Migrate Miva to Shopify May 01, 2023at 18:57 pm By: James Byrne After Dark Grafx Moving From Miva to Shopify? There are many things to consider when migrating your website from Miva to Shopify. Before you begin this process, it is best to contact After Dark Grafx via Chat (bottom right of this website), via our Contact Form – click here or via Phone Toll Free (888) 578-8300 or if in San Diego (619) 702-7377. This will save you in both time and money and the 30 minute consultation is FREE! STEP 1: TAKE AN INVENTORY OF YOUR MIVA STORE BEFORE MIGRATION: You will want to take an inventory of what functionality is currently in place within your existing Miva Merchant store and see if this same type of functionality is available within Shopify. In some cases, you can change or alter the functionality to best suit your needs but in some cases, you will either need to add a paid or free app from the Shopify App Store or contact a developer (like After Dark Grafx wink! wink!). To perform the upgrade or add advanced custom coding that Shopify or the theme that you choose does not offer. STEP 2: PAYMENT METHODS What payment methods do you currently accept and what is connected to your existing website? Authorize.net? Stripe? Paypal? Pay On Account? Etc. Then see if these systems are they available in Shopify. STEP 3: SHIPPING METHODS What shipping methods you are currently using and are they available in Shopify. Example: You may be using Worldship with Freight for your large and heavy products. You may need a paid app within Shopify to perform the same tasks and functionality. Shopify, out of the box, offers USPS shipping. If you would like to add UPS, FEDEX, DHL or other shipping carriers it is best to contact Shopify support to have them add the ability to your current plan. See more below. STEP 4: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT SHOPIFY BEFORE MOVING (PROS, CONS, LIMITATIONS & BENEFITS) Shopify allows you to utilize their own built-in merchant account, therefore bypassing your existing merchant account. If you wish to use your merchant account with Shopify, there is an added fee percentage per order so it’s best to just use their built-in merchant account and keep it separate from your retail or physical locations to keep costs down. Shopify currently has an attribute limit. This means if you wanted to have a T-shirt company and you had size, color and material it will be fine but if you were to offer additional items like inseam or brand type in addition to these three options, then you would need an app or some customization in order to allow this functionality. If you have a lot of products that have attributes/variations drop downs that are connected to those products, you will definitely want to reach out and see if there is an app available to help with migrating all of your options, otherwise you will have to do this manually. Shopify Benefits Shopify allows you to get started with an online store quickly. You can sign up for a free trial, build your store, add your payments and add shipping and launch your website in a matter of days. (ie: Smaller websites of course). You don’t need your own merchant account and shipping is built in if you are using USPS. There are free and paid apps that allow you to click and install easily to add major custom functions that would cost a lot to be added if it were a custom solution. STEP 5: VIEW EXISTING SHOPIFY THEMES Shopify comes with a few free themes, however, these free themes may not be what you are looking for along the lines of design for your new website. See https://themes.shopify.com. The other option is to use a paid theme or reach out to a designer like After Dark Grafx™, to create a custom design for your website. STEP 6: VIEW EXISTING APPS Miva merchant has a lot of functionality built into it plus modules that are added to it to extend its’ functionality. Shopify, in the same regard, has an App Store that allows app providers to offer functionality that may emulate or provide the same functionality for a fee. OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED: CONTACT A SHOPIFY DEVELOPER (We are Shopify Experts) After Dark Grafx™ is a Shopify Expert. Since Shopify’s inception, we have been developing and creating themes, apps, custom code as well as designing for Shopify. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us for a free consultation. OPTIONAL: USING A THIRD PARTY MIGRATION SERVICE PROS & CONS There are many third-party services that can help with migration from Miva Merchant to Shopify. These companies such as Cart2Cart, and others will copy existing data from your Miva website and import it into your Shopify website. However, these migration services rarely migrate all data, you have to double check everything that was migrated and test it yourself, then contact the company over and over again until the data is moved correctly. STEP 7: EXPORTING AND IMPORTING DATA You will want to make a full backup of your database of your existing website and files before doing anything along the lines of migration from Miva Merchant to Shopify make sure that you export your customers, products, categories, orders, shipments and data needed. You should log into the backend of Miva and copy the settings for your shipping and payments and try to keep in mind any customer functionality or code that was built in for your website. Please note that all data will not be migrated from the old system so you will want to make a checklist of exactly what you need from the old website i.e. orders, payment data, etc. and, in some cases, you may not be able to transfer the payment transaction data because it is with another system. Migrating Customers: Customers will need to create new passwords for their account on Shopify. Their old passwords and transaction data will not be migrated. Migrating Orders: You can migrate orders but not payment transaction data STEP 8: INTEGRATING DESIGN CHANGES In some cases, you may want the same exact design and building it into Shopify will take a little effort. It will not be an exact replica, but will emulate it closely. Otherwise, it is best to get a new website design that converts on Shopify. STEP 9: CODE FUNCTIONALITY CHANGES You should go through your existing website as a customer and go through the checkout process. Write down what is happening along the way. What’s happening on the product page, the category page, the checkout page and finally the invoice page. Are you getting a follow up email with an offer. Do you have an email system with follow ups or abandon carts? You may have up sells or other functionality that you forgot about. STEP 10: SETTING UP THIRD PARTY SHIPPING AND THE COSTS INVOLVED In some cases, adding UPS, or FedEx or additional shipping carrier is easy as contacting Shopify and having him add a small fee to your monthly plan. Otherwise they may make you upgrade to the next plan, which is usually more expensive than the small fee to add this ability to your existing plan. Simply contact Shopify support to have this fee, added and tell them that you are interested in adding additional shipping options. STEP 11: SETTING UP PAYMENT GATEWAYS AND THE COSTS Shopify comes with its own built-in payment system, meaning that they accept credit cards on your behalf and will release the funds into your account. Once they process the credit cards and take their fee. You can, however, utilize your own merchant account, but this will incur an additional percentage cost on top of the fee that is charged through Shopify so if you were paying 2.49% before you’ll end up paying 3.49% or more for your transactions so it is best to use Shopify’s built in merchant account system. STEP 12: USING REDIRECTS SO YOU DO NOT LOSE “*SEO JUICE” Before pointing your domain name over to Shopify, it is best to find out exactly what URLs are listed on the search engines, and if you are interested in keeping your “SEO juice” for your existing listing pages, this means that your old pages will point to your new pages so you will want to create your redirects to the new pages within Shopify. This should be done before finally pointing your domain name to Shopify and launching your website. STEP 13: POINTING YOUR DOMAIN NAME Once everything is migrated and the website is for working on a test or temporary URL and you are happy with the way the new website is working, you should perform one last export of customers and any other data that has changed since the last time you did an export. Once this has been imported into Shopify and you’re happy with everything, you should then point your domain to Shopify. We recommend that you keep your existing hosting in place for a few weeks to make sure that the new website is working for you. Otherwise you can easily switch back to the old server and website in the event that there are issues with the new store. STEP 14: LAUNCHING YOUR NEW STORE Everything is ready. Your new website is working perfectly. All of the functionality is in place. Your customers have been imported, your products have been imported you have tested out the payment processing and shipping and all of the emails in regards to the order process and you are ready to launch your website. Simply point two records to Shopify. One is an A record and the other a CNAME record. See how to connect your website to Shopify manually. STEP 15: UPDATING THE SITE MAP WITH GOOGLE, BING, OTHER Your website is now live on Shopify but now we need to tell the search engines that your new site map has been updated with your new address and website, your sitemap address has changed and you are going to want to create a Google search console account as well as a bin web master account and another of webmaster accounts in order to remit your site maps so that your new pages get indexed faster and you do not lose any of your wonderful search engine rankings. Sitemaps would include: (change YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE with your website domain name) https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap.xml https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_products_1.xml https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_pages_1.xml https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_collections_1.xml and if you have a blog https://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME-HERE/sitemap_blogs_1.xml This is just a basic list of what needs to be done before, during and after a migration from Miva Merchant Shopping Cart to the Shopify Platform. Contact us today click here for a FREE, 30 MINUTE, NO OBLIGATION consultation. Toll Free (888) 578-8300 Local: (619) 702-7377 Shopify’s post about Migrating to Shopify Click Here After Dark Tip: Make a Backup of your entire site and database before starting or making any changes or migrations. In your Miva Control Panel (not admin.mvc) you can export the database and all files from within Miva’s ecosystem. Their my.miva.com control panel allows you to login to the server and export the database and files OR just contact Miva Tech Support and they will do this for you. *SEO JUICE = Your current SEO standings or what links you currently have within the search engines. You should also take into consideration the age of your Miva website. Was it developed recently or years ago. Sometimes, performing a migration will not grab all of the data correctly. Utilizing an online utility to migrate your data, in most cases, does not grab all of the data you need because there is no “face-to-face” or human interaction analyzing what your site actually needs. Over the years, as you utilize Miva for your eCommerce website, you have probably added modules and custom code to make the website perform in a certain fashion needed for your company. Some of these modules or functionality will need to be re-added to your Shopify store in the form of paid or free apps plus custom coding. So, what do you do? Call After Dark Grafx for a FREE, No Obligation Migration Consultation and Cost Analysis. This way, you can understand what exactly you need and how your website will be affected by the move. It is best to spin up a test store, put it onto a paid plan and integrate and add the apps you need before moving the entire website. Note: All existing customers will have to RECREATE their passwords. You can send them out an invite one-by-one (Shopify Plus allows for mass invites) otherwise, you can use your email system like Mail Chimp, Constant Contact or other to send emails to your existing customers notifying them that you are moving to a new system and they will have to recreate their password on your website. Have a Rewards System in place? We should talk. What about Email? We should talk. Have other special coding or integrations that you may have forgotten about? We should talk. It is always best to keep your Miva Merchant account live as you transition away for the first few weeks to make sure everything is running efficiently. There are a multitude of other things to consider when migrating pertaining to orders, customers, categories and so forth so you should do yourself a favor and contact After Dark Grafx for a FREE Miva to Shopify Migration Consultation!