Our experience migrating E-commerce platforms (OpenCart to Shopify)

 

When we first started out our e-commerce site, we were originally using OpenCart and while it had its challenges, its biggest pro was that it was free. Almost 7 years into business, we started running into some issues, and it was getting pretty frustrating. Our hosting was unreliable, our site went down often and was vulnerable to hacking. We wasted far too many hours on having to test our site every week to make sure we weren’t being hacked and we changed passwords so often we couldn’t even keep track.

 

Our SEO was a mess. To be fair, if I was Google, I wouldn’t have ranked our website very high either. Our website was sluggish and not mobile-friendly. All these issues were severely cutting into our profitability. We couldn’t upgrade to newer versions of OpenCart and we were stuck using antiquated software.

 

We have nothing against OpenCart itself. It enabled us to get started which we are grateful for, and there was a lot of flexibility with what we could do with the software. Starting out, it was the right option for us. Our time with it was good, but we knew we had to move on.

 

Recently, we switched to Shopify and we are loving it. The biggest thing is that it is far more reliable, and that’s what we needed. No more fighting our hosting provider because our website was down or loaded extremely slowly. And being a Canadian company, we know that we can get support easily.

 

Instead of hiring a migration service, we decided to start from scratch. This allowed us to filter out products that were no longer relevant and redesign it for the modern age. The Shopify trial allowed us to develop the website until we were ready for launch and we were surprised at how quickly we could get everything running.

 

Switching to Shopify also helped us with SEO as everything was more mobile-friendlier, our page load times went down, and it has built in SEO features.

 

Especially as a company that’s been in business for a while, Shopify is great. The fees are more than fair to have a website that just works, and we know that we have the orders to help pay for the fees.

 

*this post is not sponsored by Shopify at all, this is an opinion piece