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How to identify when you need to migrate to Shopify

Laura McLoughlin

June 24, 2020

When you first set up an online shop, you might not need the bells and whistles of the best platform. Your website is one component in your business plan, along with sourcing suppliers, considering delivery, and garnering the best testimonials. However, once you have gained traction and your store begins to grow, you may start to feel some pain points that force you to reconsider where you have situated your eCommerce store.

Here we identify these pain points and then explore why Shopify might be the right solution to these issues.

The cost of your site is rising

As you grow your business, you need more and more server space. You will want to add new products or services while maintaining the page load speeds that make your site useful for customers. Buying upgrades can be expensive, and you might get to a point where the costs outweigh the benefits of adding more lines to your site. You have hit a natural ceiling for your business. This is a pain point that can all too often stifle the excellent work done to get you to this point.

Shopify is a cloud-based end-to-end solution. This means that you are purchasing more than a template and a website name. The cloud-based storage allows you to upgrade your shop as it grows by moving through the subscription plans. You will also be able to expand your site and manage the file directory so that the performance is maintained. The intelligent backend dashboard makes it easy to monitor the effectivity of your website and then act accordingly.

It is the fact that the subscription price plan is transparent. To move up to the next level, you know exactly how much it will cost to upgrade your site. This makes the business of planning your growth straightforward.

You lack the agility to scale

The cost of growth is just one barrier to scaling your business. Having the time and expertise to grow your business is also a problem. You may have felt comfortable moving from a sole trader to a small and medium-sized enterprise. However, what if you have the skill to grow a more significant than company this? Will there be the tools available in your current platform to help you make the decisions needed?

The app store offered by Shopify offers many tools that will guide you to the next step in your business. Also, the Shopify community has a stellar reputation for helping each other, forming connections and offer solutions to common problems.

There is no ceiling to scalability in Shopify. You may think taking out the highest-level subscription, which supports enterprise-sized companies, will act as a pinnacle. However, one of the services offered by Shopify at this level is access to your dedicated Merchant Success Manager. You are basically given help by someone trained to maximise the opportunities provided by Shopify.

Your mobile is not as good as your website

Maintaining a single view of your business across different channels can be challenging. Your customers may come to your store on their phone, tablet or on their laptop. They must have a consistent experience, no matter how they access your products or services. You might feel it is time to develop an app for your store so that customers can use their mobiles with ease.

Rather than looking to develop a separate product, you can use the tools offered by Shopify, which support an integrated eCommerce experience.

The drag and drop builder on Shopify is highly effective. It allows any business person to take simple templates and customise these for different channels. You can maintain a similar, intuitive design across mobile, tablet to a laptop while making adaptations that make the experience much smoother for customers.

Managing security is becoming challenging

The compliance issues when running an eCommerce shop are challenging. You are responsible for the safety of the data provided by your customers. You also need to offer assurances to your clients that their payment details are secure with you. Any chance that you could be hacked or that data could leak to a third party, and you will struggle to continue to trade. Customer loyalty, so essential to the health of any business, cannot be won with a site that cannot promise high-level security. Shopify has worked hard to earn industry-leading security, with the Level 1 PCI certification. This will secure your cart and your website hosting.

Shopify also promises 99.8% uptime with unlimited bandwidth. What does this mean? Well, imagine if your dream comes true, and a million people all want your product or service at the same time. Your website is highly unlikely to crash.

You want to migrate, but what about SEO?

The final sign that it might be time to choose Spotify is if your SEO is successful and you don’t want to ruin anything by changing URLs. This sounds counter-intuitive. However, migrating to Shopify allows you to set up page redirects, so your old URLs will take your client to your new site. Also, Shopify has some smart tools that will improve your SEO. There are anti-duplication tools and high-performing keyword tools, which will help to boost your position with search engines.

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