Transitioning to Shopify for E-commerce Businesses

With Shopify’s growing popularity, many established e-commerce businesses are making the switch. However, this may not be a straightforward “Do It Yourself” project.

Before you make the big jump, here are some things to consider if you already have a website.

Shopify’s Features

Shopify simplifies the transition by providing options to manage Orders, Products, Collections, Customers, Content, Finances, Blogs, Pages and Navigation.

For example, if you are running a Magento e-commerce page, there are apps that can facilitate the move.

Matrixify: A Shopify Must

Matrixify is an affordable Shopify app that enables bulk download and upload of customer information, products, orders, blogs, pages and more. If you’re a small e-commerce business with fewer than 5,000 products and a few hundred pages or blogs, Matrixify can help you integrate content between platforms like Magento and Shopify.

Issues to Consider

Yes, of course, challenges may arise. I worked with a business that transitioned to Shopify. While their team excelled in business operations and customer service, they had some gaps when it came to web and SEO expertise—something all too common to small e-commerce businesses. So, they hired developers. The obvious and correct move! Unfortunately, the development team cut some corners, which led to some costly setbacks. After transferring their websites to Shopify, their search rankings suffered, SEO and user acquisition. 

This is a great reminder: Discuss expectations with your developers prior to finalizing a project. Be clear what successful deliverables look like. This way the developers aren’t frustrated with reoccurring requests that are beyond the initial Scope of Work.

URL Structure & SEO

If your page is tshirts.com, you likely have a structured URL system (e.g., tshirts.com/long-tshirts). Over time, these URLs gain backlinks, user traffic and search engine crawling history—valuable for maintaining SEO. You can obtain information about backlinks from Bing’s Webmaster Tools for free.

But Shopify has a different URL structure that organizes content by collections, products, pages and blogs, making it difficult to retain the same paths. This can become a big headache if your developers do not adequately prepare.

Redirects

You can resolve issues with pages moving to a different link via redirects. For example, tshirts.com/long-tshirts can be redirected to tshirts.com/collections/long-tshirts. Shopify uses Liquid to manage URLs, but search engines treat redirects differently, and some SEO value may be lost. Ensure your redirects are set up properly to avoid loss of traffic (see Google’s guidelines on 301 redirects). Nevertheless, Shopify makes it easy to set-up redirects shopify one-by-one or via a massive import/export using a csv file.

Broken Links and Internal Issues

One mistake I encountered and that is all too common during a transition: failing to set up all necessary redirects. Some redirects may work and others may not, and a few may be missed. Without proper redirects, old page rankings can be lost. Broken links can also generate 404 errors, damaging user experience and SEO. Thus, ensuring all internal (and external) links are updated during the transition to avoid these issues (check out this article for more on Shopify’s URL structure).

Updating Product Links

If internal links aren’t updated—e.g., if tshirts.com/long-tshirts now points to tshirts.com/collections/long-tshirts without a redirect—you’ll get ‘page not found’ errors. Configuring a file for redirects can simplify the process, but it’s crucial that your development team reviews their work to ensure nothing is missed. Random checks can help catch any errors that slipped through.

Monitoring Analytics Post-Transition

During the transition, ensure you monitor your analytics closely. Shopify may use a different structure for Google Analytics or Bing Analytics tracking codes, leading to inconsistencies in tracking user visitors/sessions (see Shopify’s description of data discrepancies). If the tracking code is placed differently, delays from third-party apps could impact session data. While Shopify and Google Analytics may vary slightly, Google Search Console should still show consistent data.
There are free resources from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools that help you get a simple overview of issues related to your webpage. This includes SEO concerns, Redirects, 404 errors, canonical URL issues, among other things. As long as you bing/google has your XML file, it can continuously check pages and your content.

Bing Webmaster: Site Scan for SEO Errors

Bing provides an easy tool to submit your sitemap links. For example, you can view NBC’s sitemap with its 18,000+ pages. Most webpages have these, unless they hidden or managed via an alternate platform. Nevertheless, by submitting this to Bing’s site scan tool, you can get some basic and helpful information (for up to 10,000 pages for specified time period).

Via Site Scan, you can monitor a category of issues for each batch of pages. Some are easier fixes (e.g., H1 Tag missing, or Title Too Long) but others are harder (HTML size is too long).

Google Search Console: Page Indexing Issues

Whereas Bing provides a free and simple check of some key information helpful for maintaining SEO, Google Search Console is helpful for Page Indexing & Performance Issues.

Via the Page Indexing tab, you will get a ton (!!) of information about redirect issues, problems with 404 errors, canonical tag issues and other details. Some listed items may be more problematic than others. For example, if you properly setup redirect links for a 10,000+ products/pages, you will correctly observed an increase in the reported redirects. However, you should not expect a significant rise in 404 errors during a transition.

Google Analytics: User Acquisition Issues

While Google Search Console provides a constant flow of information about your Search Traffic. So it will not capture traffic related to direct visitors or visitors due to external sources. This is where Google Analytics comes in handy. By adding the Google Analytics Tag onto your former websites and Shopify, you can track all user acquisitions to your webpage. This is a helpful check of users pre- and post-transition. You may find a) you did not setup your analytics properly (getting no data) or b) there is a significant drop in users. Having this information in place during the transition provides extremely valuable data to quickly flag issues.

Conclusion

These are just a few key points to consider when transitioning from Magento to Shopify. Planning ahead and communicating clearly with developers is essential. If you outsource the work, set up a pay structure that allows time to confirm the results before completing the project. If a drastic drop in traffic or sales occurs, ensure your developers have a backup to revert to the previous version while issues are resolved.