Have been using BigCommerce for quite sometime for my online store. Now that they are increasing the price, I'm pondering about switching to another platform.
Wordpress with Woocommerce certainly did catch my attention. Wanted to find out if anybody had moved from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce successfully (or to any other platform for that matter) and if yes, are you missing anything as far as features or ease of use concerned.
Did the move affect sales/customer satisfaction? Also any comments on any potential problems highly appreciated too.
To answer your question in the subject: Yes, a migration should be possible using a tool like Shopping Cart Migration
To your second question: I have no experience with this tool or a shop to shop migration in general. Important points that come to my mind:
Replication of the design and functionality of the front end
Migration of user data
Migration of order data (connected to user data)
Migration of stored credit card information (in case of stored subscriptions)
Related
I'm migrating to an ecommerce platform that would help me sell my products online to a wider user base. I am told Shopify/Zepo is an online shop for small businesses and Magento/woocommerce are solutions. What exactly is the difference between a "shop" and "solution"? Or what if I build a site from scratch? Where do I start from?
Shopify/Zepo are SaaS ecommerce platforms which can handle milions of visits/transactions per day if your store is a real success.
Magento/woocommerce are 'own hosted' tools/platforms.
Both are ok to start with, but if you think you'll do good, be careful on the last ones. They might seem cheap at the beginning but they can eventually ruin your business.
When starting it's always wiser to start with a SaaS tool which has no upfront costs and allow you to download all your data (products, customers, orders) in case you want to move to another platform.
Starting with Magento or WooCommerce will force you to have a sys team or a web developer almost permanently doing server-packages updates and so, let alone security, performance and scalability issues.
I do not believe using an off-the-shelf SAAS alone will ever be enough for a successful ecommerce website.
If you want to have a successful ecommerce solution you will need at least a good web developer to keep your site up-to-date.
Moreover, there will be many opportunities such as integration with your back-end systems that an off-the-shelf SAAS might not be able to handle.
My advice is to find a good technical resource, even if it's just one web developer, and build your product together - invariably it's more about people than technology or platform.
A client asked us if it's possible to have the products on their website integrated with Sage Evolution so that when products are purchased online by users the stock values on Sage Evolution will be updated as well. The client would like this to be integrated with their existing WordPress site.
From what I've found so far, I don't think there's anything already available to use with WordPress except the SagePay through WooCommerce plugin. I'm not quite sure if this connects to a Sage client and updates the stock as well.
I found a Sage Evolution SDK that can be used but I doubt the client would buy with that kind of fees. There's also the SData api which I found here: Integrating with Sage Financial Software.
I'm not sure if you can use SData with Sage Evolution.
I would appreciate any help on this, thank in advance :)
As you've already noted, Sage Evolution has its own SDK and does not use the SData standard. Developers need to purchase a developer license and end-customers need to purchase a customer license.
I'd strongly recommend you don't go straight to the database as direct db writes could compromise transactional integrity and the Evolution database tends to change structurally quite frequently.
To use the SDK, you can't avoid the customer license fee but you can get a head start and avoid coding the integration by hand with Flowgear (www.flowgear.net). The Community plan is free and supports low transactional volumes. More about the connector at http://www.flowgear.net/pre-built/sage-evolution and https://developers.flowgear.net/kb/Node:Sage_Evolution
Disclosure: I work at Flowgear.
I have been planning a little side project of mine for a while now. Since the beginning I had planed on writing a CRUD application from scratch myself. Now after having a little more experience with web programming I think I would save myself a ton of time by using a CMS but being unfamiliar with these systems I do not know if I can do what I need to.
Users will create a profile.
Users will upload images.
Some users will be selling their products, others will be buying them. I will take a percentage. Think ebay without bidding.
Many javascript and php features such as image rotators and an app so users can crop their photos.
Will be integrating Facebook API.
Main reason I am considering a CMS is not to save time, but to make a safer website. I am not experienced with eCommerce and do not want to put my users at risk. Everything else mentioned I can and have done.
Use CMS like Drupal or just start from scratch?
Most of the CMS have the basic functionality you've mentioned in 1,2 and 5.
You'll have to write your own extensions for 3 and 4, or search for existing one that fits you.
Writing an extension for CMS will take less time than writing entire CMS from scratch.
If you want safe and stable code, then it's better to use existing CMS.
I agree with w3b4 that an open source CMS will save you time and give you major security and support advantages.
My experience of open source CMSs only extends to WordPress. I am sure you could make it do all the things you want with a bit of work, but my gut feel is that it might not be the best platform to start out with if you main requirement is buying and selling.
However before you strike it off your list, check out the wp-ecommerce plugin and its various add-ons. This product has developed a lot in recent years and might offer what you need out of the box.
I would appreciate any advice on this. I am not a developer. I am starting an online ebook business. Our backend data base runs on purely web based applications running on an SQL server 2008, .NET 4 / 64 bit environment. It contains all the stock information and pricing data. Due to the fact that we need to store 200,000 sku and rising all the stock information and pricing needs to be kept in the back end database.
Nopcommerce has been suggested as a good ecommerce database and cms system. Would it be suitable for this project? And does it have an established ability to pull data to the back end for viewing, browsing and also transfering data into the basket for customer purchases?
Thanks for your help.
As far as I know there is no out of the box support for second (backend) database. However, as you may already know, it is an open source solution and can easily be extended to support what you are asking for. You will need to hire someone who is nopCommerce savvy.
Also, nopCommerce has a support forum ... you might have better luck asking your question there as the project contributors often visit that section. Good luck!
I'm working at a company that uses Drupal 6 to host documentation for it's SAAS products. The documentation is organized in various books using Book.module.
We have a Production Drupal site with the documentation for the production SAAS product.
Secondly, we have a "Preview" site, for the upcoming version of our product - the documentation is slightly different than on the Production site.
Thirdly, we have a "Development" site, which contains the unstable version of our product documentation. The documentation here changes frequently
Documents are originally authored on Development, moved to Preview, and then finally to Production.
It's quite unwieldy to manually update each Drupal site as our product evolves. I've looked at Deploy.module, and although it looks promising, it has limitations wrt books (ie: it can't handle the book structure/menus). It also makes for a solution that is quite complex with lots or moving parts.
I'm hoping that I've been over-thinking everything and some Drupal rockstar out there can point out an obvious (or not-so-obvious) solution.
(An obvious non-drupal solution would probably just be store the documentation pages as html in version control and update each site with the appropriate revision. But with this I lose the ACL functionality that Drupal is so good at.)
Thoughts?
Cheers
I've had good luck with the Feeds module to get one site to consume a certain view from another site when I choose or periodically. It will take some configuration work to get going but it's more flexible than a turn-key solution and it's less fragile than any SQL dump -> import of the node revisions table.