Learn how your business can efficiently migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2 with as little impact on your bottom line as possible with this advice from 121eCommerce and Brightpearl.
With the announcement of Magento replatforming from Magento 1 to Magento 2, there have been several common questions arising such as:
- When do I have to migrate to Magento 2?
- For how much longer will my Magento 1 site be secure?
- How can I efficiently migrate without killing my margins?
- How can my back-office operations stay intact and are they supported by the new Magento 2 platform?
We’ve recently partnered with certified Magento ecommerce development agency, 121eCommerce on a webinar to share some of the challenges customers have faced with this migration, key facts to consider when migrating to Magento 2 and how to successfully relaunch your Magento platform.
In case you missed the webinar, you can watch the recording here. Or you can use this blog to recap on the key points:
What’s happening with Magento 1?
There’s a lot of confusion and conflicting advice around at the moment regarding the end of life for Magento 1.
Right here and now, we’re going to dispel those myths and set the record straight.
Magento Community Edition, now called Magento Open Source, will see a hard stop on support for version 1 at Q3 of this year.
While users of the Enterprise edition, now called Magento Commerce, will see support for version 1 extended until June of 2020. However, to receive this extended support, you must renew your license upfront through 2020. To put this into perspective, if your license expires in 2018, you’ll need to renew for 3 years; if yours expires in 2019, you’ll need to renew for 2 years and so on.
Magento Community Edition: Version 1 end of life at Q3 2018
Magento Enterprise Edition: Version 1 end of life in June 2020
What happens once support for Magento 1 ends?
Something that presents some confusion is exactly what happens once support for Magento 1 ends. Many businesses question whether they will be impacted simply because they don’t use the Magento Support team when they have an issue.
However, the end of life goes beyond technical help and support. Your site will face:
- A lack of security and patches (for the zend framework, PHP and extensions)
- An outdated extension market
- Difficulty finding top-tier developers
What are the benefits of Magento 2?
In 121eCommerce’s experience, a typical Magento migration takes approximately 4 months. And once you’ve live, there are a whole host of benefits Magento 2 can bring to your business, alongside resolving the issues mentioned above.
1. Performance (Front-End)
- Powerful responsive design and SEO features: Magento is very much mobile-first and helps improve conversion rate by offering a true responsive design, alongside various payment methods including Apple Pay.
- Easier-to-manage theming and design: Magento’s extensive Content Management System (CMS) allows for quick and easy landing page creation.
- Product catalog improvements: These can easily scale to millions of SKUs and tens of thousands of daily orders, thanks to Magento’s work on improving the underlying structural database and how they handle data.
- Optimized checkout process: This process has been re-designed to help reduce cart abandonment.
- Visual and dynamic catalog management: With the popularity of personalization in marketing and retail on the rise, Magento has made improvements to the catalog to help promote up-sells and cross-sells that are truly relevant to the buyer.
2. Performance (Back-End)
- More intuitive admin: You can easily edit existing pages or create new ones, and handle every aspect of merchandising.
- More robust API: This helps to reduce custom integration costs.
- Vetted marketplace: This results in fewer bugs and conflicts, leading to reduced maintenance costs.
- Promotions: You can now schedule and view promotions months in advance.
3. B2B Suite
Magento 2 also has a fully built-out B2B suite, which makes managing ecommerce for your wholesale and B2B business a lot easier.
You can now:
- Manage your negotiated pricing by using customer-segmented catalogs and pricing
- Support complex approval processes with advanced corporate account structures
- Keep customers happy by allowing them to make purchases on terms with credit limits
- Save your customers time by offering one-click reorders and bulk order grids
4. Quarterly Platform Updates
Magento has been really aggressive in keeping their new platform relevant, and plan to release quarterly platform updates. These updates include:
- Continuous platform improvements to keep your site running smoothly
- Proactive security updates to ensure your customer data is secure
- Useful feature additions to help you take advantage of modern ecommerce best practices
For loads more info about Magento’s replatforming to Magento 2, 121eCommerce have created this great guide.
Back office considerations for Magento 2
A migration can be the perfect time to launch a new ERP or back office solution as you can test both in staging before going live.
At Brightpearl, we know that you’ll want to keep your migration as smooth and efficient as possible. The last thing you’ll want at any time – not least during your migration – is for your web agency, back office and website to work independently of each other and provide little support if something goes wrong.
That’s why we work directly with your web agency and offer you our own built-in Magento integration, which provides you with a few unique features, including:
- Inventory levels updated in a way that optimizes site performance
- Customizable field mapping to give you the data you need
- Control over how and when updates are sent to Magento to reserve site performance for customers
But once you have a great connection in place between your front-of-house Magento site and back office system, what happens next?
We’re confident that you’ll want to put in place process automation and decision making automation. In fact, we could even go as far as saying you need it. As one of our customers, Open 24 Seven once elegantly put it: “Automation is crucial if we’re going to remain competitive.”
These forms of automation can allow you to disrupt the hold that companies like Amazon have on the market, and help you keep up when it comes to next or same delivery, which is quickly becoming the norm. With automation in place, you can ensure orders are fulfilled accurately, and that goods are being sent from the right place and for the right price.
To learn more about how Brightpearl can help you to automate your Magento-powered business, take a look at our detailed Automation page, or get in touch with us for a more specific discussion about your particular business.
