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App Review: Klevu smart search

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Klevu is a sophisticated self-learning search technology app for Shopfiy stores. It provides a robust and effective search solution to replace the Shopify native search.

What does the Klevu app do?

Klevu search offers the most advanced search engine for Shopify. It features the following sophisticated technologies:

Natural Language Processing (NLP):
This enables computers to be taught to understand nuances of the human language. For example- “most expensive” are two words that when used together mean not just “expensive”, but THE most expensive product.

Natural Language Search: the search engine is programmed to understand a searcher’s intent and more complex, multi-part queries. This means that the search app can understand questions asked in a way you would ask them if you were talking to someone as opposed to keyword based search.

AI Powered Search: the app continuously learns from your users and your content, to power more domain-aware and intelligent search.

Klevu uses NLP and AI powered search really well. It produces fast, effective and accurate search results that enables you to guide your customer to the most relevant products.

Overall review

Klevu can quickly deal with complex products with many variants. It is a great choice for a mid- or high-level enterprise, offering a large number of different products. It comes at a price, but an advanced search app is essential for increased conversions and for an excellent user experience for your customer.

Some features really makes Klevu stand out. For example when you search, relevant synonyms are added in real time which helps your store understand your customers intent, and guides them to products.

There are also some other fantastic features in this app. You can for example display product promotions, trending products, popular searches and personalised search recommendations.

The instant search page is fully customisable and so is the search results page. The app also produces a report which provides you with important data about the performance of your search.

The customer services team responds really fast to queries which is essential when you run a large online store.

Who is it for?

Klevu search targets mid- to enterprise level e-commerce businesses worldwide.

Pricing:

Free: up to 330 records
Growth: $199/month, up to 5000 records and self learning search capabilities
Premium: $499/month, up to 20 000 records and natural language search
Premium+: $799/month up to 50 000 records and advanced natural language search

Free trial

Try out Klevu for 14 days for free here.

The post App Review: Klevu smart search appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.


App Review: Pathfinder

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Pathfinder is an email marketing app that takes care of a range of marketing tasks for your Shopify store. It handles the whole process of writing, creating and scheduling emails for campaigns that will increase purchases and achieve results.

Pathfinder – Email marketing done for you

Creating email campaigns can be fiddly and time consuming. To manage a successful sequence of marketing efforts and get result, you’ll also need some solid knowledge and a thoroughly organised send-out schedule to send the newsletter out in a timely manner and keep your customers engaged, bring them back to your store and create repeat purchases (without annoying them in the process). The Pathfinder app does all of these things for you and will save you a great amount of time and stress.

Pathfinder gives you the option to choose between the following tasks as soon as you start the process of creating a campaign:

  • Acquire new customers
  • Reduce abandoned checkouts
  • Upsell customers after a purchase
  • Create promotions
  • Convert window shoppers
  • Increase customer happiness and referrals
  • Recover lost customers

Pathfinder will then produce a campaign newsletter based on what you want to achieve, using content from your site to fit your brand. It basically writes it and designs it. The best thing is that it also uses AI and will learn, over time, to make increasingly effectively targeted campaigns for your store. All the content they add is based on research from other successful campaigns, as well as your customers and their behaviours.

Overall review

This app gives great insight in to how your campaigns work for your customers and the revenue the campaign alone actually adds to the store. It segments your customers and creates different campaigns to fit your customer’s interactions with your store. With time it will suggest improvements to make your campaigns more efficient. The self-learning process in this app really gives it an edge over its competitors.

The whole campaign creation is automated so you never have to spend time on entering texts or making design amends. The actual interaction with the campaign set-up process is done in a chat form in question and answer style (which will remember choices you have made). Although the options and requests are pre-set, it feels easy and somewhat personal – like you are chatting to a member of your team.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a comfort in knowing that you always have the ability to change the automated campaign Pathfinder has set-up for you and will always have to give the go-ahead on everything that is being sent out.

All in all, this app actually does what it claims. It fills the position of a marketing person in your team and takes care of  many marketing tasks essential to your store.

Pricing for app

This app is suitable for any sized team that wants to save time on email marketing.

The pricing increases based on the number of contacts.

Automate: $45/month
Pro: $145/month

Free trial

Pathfinder offers a 7-day trial. Interested? Please see here.

The post App Review: Pathfinder appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.

App Review: Personalized Recommendations

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The Personalized Recommendations app is a sophisticated app that provides recommendations for products in your store – just like its name suggests. It also comes with features such as Frequently Bought Together, Related Products, Upsell, Cross sell and Recently Viewed for Shopify Plus stores.

Features of the Personalized Recommendations app

When you notice that your customers leave your store without purchasing anything, you may want to take action. Start by introducing ways to entice them in to buying, by presenting other products that are personalised to them. This increases your chances of selling and will create more revenue for your business. Personalized Recommendations app offers several ways of presenting related and recommended products in different places of your store such as on your home page, product page, cart & checkout page. It makes these suggestions about the products your customers may be interested in based on their behaviours and purchase history.

The main features of this app are:

  • Personalized Recommendations – the app uses proprietary algorithms to show content which is personalised for your individual customers.
  • Frequently Bought Together (Upsell) – feature that presents products that other people have bought together with the product being viewed. It can also be configured manually.
  • You May Also Like (Cross Sell) – rules can be set to guide the user to specific related products.
  • Similar Products – displays similar products based on the pages your customer has already visited.
  • Recently Viewed – displays the products the customer has already shown interest in by showing them again.

There are also other great features to add to your store such as Bestsellers, Trending Products, Top Discounts and Recently Launched.

Overall review

This app offers all you need in terms of upsells and cross sells for your Shopify store. It’s a real advantage that all recommendations can be configured manually. The automated configurations are based on tags and type of products.

On your store’s website, the recommendation sections display as carousels or grids (all responsive, of course) and there is also a nice “add to cart” option from the widget. The design is pleasant to look at, clean and modern.

The app offers a dashboard with a widget section. Widgets are easy to set up and configure, and they all have amendable CSS. An excellent feature for the pro version is that the widgets automatically get styled to match the other recommendation sections in your existing theme.

This app is simple to install and use and the widgets are easy to integrate into your store. If you do encounter any issues, the customer service team is very helpful and quick to reply to queries. It is well-reviewed on the Shopify app store with 5/5 stars.

Pricing

There is a free plan for new stores, and moving to a paying plan is only required when a quote of 1000 widget serves is reached.

Basic Plan: $9.99/month

Free trial

Interested in this app? Try it out for free here.

The post App Review: Personalized Recommendations appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.

App Review: Rise.ai Gift Cards & Loyalty

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Rise.ai offers a fully customisable Gift Card feature and an automated Loyalty and Rewards  store credit solution for Shopify stores.

What does the Gift Cards and Loyalty app do?

This Gift Cards & Loyalty app helps to create customer engagement and provides an excellent platform for your store to interact with customers. It manages both gift cards for your store, and loyalty programs for your customers.

Gift cards

The ability to create a custom gift card is offered with all price plans on this app. This is a really useful feature to get more purchases on your store. People often shop to buy presents but have trouble choosing what to get , so instead of them abandoning your store, you can give them an option of a gift card.

The gift card feature is fully customisable and you can set both the look of your gift card with your own images, text etc as well as the price and expiry date. When the card is emailed to the receiver, it is sent as a well-designed, elegant looking card.

When the customer buys a gift card, a pop-up window will display. This is easy to navigate and offers all the functions you would expect, such as ‘choose a card’, ‘write a personal message’, ‘print’ etc. It works well and looks great on mobile devices too.

Loyalty and credit reward program

Customers earn points when they purchase products and can use these points towards future purchases.

For the customer, they’ll get a store credit showing in their account, which they can use with one simple click when they are in the process of checking out to purchase something new.

Credits can also be issued manually, if for any reason you want to gift points individually- for a birthday for example.

You can completely customize how, when, and why you reward your customers. It also has several other useful features, you can for example send reminders for unused credit, or deal with refunds in a simple and effective manner, by issuing a store credit.

To set up a loyalty program Rise.ai uses an interactive rules solution to create a rewards programs that will engage your customers and keep them loyal. You can change rules to suit your requirements when you set up your program. See below for how this looks in your Shopify admin section:

Who is it for?

This app makes it easy for customers to purchase and send gift cards. It also helps you set up and manage loyalty and rewards programs for your customers. It is intuitive to use and automates several tasks that would normally take a long time to manage.

Setting up a loyalty scheme is important for any business that cares about keeping their customers loyal and giving them an incentive to return. This app does just that, and comes well-recommended.

Price plans

Rise.ai offer several price plans. The Advanced Gift Card Program is available on all plans and the other features on higher plans. Make sure to check that what you require is available on the plan you choose.

Starter: $19.99/month – $0.2 per order above 100
Small Business: $59.99/month – $0.15 per order above 400
Pro: $199.99/month – $0.1 per order above 2,000
Premium: $599.99/month – $0.05 per order above 12,000

Free trial

Try out Rise.ai Gift Cards & Loyalty for 14 days for free here.

The post App Review: Rise.ai Gift Cards & Loyalty appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.

App Review: Rewind

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Rewind is the only full backup app for Shopify. It can back up the data in your shop and rewind to a previously saved backup when prompted.

What does the Rewind app do?

It’s important to know that Shopify only backs up its own data and does not store any backups of the data or products in your shop. Moreover, you do not have access to any of Shopify’s backups. This means that if disaster strikes, and for some reason your shop’s information is lost or compromised, you will not be able to turn to Shopify for help. If something is deleted on your store then it is permanently erased.

The Rewind app protects you from these kind of disasters. It backs up your Shopify store once a day and sends you a weekly summary email.

You do not need to contact Rewind to access older backups. You can access the data yourself using the app’s admin panel.

There are two ways you can access your backed up data with Rewind:

  1. Account rewind. This will rewind everything in your store to a given date and time. This backup is really only for those who want to restore a whole store or a whole section of it.
  2. Rewind vault. This can revert individual given items to a specific time and date. You might have entered information for one product type incorrectly, or you might want to retrieve a group of products that you have deleted. This is the function to use for that.

Rewind does not produce a database (.csv) file that you can download,  except in special circumstances- but it stores everything for you- encrypted, secure and GDPR Compliant.

Overall review

All Shopify store owners run the risk of a faulty app causing errors or in worst case scenario, deleting your products. Hours and hours of work can be lost in just a couple of seconds. Possible scenarios are that a developer makes a mistake, or one of your staff members deletes a group of products accidentally. We’ve seen this happen countless times- a quick mistake can take hours and hours to fix. These sorts of scenarios need not be a worry if you have the security of an automated regular store backup and the option to “undo” actions.

Doing csv file backups manually is difficult, takes time and needs to be scheduled, so this really is a simpler way of ensuring that your data is secured.

Keep in mind that this app can not back up data in 3rd party applications so if you have product data stored in one of these – the data will not be backed up.

Prices for app

There is a 7-day free trial offer to try Rewind and the monthly plans are all reasonably priced:
Basic: $3/month – Up to 20 orders/month
Growth: $9/month – Up to 200 orders/month
Pro: $39/month – Up to 600 orders/month
Plus/Enterprise: $99/month – Up to 2,000 orders/month – contact sales@rewind.io for 2,000+ orders

Try it out

If you are interested in trying the Rewind backup app, please see here.

The post App Review: Rewind appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.

App Review: Change Commerce

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Change Commerce is a donation app that lets your customers choose a charity/nonprofit organisation to donate to with each purchase.

How does the Change Commerce app work?

Change commerce gives your customers the option to select a charity/nonprofit to donate money to when they purchase something in your store. As a Shopify store you can select up to 6 different causes your customers can donate to. Customers can also search from a multitude of organisations if they want to donate to a specific cause or a local organisation. Donations can be made either as a flat rate or a percentage of a purchase.

Change commerce provides a guarantee that all of the money your customers donate will reach the chosen cause – they have teamed up with PayPal Giving Fund so customers can be sure that their donations reach the charities they have chosen. The charities can easily access their funds through PayPal.

Customers can also track donations and share their donation on social media after making a purchase which will increase awareness both of the cause and your brand.

The app offers several solutions to choose from to make the widgets fit nicely in to your Shopify theme.

Once set up you also get access to valuable data and information on the Average Order Value for donations made, conversion rates for donations and more.

When a customer returns an item bought in your shop, the donation is not made. It is also possible to integrate Yotpo Loyalty & rewards to enable customers to take out points as donations or reward a customer for donating.

Who is it for?

This app is for any company that wishes to give back to anything from their local community to worldwide causes. The pricing is reasonable for any sized company.

Overall review

Customers are more likely to feel good about making a purchase in your store if they are empowered to donate to a good cause. This will create customer loyalty with your store and customers are more likely to return. Customers will value greatly that your store has partnered nonprofit organisations and that your store has committed to giving back and benevolence.

Point of sale donations have become quite a common thing and this app provides an opportunity to donate not only when you check out ,but on the product and cart pages too.

The app is very quick and easy to integrate. All you need to do is to customise the style of your widget to fit your store branding and select the causes you want to give the customer the option to chose from.
If you run in to complications – not a problem, the customer service team is really friendly and efficient .

Pricing

Impact Starter: Pay as you grow
Impact Plus: $3,250/year
Impact Partner: $10,152/year

Try it out

If you are interested in trying out the Change Commerce app, please see here.

The post App Review: Change Commerce appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.

App Review: PreProduct

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The PreProduct app enables Shopify store owners to collect orders for future and upcoming products.

What does PreProduct do?

This app allows you to pre-sell your products before you have the stock, which is an excellent way of finding out in advance how high the demand of your product will be. Once a customer places an order, a shipping date will be specified, so they know when they can expect their order to be despatched.

Before the product is ready to ship, there is a feature in the app that allows you to send out update emails about the product and any possible changes to delivery dates. Once the product is available, the customer will be sent an email with the cart checkout to make the payment. These can simply be triggered from the admin of your store. There is no binding purchase of the pre-order until it reaches this stage of the process.

You can set early bird discount for your pre-order and reward customers for waiting on their desired product. Each customer will also receive a specific URL where they can manage their pre-orders.

The app is compatible with Shopify’s native order and checkout system and is easy to integrate.

The email campaigns that you send out to update your customers on their advance order, can be designed to fit your branding and text and images are easy to customise.

When you enter a product in your store for pre-ordering, the usual “Buy” button will be replaced by a “Pre-order” button and a short text where you can give some important information about delivery date etc. The button can easily be changed to fit the styling of your website.

Who is the PreProduct app for?

This app is particularly useful for businesses who produce their own products. It will give an idea of how many orders you will have for your new product and the popularity of it. It will change the way you deal with inventory and buying of your products and it will allow you to get a market indication of your next big ideal, to see if it’s worth pursuing.

Crowd funding is very popular these days and the PreProduct app also covers this area. This app offers a crowd funded pre-order function where you can specify how many orders will need to be made before you put the product on the market. The customer will then be made aware that the product will only go to production if that specific number of order have been met. This is a great way for a business to get funding for their product and to avoid losses if orders are not made.

In summary, the PreProduct app is a fantastic way to get some real figures from your target customers on the orders and popularity of a future or planned product before it is brought to the market.

Pricing

PreProduct offer a 14-day trial period and price plans as follows:

Starter: $15/month
Growth: $19/month
Plus: $59/month

Interested in trying PreProduct?

Try out PreProduct for 14 days for free here.

The post App Review: PreProduct appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.

Shopify’s Online Store Speed Report

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A 2019 analysis of over 5 million desktop and mobile sites reported that the average fully loaded page speed was 10.3 seconds for desktop and 27.3 seconds for mobile. Which is concerning when, on average, people will only wait around 3 seconds for a web page to load before moving on which reduces your conversions.

Google announced publicly in 2017 that it takes the speed of your website into account, (as well as how mobile-mobile friendly your site is etc.) in the ranking of your website.

Recently, for users wanting to improve page speed, Shopify launched an Online Store Speed Report. This shows they see the importance of Shopify page speed optimization to the online purchasing experience. There is now an easy way to get data on how well your store performs speed-wise with the help of Shopify’s online store Speed Report.

But can it help Shopify increase page speed? What does the Shopify Speed Report provide, and how can you use it?

What Is Shopify’s Online Store Speed Report?

Shopify’s speed report ranks your Shopify website speed relative to other similar Shopify stores and assigns it a performance score out of 100. The higher your number, the faster your site is, and the better browsing experience your customers will have. A low score means your website is slow and will provide customers with a poor user experience.

Pagespeed Score

Shopify uses the Google Chrome Lighthouse test to score the performance of your store’s home page and your highest-traffic product and collection pages over the last seven days. It then combines all the Lighthouse test pagespeed scores into a single, weighted average score.

High Score: This means your site is fast and customers will have a satisfactory experience browsing your store, even if they are on a slower connection or don’t have the latest mobile.

Low Score: Means your loading speed is slow and your store may not be accessible to some users (and your conversions will decrease.)

Note: As 60% of Shopify store sales are made from a mobile, the Google Lighthouse test is run on the mobile versions of the pages mentioned above.

The weightings are determined by several factors, including comparative traffic to similar pages on other Shopify stores. Your score is not negatively impacted if you don’t have one of these pages or have no views.

Pagespeed Ranking

Your ranking is a simple way to assess where you stand. It is indicated after your score by either:

Slower than similar stores – This is where you have to make improvements to your loading speed as your store may not be accessible to some customers.

screenshot of pagespeed on shopify which is slow

Faster than similar stores – Your store ranks well and customers will have a better experience shopping from your store as it’s faster than other similar stores.

Because it’s a relative measure, your score can change without you changing anything, as the speeds of other stores improve or decline, Or if the underlying reporting metrics or weightings change.

You can access your collated Speed Report through your Shopify Admin menu and view the particular page’s pagespeed score separately. Just click on See how your score is calculated and then select View Insights. You can interpret the metric with the help of this explanation of Lighthouse performance metrics.

Is Shopify’s Online Store Speed Report Useful? What Our Developers Think

All speed tests use their own variables, standards, and weightings. For example, the Google Lighthouse test weights performance indicators on how they are perceived by user experience, which may be different from the literal speed results. Where adjustments like this are not transparent, it can be tough to tell what changes to make to affect your pagespeed score.

Tests are also run in their own environments. You may experience this by clicking on View Insights, as described above. Because it runs the test on the Lighthouse environment instead of the Shopify environment, you may get a different pagespeed score.

Tom, developer at Liquify, finds there are limitations to the store speed report:

I’m actually not a huge fan of the Shopify online store speed report, it’s based on Google Lighthouse and image-heavy online shops will pretty much always get a bad score, simply because their main features rely on big sections full of photography which take longer to download on slower connections.

The speed report can help us developers spot obvious issues which can be easily fixed, such as render-blocking JS/CSS, but this can only be spotted when running a proper Google Lighthouse report outside of Shopify. The Shopify speed report would be a lot more useful if this information were displayed directly in the Shopify dashboard without having to switch tools.

Joe, developer at Liquify, also finds there are limitations to the store speed report:

I’m also not a fan tbh. It’s very limited and only serves as a high level view of what may be going on.  For a start it ignores amp pages which are blazing fast. You can have a score of 15 (bad) on the Shopify pagespeed score but if all your mobile customers are served amp pages (which we use a lot now for SEO) then you’ll actually be serving them all in under 0.5s which is pretty damn fast.

The app ecosystem and Shopify’s own code which hooks in via the header pretty much guarantees a poor pagespeed score.  It can usually be improved with the reduction of apps.

If you’re looking to improve site speed in Shopify, the Shopify Speed Report is not your only option. Pingdom, on the other hand, is a top-rated tool for speed testing and waterfall models.

The Pingdom App

Pingdom is a general web monitoring tool that allows you to monitor uptime and availability from various locations around the world as well as test transactions like your shopping experience, logins, cart checkout, and searches.

Its speed testing is one of its most popular features and the app allows you to test your website from several different geographical locations so that you can see the impact of network latency. This is particularly helpful for large, global eCommerce stores.

pingdom screenshot of pagespeed for amazonAs part of its speed report, Pingdom generates a waterfall chart of every request on your site. The requests are sorted in order of longest requests first, with colour-coded explanations for the different elements making up the time taken. You can get an immediate graphical explanation of issues and advice on how to correct for them.

How Can I Improve My Page Speed in Shopify?

Several factors impact your Shopify website speed, including apps, third-party libraries and services, analytic libraries, theme codes, and the number and size of images and videos. Even custom fonts can affect loading times.

But, in the experience of our Shopify developers, Shopify page speed optimization is best achieved by concentrating on the following three areas.

Fixing or adjusting these will be the most effective way to improve your customers’ experience and speed up your online store:

1. Apps

When you use an app, it adds code to your store, and each one increases your loading time. That’s why it’s important to delete unused features or apps you no longer need. Always weigh up the increased loading time against the advantage of the app when deciding what you want to use on your store. Auditing & cleaning up your apps is usually the least painful way to trim some time off the load speed.

2. Theme code
Some theme codes are messy and you may install a theme that comes with a lot of pages and features that you do not need. Changing the code of your chosen theme may make theme files heavier and increase page load.

If a custom theme is an option, we’d recommend this, as the theme is built from scratch and will only have the code needed for your store so will be more efficient. Our developers are experts in developing clean, structured and efficient custom themes for clients. Please contact us if you want to find out more.

3.Images/videos
These should always be optimised for the web; keep in mind that each image or video added increases loading time. Remember the more images and videos you have for each product, the longer the page will take to load. This goes for slideshows as well which you should limit to three images per page.

There are other factors to Shopify website speed, such as making sure your developers write efficient code in Liquid, and only add the essentials that you need, avoiding really heavy elements like pop-ups unless you actually need them.

Overall

Your pagespeed score in Shopify can only really be improved with the help of a developer who will need to do a full waterfall model to see where bottlenecks occur & where improvements can be made.

With under three seconds to make an impact with potential customers on your store, deciding what stays and what goes can be a bit of a balancing act. Speed testing tools can be invaluable in helping you identify the elements of your store that are slowing things down. Heavy graphics, images, and many apps can all affect Shopify website speed, so remember to only add what is necessary and to remove (with the help of a developer) each and every app you don’t absolutely need.

Ultimately what matters is the experience for your customers, and increasing your potential to make sales. Faster websites rank higher in Google and convert at a higher rate.

Need help?

A typical pagespeed audit & in depth report usually take 2-4 hours. Only then can steps be actioned to improve it.  The total amount of development required will depend on the complexity of the site and the codebase you have.

Contact our Shopify developers.

The post Shopify’s Online Store Speed Report appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.


How to Successfully Migrate from Magento to Shopify or Shopify Plus without Losing SEO Positioning

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At Liquify, our Shopify Experts have been managing migrations from Magento to Shopify for the past 4 years and our typical client is a multimillion £/$ brand looking for more stability in their software and hosting.

Magento used to be a popular choice for starting an eCommerce store, but we’ve seen how quickly businesses grow out of it and struggle with its many limitations. It’s a fairly complex platform with limited support and a lot of manual updates (which increases the risk of impacting your sales if something goes wrong) and no one with any business sense wants to use it anymore. Self hosting successful ecommerce stores needs a team in-house.  If you don’t have a development team in house you would be silly to use Magento.

But whatever the reason for moving to Shopify, you should ensure you are handling your Shopify to Magento migration correctly.

We’ve seen one business almost go bust after a mismanaged migration where their organic traffic tanked. Luckily, we helped them solve the SEO issues they created, but it was a costly and stressful 6 months. There are several steps that should be taken to ensure you are managing your migration to Shopify properly, and ideally, you’d be doing this with the help of a seasoned team of Shopify experts and Shopify Plus Experts.

But for those who don’t have the budget or just prefer to self-manage, our Shopify migration specialists have laid out a detailed description of the entire process and steps you should take when moving from Magento to Shopify.

Magento to Shopify Migration Checklist

Depending on the size of the store you’re looking at around 1-3 months for migration, with an additional month for monitoring SEO positioning.

  1. Understand the risks of a migration
  2. Create a development store
  3. Migrate your products and collections
  4. Dealing with Categories/Collections
  5. Ensure products and categories are all redirected correctly with 301 redirects
  6. Migrate your pages
  7. Ensure pages are all redirected correctly with 301 redirects
  8. Migrate your blog content
  9. Ensure blog posts are all redirected correctly with 301 redirects
  10. Spot test from Google Search Console
  11. Full URL test from XML sitemap or Search Console
  12. Create store look and feel
  13. Migrate your customers (at the very end)
  14. Going live and ensuring your old site is available on a subdomain
  15. Monitoring after a migration

1. Understand the risks of a migration

There are always inherent risks in a migration between any platform, and the main risk here is the loss of Google SEO position. Google search traffic is often a main asset for an established site which usually has anywhere from 30% – 70% of their customers coming from Google unpaid (organic) search.

shopify traffic report SEO When you don’t migrate from Magento to Shopify properly and you lose ranking, you’re essentially risking the loss of sales from unpaid search results (which has a greater ROI (return of investment) than other marketing efforts since it hasn’t cost you anything to gain the sale.)

Instead, you need to redirect all the traffic and potential customers to your new site, making the transition as seamless as possible, without taking a hit on your SEO or Google ranking.

Making sure you follow each step in our Magento to Shopify migration checklist is essential, but if you are unsure about what you are doing, we strongly advise you to contact us, so we can help you manage your migration correctly.

Note: It’s much more costly in time (and money) to fix a bad migration, and sometimes the damage is beyond repair. So ensure you pay attention and do this correctly.

Key points of SEO to remember:

  • Keep your content on the new Shopify website as close as possible to the old content on Magento.
  • Redirect everything with a 301 redirect
  • Test everything
  • Double check that everything is redirected
  • Triple check that everything is redirected

2. Create a development store and install required apps

When you’re ready to start with the migration, your first step is to create a development store. For this, we recommend that you sign up for a free 14-day Shopify trial.

When you finish setting everything up and you have created the development store, you will want to install the Excelify app. This will help you with some of the heavy lifting of a migration from Magento to Shopify.

excelify app shopify magento migration

We always use this app for Magento to Shopify product migration, as it allows us to export and import data between platforms much more easily.

3. Migrate your products and collections/categories

In this next step, we will use the app Excelify to export your products from Magento and import them to Shopify.
Here is a short guide on how on how it works to migrate products from Magento to Shopify:

  1. Log in to Magento and export products by using the standard Magento CSV export option in the admin panel under System → Import/Export → Export.
  2. Rename the file so that it contains words “Magento” and “Products.” For example: Magento_products_20201201_12345.csv
  3. Upload the file into the Excelify app. It should be recognised automatically based on the file name.
  4. Enter your Magento store main domain name; for example, https://mystorename.com. This will start the migration of images from Magento store to Shopify.
  5. Optional: Select Dry Run under Options in Excelify to test if everything works properly and make necessary changes if needed. Finish by pressing the Import button
  6. Download the generated Import Results file and check if everything looks okay. You will have 3 sheets in the file called Products, Smart Collections, and Redirects.
  7. When you have checked everything in the file and prepared it for import, upload it again to Excelify.
  8. All your Magento products should be in Shopify Smart Collections.

Note: Not all categories will be automatically transferred, and not all products will be created exactly as they are in Magento. A lot will depend on the complexity of the products, and you may need the help of a Shopify Developer. We recommend that you run a test import first with just a few products and make sure you keep regular backups of all your exported products!

4. Ensure products are all redirected correctly with 301 redirects

Excelify will, by default, add redirects for all products. This means that all old URLs will be redirected to new URLs. You should spot test these to ensure they are all done and that old URLs will map to the new ones.

Top Tip: Pay attention to product URLs that have special symbols in their names, as they sometimes don’t copy over correctly.

All URLs will need to be changed when you migrate products from Magento to Shopify. When you compare Shopify to Magento, you will notice that Shopify has a fixed URL structure that is different from Magento’s.  All old URL’s need redirecting to the new URL structure on Shopify.

5. Dealing with categories/collections and migration

Excelify will also create your collections in Shopify based on the categories you have in Magento. While this will help you immensely with the migration, keep in mind that the app will NOT do the following:

  • Redirect category URLs (on Magento) to new collection URL on Shopify
  • Migrate category text/images /meta title/meta descriptions.

You will need to do this manually and carefully. You can copy and paste content and add redirects manually within Shopify’s admin page or you can use a CSV export/import if there are hundreds of categories that need to be updated.

The Excelify app will create the category and ensure the right products display, but that is all it will do – the content and redirects will still need to be managed manually.

Pay special attention when redirecting categories, as those are often the highest-ranking pages for SEO!

6. Ensure products and categories are all redirected correctly with 301 redirects

When you are finished with all of the previous steps, we strongly advise that you do a spot test on your category URLs and product URLs. Make sure they work and that the users are redirected to the correct place on the new site.

Top Tip: Have a second person do the spot tests, we find it’s much easier to spot errors this way. We usually spot test from Google search console on high value pages.

7. Migrate your pages

Unfortunately, you cannot use Excelify for this step, so the pages will need to be created manually in Shopify and content copied over from Magento. When you create the pages in Shopify, copy the content over, including meta titles/meta descriptions, and all the pages will need to be redirected by using 301 redirects as well.

For example, if the page on Magento was on www.mystorename.com/contact you will need to add a redirect to www.mystorename.com/pages/contact, which is the new URL on Shopify.

Note: If you fail to add the redirects, you will lose any SEO value the pages had on the old site and customers may also follow links to them.

7. Ensure pages are all redirected correctly with 301 redirects

Again, always do a spot test after each step to ensure all the pages you moved and copied over are properly redirected to the new pages/path on Shopify before you move on. It sounds boring, but it’ll help you know exactly what has gone wrong if you confirm every step is working before you move on!

If you’re unsure how to properly redirect pages, drop us a message and ask for our professional Magento to Shopify migration service.  We aren’t cheap, but we are highly experienced in doing this. We have helped multiple websites with migrations including over 10 multi million $ sites and one listed company.  We know what we are doing.

8. Migrate your blog content

You can also migrate blog content with the help of the Excelify app by importing it from Magento (or this also works for WordPress if that’s where your blog is hosted) using a similar process as you did to migrate products from Magento to Shopify.

You will first need to export your blog content from Magento and manually format that file into CSV format so it can be imported into Excelify.

Note: For larger websites be aware that excel has a cell character limit of around 32,000 characters which may not contain a whole blog post and throw an error. You can find a workaround as well as detailed instructions if you get stuck in their documentation here:
https://excelify.io/documentation/blog-posts/

When you are done with the import/export, you will need to manually handle redirects for all
blog posts so that the old URLs map exactly to the new ones under Shopify’s URL structure.

Top Tip: Pay special attention to old blogs with lots of content. There is often a substantial amount of SEO value in old quality blog content, and you should make sure everything is redirected carefully.

9. Ensure blog posts are all redirected correctly with 301 redirects

Spot test your posts and blog content to ensure everything is redirected to the new path on Shopify. Look for any errors that indicate the process was not done properly and do these redirects again (then re-spot check!)

10. Spot test from Google Search Console

When you are done and you’ve checked that everything is working properly, you should complete a spot test from Google Search Console to double-check everything from a search engine standpoint.

To do this:

  • Pick the top 10 pages in terms of traffic
  • Copy the respective URL and paste each one onto the end of the myshopify domain.

You want to see the “user redirected” to the matching content on Shopify. If they haven’t been redirected, then you have done something wrong and you need to go back to see what the issues are step by step.

If you’re struggling to figure out what’s not working, get in touch and we can help you with moving from Magento to Shopify.

11. Full URL test from XML sitemap or Search Console

After a successful spot test from the previous step, you can move on to do a full test of all your URLs. We do this by one of the following processes:

  1. Download all Magento URLs from either Magento or Google Search Console
  2. Put the URLs into a Google Sheet
  3. Take the password off the Shopify store
  4. Create a new column for new Shopify URLs with the myshopify URL (you’ll need to use a concatenate function for this)

Once you have a Google Sheet with all URLs mapped to the myshopify domain, you can run a script to test the page status code. There are multiple scripts available to check status codes & we also have a bespoke one coded.

When you run a script, it will show status codes for pages on the temporary Shopify URL. If everything is done properly, they should all read “code 200.”

If you don’t get the code 200, then you have done something wrong and you have probably missed some content or redirects. Often, you’ll need a Shopify developer for this step.

12. Create store look and feel and setup in admin

Next, you should focus on the aesthetics of your store (the look and feel). Along with the design, ensure everything is working as expected on the front- and backend in terms of functionality as well as user experience.

Most people tend to hire a decent Shopify designer/developer for this step and a seasoned Shopify expert will be able to help guide you on what needs doing next, making the whole process much faster and easier. A complete checklist here would most likely take several hours to create and and depend on your specific set up, as each store has its own circumstances you need to take into consideration during development.

13. Migrate your customers and orders (at the very end)

When you reach this point, you should be pretty much done and almost ready to go live with your new Shopify store. All of your content should already be migrated and the backend set up.

Migrating your customers and orders is an optional step, but it can make things easier and more streamlined in the long-run if you do decide to do it, particularly if you have a lot of recurring customers.

If you do decide to go ahead with user and order migration, Excelify has excellent instructions on this here and here.

(You can also try and use the cart2cart Magento to Shopify migration service for this step, but we use and recommend Excelify.)

Note: Your customer passwords will not be migrated and customers will need to create a new password, so make sure you notify them. This step should be left for the very end, just before going live.

14. Going live and ensuring your old Magento site is available on a subdomain

Once you’re ready to go live, you want to ensure that your old admin is still accessible on a subdomain. Contact your Magento host for this step, as they should be able to do it for you. It’s very important that the whole Magento site has the no-index tag, as you absolutely want to avoid duplicate content issues.

There are two key factors for this step:

  • Keep the old website available for admin purposes and for any issues you may find around orders that were made during the migration process.
  • Changing your DNS to point to Shopify should be completed on the day of the transfer. Typically, you would first want to change DNS so the new site is live and then get the old store available on a subdomain after.

By approaching things this way, you should minimise downtime. Just make sure to check beforehand if your host is available to do this on the day of your change over to Shopify. Also, there will be a period where customers may see the old site or the new site. During this period, you may need to modify your host’s file locally to access the old site admin.

Note: Expect to have around 10 minutes downtime whilst SSL is issued. If you have a very busy store, you should aim to do this part of the process during a quiet time, when there is usually less traffic.

15. Monitoring after a migration

After you have completed your migration and your Shopify site is live, you want to do the following:

  1. Ensure everything is set up and running correctly.
  2. Make sure your old domain is on a subdomain and set as ‘no-index’.
  3. Re-submit sitemaps to Google.
  4. Monitor Google positions for 2 to 6 weeks.
  5. Google analytics should be monitored for 404 URLs to ensure no redirects were missed. Any 404 paths should be redirected to relevant content.
  6. After some time, the old subdomain can be wound down and archived.

Conclusion

Moving from Magento to Shopify isn’t a simple process and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Which is why the best option is to have this process managed by a seasoned Shopify Expert / Shopify Plus Expert.

By doing it yourself, you risk missing redirects, and losing valuable SEO and Google rankings, all of which you had to work hard to get. If you do decide to do the migration yourself, ensure you fully understand all these steps and don’t skip anything.

We have migrated dozens of stores here at Liquify and are proud to say nobody’s SEO has suffered.

So if you need help, drop us a line.

The post How to Successfully Migrate from Magento to Shopify or Shopify Plus without Losing SEO Positioning appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.

What Are the Top 10 Features of Shopify Plus?

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As the enterprise eCommerce platform, Shopify Plus is specifically targeted at large scale businesses with significant and growing profits. With a minimum monthly cost of $2,000, we’re often asked at Liquify if it’s worth it, and honestly, it’s vital for features like having multiple staff accounts and being able to handle over 10,000 transactions per minute.

Shopify Plus benefits from extra flexibility, deeper access to your store’s code, more support and other unique features. But, probably most notably, you get different charges on your transactions so if you sell in higher volumes you’ll save on fees.

Because of the extra features than the standard Shopify platform, Shopify Plus starts to make sense for stores when they reach an annual revenue of around $1-2million.

But if you are still unsure and want to know the advantages of Shopify Plus and what this plan offers, here is our selection of the top 10 unique features of Shopify Plus, which would bring great value to your store.

 

1. Shopify Plus Script Editor

With Shopify Plus you have the ability to customise almost everything. Shopify Plus Script Editor gives you greater control over discounts, taxes, and shipping methods, as well as offering users customisable customer fields and payment methods.

Shopify Plus Script Editor can also facilitate the creation of custom scripts for line items and payment, allowing users almost complete control over their checkout process. Making everything run smoother for customers based on their purchase selections and geographical location.  You can even do complex stacked discounts which would never be possible on regular Shopify stores.

2. Shopify Plus Multiple Stores – Make your store globally accessible

Every thriving business needs room to expand, and with Shopify Plus Multiple Stores, that’s easier than ever. The feature allows you to create and manage unlimited online stores, each able to operate in different currencies and languages, ensuring worldwide accessibility.

Your main store as well as a further 9 stores are included in the Shopify Plus Multiple Stores monthly fee, with each additional store costing an extra $250USD per month. Though the multi language capabilities have now been ported over to the standard Shopify platform as well, there are still plenty of Shopify Plus advantages to make the extra subscription worth it.

One of the most powerful Shopify Plus benefits is arguably the new dashboard design, allowing you to manage all of your stores, analytics, staff accounts, user permissions, and automation, all from one easy-to-use platform. Providing a thorough overview of all areas of a business, which makes Shopify Plus perfect for managing larger teams with a global reach.

 

3. Shopify Plus Pricing Model – Credit card fees

To begin with, the Shopify Plus Pricing Model carries with it a monthly charge of around $2,000, switching to 0.25% of monthly revenue for companies earning over $800,000 per month. However, it should be noted that Shopify Plus subscriptions can be tailor-made for users, so some terms may be negotiable and rates may change from country to country.

Compared to other Shopify plans, Shopify Plus has the lowest transaction fees which really add up if you have high volumes of sales when using external gateways. With other Shopify tiers charging between 2.4% and 2.9% (+ 30 cents per translation at every tier) the Shopify Plus Pricing Model is a lot more favourable for larger businesses using external gateways.

Shopify Plus Credit Card rates differ from country to country; however, all transactions carry an extra 0.15% fee if ‘Shopify Payments’ are not used. Shopify Payments is the in-house service, supported by Stripe, which removes the need for merchant accounts and payment gateways.

By way of example, with Shopify Payments, Shopify Plus credit card fees in the United States stand at 2.15% + $0.30 for domestic visa and MasterCard transactions, with an additional 1% for American Express.

To reiterate, rates will differ depending on the country, and Shopify Payments are not available in all locations, so some business will be stuck with that extra 0.15% until the service becomes available worldwide.  And like with all transactional fees – these rates are always negotiable.

 

4. Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel – Scale your business to wholesale

Selling products online isn’t just about marketing to the public. The wholesale market presents growing businesses with massive opportunities for lucrative B2B sales. Thankfully, with the Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel, scaling a business to wholesale is easier than ever.

With password-protected storefronts exclusively for wholesale buyers and products and the ability to automate the whole process from signup to checkout, the Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel will make sure that big-ticket sales run smoothly and efficiently.

Just as with the other Shopify Plus advantages on this list, you remain totally in control when using the Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel. From wholesale-specific pricing and discounts to advance order review controls, you’ll be able to create a wholesale environment tailor-made for customers and their industry, standing out from the crowd and resulting in less time spent fielding wholesale orders over the phone or via email.

shopify plus wholesale channel

 

With all that in mind, one of the best Shopify Plus benefits is the ability to manage all of a business’s storefronts, both B2B and B2C, in one place. No fuss, no hassle, just sales.

 

5. Shopify Plus Reporting/Analytics

Information is key to running any successful online business, which is why Shopify Plus Reporting / Analytics is one of the most valuable Shopify Plus advantages on this list. The extensive information offered allows you to make informed business decisions as to when and where to expand and how to plan the future of the company.

Shopify Plus Reporting / Analytics offers live viewing and product analytics, as well as unlimited reports on inventory, behaviour, marketing, sales, profit, and customers, among other things. To top it off, Shopify Plus customers also have access to unlimited custom reports, so you get precisely the information you want, whenever you want it.

 

6. Shopify Plus Flow – eCommerce automation saves time

Shopify Plus Flow allows you to create unique custom experiences for customers without ever having to write a single line of code. Customer service, design and development requests, merchandising, communications, marketing and advertising can all be tailored to specific industries and customers, ensuring the very best user experience possible.

By storing triggers, conditions and actions, Shopify Plus Flow allows you to start and stop promotions, control email segmentation, and deliver content to customers on a case-by-case basis. Through the tracking of individual customer purchases, Shopify Plus Flow can ensure that automated promotions and content are relevant and targeted, every single time.

 

7. Shopify Plus Partners – Certified partners to meet your requests

Shopify Plus Partners are a business owner’s dream. A team of vetted 3rd party experts are on hand to help you get the most out of your Shopify Plus benefits, offering highly specialised solutions for high-growth businesses.

Shopify Plus Partners are a group of hand-selected companies that are certified by Shopify as experts in their fields, guaranteeing the very best service. Partners are available to assist with pretty much everything a growing business could need, including web design, product development, wholesale, consulting, taxes, and shipping solutions. If a business has a problem, a Shopify Plus Partner will have a solution.  Note that due to demand the vast majority of Shopify Plus partners are booked up and most are not taking on new clients.

8. Shopify Plus Exclusive Apps

Standard plans on Shopify grant users access to a wide range of useful applications, designed to make it easier than ever before to run an eCommerce business. With a Shopify Plus subscription, however, you’ll gain access to an even more extensive range of digital tools, including specific Shopify Plus Exclusive Apps.

These apps represent a whole host of Shopify Plus advantages, and are certified third-party apps that work seamlessly with Shopify Plus. In fact, some of the Shopify Plus Exclusive Apps have already been mentioned in this article, including the Shopify Plus Script Editor, Shopify Plus Flow, and Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel.  Some apps will have a version for Shopify Plus as the features are different on Plus and the API rate lower.

 

9. Shopify Plus Help & Support and Shopify Plus Academy

Shopify Plus Help & Support and Shopify Plus Academy offers users dedicated support, tailored to individual needs for businesses and their owners. The service includes a dedicated launch manager to support you during the setup and migration process.

Shopify Plus Help & Support and Shopify Plus Academy also helps with third-party integrations in order to make the inclusion of partners as easy and smooth as possible, as well as providing a merchant support manager to generally assist with ensuring site growth and success.

shopify plus accadamy

10. Shopify Avalara/Avatax – Business tax compliance

Shopify Avalara/Avatax is a Shopify Plus benefit designed to assist with tax calculation and compliance. The service offers real-time tax calculation and automatic returns filing, making compliance as easy as possible. The software will even tell users how much tax to charge on each individual invoice, taking control of tax at every level of the eCommerce business.
Shopify Alvalara/Avatax is especially useful in the United States, where companies are required to file taxes in every state in which they have made sales, a chore that is now automated with Avalara.
Note: Avalara / Avatax subscriptions are charged in addition to the usual Shopify Plus monthly cost, with tax automation coming in at an extra $250USD per month.

 

Summary

Shopify Plus offers businesses and users all of the flexibility they need to grow and expand beyond the realms of what would be possible with a normal Shopify plan. Though the monthly subscription of $2,000 may be daunting, the features boasted by Shopify Plus, if utilised effectively, can help any eCommerce store to boost their earnings and break new markets. For the high-flying businessperson who wants maximum customisability and control over their online store, Shopify Plus has everything you need.

At Liquify, we are world-leading Shopify Plus experts who can help you manage design, customisations, and migrations from different e-commerce platforms, integrations, and the creation of apps for Shopify Plus. Please contact us if you are considering moving your store to Shopify Plus.  We will help manage your SEO correctly & get you get setup in the most streamlined and sensible way.

The post What Are the Top 10 Features of Shopify Plus? appeared first on Liquify Shopify Agency.





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