover by simply reverting to M1 and the same could have happened by moving to M2 apparently.
 
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Clodbuster said:
My developer (who advised me to move) and Shopify assure me it will recover. I've outlaid a fair bundle to just throw it away now. Yes I did ask around for opinions but not many were able to help much. Now that I've dropped I would not necessary recover by simply reverting to M1 and the same could have happened by moving to M2 apparently.
Click to expand...

I hate to be the bearer of bad tides but M1 will be supported for the foreseeable future and is infinitely better for SEO than Shopify.

I looked into this myself due to the supposed end of support and you’ll struggle to find a Shopify site ranking nearly as well as Magento etc. The major brands that use it, such as Gym Shark dominate through social media etc.
 
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The thing is like I said before I can see the lure of Shopify because magento can be a major pain in the rear end. Take the latest version 2.2.4 it has broken quite a few things...

1. The from address on transaction e-mails has been removed so it looks like your order confirmation etc come from an e-mail address with no from (thats going to bugger up the delivery and put straight into spam).

2. The breadcrumbs on the product view page are no longer consistently showing.

3. You can no longer update your template information in Content > Configuration at the store view level.

So with that in mind I can see why Shopify is popular amongst those that don't want to hassles that come with Magento. I am pretty sure with some addons that Shopify could be just as good with SEO as Magento.
 
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So just for the sake of updating this thread we decided to go with Magento 2.

- Prefer to have control over the data for backup purposes.
- If we grow and need customisations later it can be done easily with the right developer.
- Any added functionality are one off costs (usually) in relation to extensions

The reasons why we decided not to use shopify.

- I felt basic features where having to be added as an APP for example the ability for customers to update their e-mail address on their account! that needs an app.
- Their own Google Shopping app was updated and only works with USD
- No Amazon UK or Ebay native integration.
- Accounting integration (again a 3rd party app by BOLD)
 
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So I recently read today that Adobe bought out Magento. That does leave me wondering if the Magento community version will survive the transition. Perhaps I will just need to deal with the negatives of Shopify and lock into that platform for security.
 
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Some comments from Shopify experts on this query,

https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/ecommerce-marketing/t/shopify-and-seo-515299#comment-520328

"Anytime I hear someone blame Shopify for their drop in organic rankings, I know the migration was poorly handled. Having done many SEO migrations from Magento and other platforms to Shopify, I can tell you Shopify is not your problem. It is common to get a 10% organic traffic fluctuation in the first 2 weeks before restoration for any major design change (which happens from a platform migration.)"
 
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After 60 days the situation has not improved. Shopify were adamant that I must expect an initial drop but their platform is superior to Magento and I would see a climb back to where we were.
This is fast approaching decision time - revert back to M1 or will that be a mistake? I am at a loss to know.
 
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For some reason people seem to be spinning against Magento on every platform. Normally as they have something else to sell..

The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce has moved Magento right to the top right in the Leaders / Visionaries with the other big boy e-commerce tools (Oracle / Sales force / IBM). While Shopify / Big Commerce are still down in the bottom left as Niche / Challengers.
(quick summary here https://dx3webs.com/blog/magic-quadrant-digital-commerce)

Amazingly... this awesome power is still available for all.. for free and getting better all the time. Now with the clout of Adobe behind it.
 
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