On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Kurt Elster. Kurt is a long time Shopify agency partner but is probably best known for hosting The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. We talk about mapping out key considerations when migrating, telltale signs that it’s time to move to Shopify, embracing change to get better results, and so much more!
One of the most highly regarded independent consultants in his industry, Kurt Elster is a Senior Ecommerce Consultant who helps Shopify merchants like Jay Leno’s Garage uncover hidden profits in their websites through his ecommerce agency Ethercycle.
With two million downloads, Kurt is best known for hosting The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Kurt Elster
You don't want to be limited in what you can do and what you can offer. And Shopify the platform and Shopify the ecosystem, I think those two combine, you should be able to achieve 99.9% of things you want... of promos, campaigns and things you want to do with your store, if you switch to Shopify.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I'm welcoming back to the show, the first guest I ever had on the show actually, Kurt Elster.
Welcome back.
Kurt Elster
I was the first guest?
Chase Clymer
You were. You were. 5 years ago. And I'm assuming this will come out almost within 2 weeks of the 5-year anniversary of our show.
Kurt Elster
That's pretty cool.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Yeah. So for those that don't know, I've known Kurt for quite a long time.
He's been a great friend and mentor to our agency. And we both have been doing a podcast for basically ever.
And we had the shortest pre-interview ever. I just said, are we ready to go like 14 seconds after he popped onto the screen? And we haven't really figured it out yet.
But we do know, we're gonna dive in and chat about migrating to Shopify. So before we go into that, is there anything on your mind before we get into the meat and potatoes of the episode?
Kurt Elster
No, no. Let's do it.
Chase Clymer
Alrighty. This is going to come out at the beginning of the year. Hopefully, everyone listening just had a great Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and they're sitting on a beaucoup monies and they want to invest it the right way.
But they made the wrong choice way back when building their business on something that wasn't Shopify.
So what should their first steps be? What challenges should they be identifying within their business that migrating might make sense?
Kurt Elster
Well, I think number one is, what platform are you on now? And how hard is it to migrate? And I think it comes down to how close to Shopify in practice, in structure, really, is your current platform?
And I think the easiest one, if you are on an existing commerce platform, you're on BigCommerce, you're on Magento, those will migrate very easily to Shopify, within reason.
Moving the data across, really not that tough anymore. There are tools, guides, and plenty of experienced folks, spreadsheet jockeys like myself that can do it.
So number one is figure out, why do you want to? Why change platforms?
It's going to be a little stressful. It's gonna cost money, and it's certainly gonna take some time and involve changing and getting used to some things.
So I think figuring out, ‘Okay, what are we looking for here? Why do we want to change?’ And if it's just a shiny toy, maybe don't.
If you're like, ‘These other businesses are on that, and that seems cool, I wanna use that too.’
But if you're like, hey, we've got some real problems here, and we know switching can solve them, then that's why I do it. That's typically what happens.
It's either like, there are features we need to solve problems we have on Shopify, or here's where just like the issues we're running into in our existing site are mounting up. Let's not throw good money after bad.
Chase Clymer
So what I'm hearing here, Kurt, is if I'm a merchant, and I have just believed my store could be doing better, switching to Shopify and changing nothing about my business isn't going to magically fix things?
Kurt Elster
So what's funny is, it could. Having said all that, it actually could, because you get the network effects of Shop Pay. It just makes it that much easier for people to purchase.
You get these really cool, they call them dynamic checkout buttons. You get those express Buy Now buttons like, ‘I'm on an iPhone and I could just click Buy Now with Apple Pay.’ And that's a feature built into Shopify.
The addition of those stuff, Shop Pay, Shopify or Shop Pay installments, dynamic checkout buttons, one page checkout, all that stuff around making it really easy for a customer to give you money, potentially that does actually help your business just by switching.
And then I think the act of migrating or switching forces you to reconsider, to re-review, to look at things again with a critical eye and maybe revisit it.
And in that process certainly since you set up your site, initially, there's probably things you've learned since then but have grown accustomed to or blind to as issues on your site.
So maybe through that process, your site ends up better - making more money. But I think really, ideally, you should have goals in mind, specific things you're looking to use, as opposed to just… let's switch because it's better. What you could do... Yeah.
Chase Clymer
I know I asked the question knowing full well that you have experienced the same conversation that I have as a consultant, where people can't give you real reasons of why they want to switch and they just think it's a good idea.
And without understanding how the switch and underlying either processes or how your website navigation flows, the UX decisions... Without talking about that stuff, people that just want to copy and paste their design that they believe works onto a backend that is different.
It's a complex, expensive and not fruitful endeavor.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Even if it's like, okay, we know our site works. Then take the learnings and go, alright, let's reuse this content. Let's reuse these layouts. But then you're still going to end up rebuilding it in the new site however that platform wants you to do it.
And so I would look at that as the opportunity rather than like it has to be one to one the same.
Because your customer is not looking for perfect. And as long as it looks vaguely similar, often they won't even notice the difference. No one is as invested in it as you, the owner, are.
Chase Clymer
You just threw me for a loop here because I have some notes I made.
But you've mentioned this a few times on the internet and now you're saying it here. This idea of your customers aren't looking for perfect.
Explain what you mean there.
Kurt Elster
As a brand owner, as a business owner, I am emotionally invested in the site.
If the site looks in some way crappy, if there's a thing about it that bothers me, I take that personally.
But the customer really doesn't. They have a goal and self-interest. They're like, I just want to get in here, do some research, find the thing I'm looking for. I want my new pair of jeans.
I know what size I want. I don't want to pay a ton. I just want to get in and get it out.
The padding is five pixels wrong on this element, and this vertical spacing isn't quite right here. It should be three pixels, and our border radius on this button is one pixel different from this.
There is no customer on the planet who notices those issues, right? They're not going over it with a fine-tooth comb. They care about the process. Can I get in, get out, and just make my purchase?
Versus if you went to school for graphic design, these things might seem like glaring issues to you. But to the customer, they're not. They're really not.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And to the point that they are affecting your conversion rate or your sales? Absolutely not.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. The stuff that people think affects conversions versus what actually does. Not a ton of overlap there.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Kurt Elster
You'll land on sites where it's got 15 pop-ups and half of them cover important elements like a Proceed to Checkout button, right? And that they're fine with. No problem there because they haven't looked at the site in a while.
But smaller minor issues with layout. It's like, oh, that's got to be perfect.
But what about the spin to win and punch the monkey banner that's blocking the Add to Cart button?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, you should probably get rid of those things.
At the beginning, you said you need to identify how close your current website is to Shopify and that's going to impact the lift of doing this migration. And you said the closer ones, manipulating the data is easy and then you walked it back a little bit.
I'm going to challenge you there by using the phrase ‘easy’. I would say it's doable. And people have done it before.
But I wouldn't ever say it's easy.
Kurt Elster
You're right. It's not easy. It's plausible. And there's always some weirdness, some small issues.
The thing I'll say is always hard. Migrating subscriptions. That's not easy. We achieved that successfully recently.
But in the past, I would just flat out refuse. We can't migrate subscriptions.
Now we've got the tools for it. Now that works.
But as far as migrating the data over, it's largely, ‘Hey, can we reassign these fields?’
It's like a customer's first name is probably a field in every Ecommerce platform. And so mapping that and getting that across, that's fine. No problem.
But then say something like in BigCommerce where and when it stores the addresses, it doesn't distinguish between shipping and billing.
And so in Shopify then, well, which one becomes the default for this customer when you import that? Like there's those idiosyncrasies that you have to worry about.
Plus the SEO concerns of setting up URL redirects and just making sure the content matches as closely as possible. It's a lot of moving data around.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
I think that what frustrates merchants that have never done this before is they just think it's an import-export problem and there's no manipulation in the middle. And that's where we have to educate them.
Kurt Elster
And especially Shopify, where the product spreadsheet is arranged unusually in that if you have multiple images, you have multiple product media, those end up being separate line items in a spreadsheet where others will just say, ‘All right, all the images go in one cell that's separated by comma.’
And so I gotta figure out how to make that work. And in my case, the answer is we wrote Python scripts that do a lot of that work for us.
But moving customers' orders, those entities, that's not bad. You can never move passwords. You just have to invite the customers to recreate their passwords.
But that's an opportunity to reach out to them and be like, ‘Hey, we got a new site. Come check it out when you reset your password.’
Chase Clymer
Exactly.
Kurt Elster
Moving product, the on-site content, okay, that's where SEO becomes a concern. And I think that's often people's concern.
And that's where the content itself, SEO, title, meta description, H1, and the content, that should match as closely as possible, if not identically. And you set up a URL redirect, and then you're probably fine on SEO.
But just importing the data fine, setting up the redirect, okay, but getting all of those pieces lined up, including that H1, that's where the devil's in the details and it might be harder than you might think.
And how many entities are there? Are we doing this for 20 pages? Are we doing this for 2000 pages?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, exactly.
Within our process, there's usually like, we're just gonna do one clean up and import just to see how close we got it.
And then the next one actually is way closer. The first one is always for... We're just gonna see what happens.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Yeah. Let's see what it does. Let's see how it breaks. Try it and see how it breaks. Yeah. I think it's a good approach.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. All right. So we walk through the data element of migrating.
What about the design stuff? We talked a little bit about it before. But let's talk about the design impacts of migrating and what are my options here as a merchant?
Kurt Elster
Fundamentally, you are starting a new store. The data, you have all the content prepared that you want to put into it. And you can migrate the data on the back end across.
But as far as the look of it, treat it as starting over. I wouldn't attempt to recreate what you had in the past. Use that to inform the new design on what works and then combine that with, hopefully you have a brand style guide and have a strong idea working with someone who does on this is what best practice within this platform is.
And ideally, when you marry those three things together, you're gonna come out with something that is better than what you had before.
And the chances are, if you're considering a migration like this, you're probably… your current site is probably a few years old.
And so just in moving and starting over, it's a great opportunity.
But I wouldn't... I think the design becomes potentially easier when it's as part of a migration project. Because you know what the content is. And you have the experience to inform you on what potentially does and doesn't work.
And so from there, now, work within that sandbox, but do whatever you want with the design.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think that migrations are like the number one thing that also will come with a redesign. It's very rare that someone won't do a redesign with migration.
It's like, why would you want to inherit the choices that were limiting the old website?
Kurt Elster
Exactly.
Chase Clymer
So, with the design, you can do whatever you want there.
What about the functionality? How should I consider that within my migration?
My old website used to work this way. Will the Shopify website do the same thing?
Kurt Elster
This is a good question. And it does inform how difficult or how realistic a migration might be.
So the first thing I wanna know is what is the size, what's the size of this lift? How hard will this be? And that's really gonna be like data migration.
And so once I know all those pieces and I have faith that I can get them into a spreadsheet, if I can get that far, okay, I can get them into Shopify.
Then the other part of it, features and functionality, and that's mostly front end stuff. So does the site offer subscriptions? Does it offer cross-sells? I wanna map and figure out all of the features and functionality - special features and functionality.
Obviously add to cart, I expect that. That the old site has, are there any of those we don't want, we wanna get rid of? Are there new ones we want or need?
And often there are, often that's like why they're leaving the previous platform is to go to Shopify because it has X feature that they need.
And so if you can figure out that list and then map that to like, okay, Shopify has this feature natively. By this year, that's often the case. It's just like, well, it works like that out of the box.
But if not, then, all right, what's the best solution on Shopify? Find an app for it, or, hey, can we modify it, can we tweak this approach a little bit, achieve the same thing in a slightly different way Shopify's existing feature set.
But yeah, mapping, figuring out first, inventorying what those features and functionality are where you start. And then that's where you need someone who's very familiar with the platform like yourself to say, okay, this is what's just going to work so don't worry about it.
Versus like, okay, this is something we got to find an app for.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Something I always do is I go - this is even before we're talking numbers - it's like, ‘I just want to let you know, the new site is going to work completely different than the old site, but everything's gonna make sense to your customer. As long as you're okay with that, let's explore this more.’
But there are oftentimes merchants that have blinders on to a new system or process because the old one works. And it's like, ‘Well, that's not how Shopify works.’
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
And I think this is true of probably a lot of things in life. Just because it worked that way in the past doesn't mean it has to work that way in the future to have the same end result.
I think sometimes people get too caught up in what the process has to be as opposed to what the outcome is.
And there are some, certainly there's some fear around learning new tools - that's some cost fallacy. I already put all the time and money into this old system. So naturally, I should keep using it and things should keep working that way.
And it just isn't the case.
The other thing we find, there's some fear potentially from customer service reps, depending on how large the business is.
And so what I'll do is I'll say, hey, we'll run... I'll do a workshop. We'll just get everyone who has to work with the Ecommerce software. Let's get them on a Zoom call. And I'll do a screen share.
I'll just walk you through a few standard tasks. Here's how you'd refund a customer. Here's how you'd look up an order for a customer, that kind of thing.
And then I say, I know no one wants to learn new software, but I promise, I know what you were using before, this will be easier and you'll be relieved by the end of this.
And that's been the case every time. No one has ever been like, ‘Oh man, Shopify seems way harder.’
Never. It doesn't happen.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Do you send over a lot of loom recordings of how to do things?
Kurt Elster
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We do like... Once the site goes live, we'll do 30-day maintenance and support because I don't want people to be fearful about launching a website. Like, ‘Oh, we got to find every little thing.’
Now launch it and you'll find everything that's wrong with it in 5 days.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, it'll become very apparent.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it becomes obvious. Then we fix that stuff.
But a lot of the warranty stuff is more... In practice, it ends up being around, well, how do I do X? Show me.
Chase Clymer
I didn't think about this edge case that comes up once a month on the 5th always.
Kurt Elster
And so you go, all right, here's the solution. Or here's like 3 potential solutions. Here's the one I'd go with. And here's a screencast and how you handle that.
And those screencast tutorials are fabulous. Because someone could just look right over your shoulder and watch you do it.
Chase Clymer
I don't know how we were consultants and building websites before things like Loom existed. We give them just a library of Zoom videos, one of the things all said and done because we collect them all into a folder for them. We're like, ‘Hey, just here you go. Also use these things before you ask these questions again.’
Kurt Elster
Oh, that's clever. Yeah. As you make them, drop them into a Google Drive and share that. That's cool.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, it helps out a lot.
We were talking a bit about the fears of migrating. This has come up a few times for me, and I wonder if it's come up for you.
How do we ensure that, with data security and stuff like that, that nothing's gonna get stolen along the way or data integrity?
These are questions that I know I've had with merchants in the past when discussing migrating.
Kurt Elster
So there has never been a migration where we have moved passwords. And there's never been a migration where we have moved credit cards.
Chase Clymer
I don't think you can.
Kurt Elster
Exactly.
Chase Clymer
Maybe you can if you have a weird custom legacy software that was a homegrown build, and it's not secure, maybe those things are in plain text.
But all those things are hashed behind algorithms that I can't figure out.
Kurt Elster
Exactly. But not everybody is aware of this.
If this system is working correctly, no one should be able to get passwords and credit cards out. They just shouldn't.
That dangerous personally identifiable information that we don't want leaked, well, we can't get it out to begin with. So it doesn't become a fear there.
Analytics themselves do not migrate. But when I put all that order data into Shopify, then Shopify is going to generate the analytics again for me. So I don't have to worry about that leaking.
Really it's the fear of…here's a customer list, this big email list. That's the risk of the thing that could potentially leak.
I don't know why someone would want to do that and just jeopardize their career and freedom. But I think that's the only potential for leak, realistically, that customer info leaking.
But I mean, in our case, we don't store the data any longer than we have to. And then everything gets deleted.
Once we know it's like, alright, it still lives in the old store. And we generally tell people, ‘Hey, leave that up for 60 days. And if at the end of 60 days, you don't need it, you can just shut that store down, but at least you have it.’
And then once it's in Shopify itself, it's fairly secure, especially if you force all staff accounts to use two-factor authentication.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think that it's the fear of sending a third party, i.e. like an agency sending them a plain text customer list and just all this data. I think a lot of merchants can consider the nefarious things that could happen.
But you hit the nail on the head there. It's like, why would I risk that when I've got 8 years building this agency that's worth more than your customer list, quite frankly?
Kurt Elster
Yes.
Chase Clymer
Well, it depends on the store.
Kurt Elster
Well, I mean at the same time, it would be like a black market customer list. How much could that possibly be worth? I don't know. I guess I don't want to know.
Chase Clymer
Nobody needs to know. Okay.
So moving on from those, let's talk about... You mentioned how close their old store is to Shopify.
Are you saying if I've got like a homegrown software or something no one's ever heard of, I'm kind of SOL?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, for sure. You definitely just made your life harder by DIYing it, which I respect, you know, good job.
But if you're not using things that are in the majority, life's gonna be tougher for you. There's just gonna be fewer resources available to you.
You know, moving like BigCommerce and Magento, I think those are the big, well-documented, easier ones to move to Shopify. Versus, you know, we've done some more unusual stuff like PrestaShop.
And generally, even if it's like a weird, unusual system, they're still fairly similar. And again, it's like, as long as you can get all the stuff out into a spreadsheet, you can generally get that back into Shopify.
With your homegrown system, we've dealt with those two. The chances are there's someone involved with it who is like a database wizard and could generate that data, get it out of a database like MySQL.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Bill, over in accounting, built this in his garage. And he can get you any information you want.
With the homegrown things, they all are just plugging that stuff into a database. As long as you can get the database, the database is just a fancy CSV. And that's all we need.
Kurt Elster
Yep. Exactly. As long as it can live in a spreadsheet.
And sometimes those spreadsheets are going to get gigantic. And they're going to get difficult and unwieldy to manage.
And you get so much data that it's like literally days to import it into Shopify. Especially Shopify Plus, it doesn't have a limit on it for products imported and created.
Nonplus, you can run into a limit. There's a daily import limit for the total number of variants. And so that could slow things down if you have a huge catalog.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, those are always interesting challenges. And that's why we do smaller segments to just make sure things are working right. And all of our ducks on the road before we do the huge imports where everything should be fixed because you can't really speed up that.
Kurt Elster
We did one where we did exactly what you described. And we're like, ‘Hey, sign off on this. Make sure it looks okay.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, it looks great.’
Alright, we are going to import it. And then we're ready to go live. We do the recent data migration. And that's when somebody noticed like, oh, this one field is transposed with another.
Okay, now we're going to delete it all and start over.
When somebody says check the sample, definitely take the time to really check it.
Because when you're not super familiar with it, like, I can map the fields and do the migration, but if I'm not really familiar with the orders, the products, it's easier for me to miss stuff versus someone who's quite familiar with it and something like that may stand out to them.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Do you have any other examples of maybe some successful migrations or challenges or just stuff along the way with any of these projects?
Kurt Elster
For subscriptions, that's a tough one. But really, you find a subscription partner who's good at it. And it becomes very dependent on just how the old subscription system worked.
How are they storing payments? How are payments tokenized? Really is the big catch there.
And then the other one is if you're dealing with a store that has internationalization. That's adding a layer of complexity.
How do they handle it now versus how do they want to handle it in Shopify?
I like Shopify markets where you have one store, but then that one store has translations and currency conversions and can even have different layouts and flips through them.
But there's just not a great way to migrate that stuff, language translations into Shopify markets without copying and pasting all of it.
Sometimes there are things that's easier just to give up and start over with. And I think internationalization is one of those.
And then of course there's like back end processes. An order comes in, how do you fulfill it? Ah, you've got a customer service request coming in. Where's that going? Right?
And do those things, does that have to plug into Shopify? Should it, does the current system work with Shopify?
How about that order fulfillment? Can that, your order fulfillment, your 3PL, do they have an integration with Shopify? Can they handle it?
Knowing, and so far that's yet to be a problem, but those other ancillary pieces of software that you plug in to your Ecommerce, you got to think about all of them.
Chase Clymer
I'm going to challenge you. Can you give me a specific example of a tough migration that you guys have done?
Kurt Elster
Sure. We did... Two come to mind. One, Navage. Navage Nose Cleaner. They used to do these ads seen on TV ads that were great.
It'll pressure wash the boogers right out of your face. I'm sure they're not in the slightest bit thrilled with that description, but it's a great product. And that's what it does.
We migrated them from BigCommerce to Shopify. They had subscriptions, they had internationalization. And for internationalization, that was the thing that really scared me. And same with the subscriptions.
The subscriptions, we didn't have to do anything. The subscription partner handled it and did a great job to the point where this business was like, they owned other properties, like, let's move them to this subscription app.
And the internationalization. Shopify markets pro made it so easy. I was like, all right, I want a French version of this site.
And I assumed it was like ChatGPT on the backend. It translated the whole thing in this easy to manage table where you can see this is the previous, this is the English, this is the French.
And then we had a native French speaker go through it and they had very few issues with it. They're like, this is fine. Really the only problem they had was branded terms. It wasn't consistent with how it was translated.
If it was like SaltPod, it would be like, sometimes it'd be two words, sometimes one word, sometimes title case.
Chase Clymer
Pod of salt or something.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And so, in that case, the things that were hard that I was worried about were not actually a problem at all.
And then another, the biggest we did was Wheel Wiz. Wheel Wiz Canada went Magento to Shopify.
The struggle with it was huge. It's just a gigantic drop shipping catalog with so many attributes and custom details in it that everything becomes cumbersome to do when you have to move that much data around and into a catalog and how we ran into, discovered like, oh, there's a maximum number of automated collections you can run in Shopify. Cause I was just going crazy bulk creating them via a Matrixify spreadsheet import.
And you can run into... There's an upper limit on everything. There has to be. And I discovered if you're on Shopify Plus, and you make the case for it, you can often get them to raise limits for you.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, I'm a merchant. I've got a store and Black Friday, Cyber Monday just happened and I want to migrate my site to Shopify before Christmas. What do you say?
Kurt Elster
Oh dear. Is it a single product store? And will you be paying a rush fee?
In which case, it's still probably not going to happen.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. So I mean, I'm not gonna hold your feet to the fire here. I just wanted to let people know.
Migrations are hard and they take longer than a normal redesign by far.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, there's always something that's like, ‘Oh, here's this thing we got to think through.’
And it's not necessarily like, ‘Yeah, there's some big emergency.’ It's more like, ‘All right, you do things in this way. Shopify wants you to do it in this way, let's talk through how that's gonna look.’ You have those types of conversations.
And there's stuff like you could do all the discovery and scoping in the world, but there's still stuff you're not gonna be aware of until you're all the way immersed in it and doing the work.
And hopefully you don't run into stuff like that, but sometimes you do. And so, you always wanna build in that extra time, that extra overhead.
The fastest we ever did a migration and theme build was for Adams Polishes, the detailing company.
They moved from Magento, put them on Shopify, Shopify Plus with a custom theme. And I think we did it in 8 weeks, which is like a breakneck pace to do it.
Chase Clymer
And to do a project like that, how much freedom did they give you or how much stuff was pushed to phase 2? How do you accomplish that?
Kurt Elster
To do it, they internally had many of the designs created and for key templates, and they were sane.
It's one thing to design a template, it's another thing to design one that's like, okay, that's actually good. Let's do that.
And they were open to feedback on it. So the whole design phase went away largely. And so a big chunk of time there goes away. Great.
And you're absolutely right. There was stuff like, ‘Hey, we got to migrate gift cards over.’
That's fun. That became phase two. Just migrating gift cards. Oh, what a pain.
At this point, it's like, oh, you got less than 50. I'm just manually recreating it. Just copy paste.
But yeah, no, you're right. I'm trying to think... It was years ago now.
Chase Clymer
Migration as a line item in a project is such a wild card. You mentioned some of them that are closer to Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce.
I would argue WooCommerce is pretty straightforward. I think Squarespace is the easiest because that platform sucks so bad. There's nothing that you have to account for.
Kurt Elster
That's funny. I've not done a Squarespace one. That's really funny.
Chase Clymer
Oh, it's so easy. We've done a couple.
Kurt Elster
WooCommerce, that's a troublemaker because within WordPress, it's open source. Like, you don't know if somebody went buck wild with plugins.
And so we migrated Modern Sprout, modernsprout.com from WooCommerce to Shopify. And it was fine except for they used this whole custom like templating thing so you could make these goofy landing page type deals.
And the way that was exported in a spreadsheet was just all short codes. And it's essentially just... Sometimes you just get lucky and it's like, well, we're going to be doing some copying and pasting here.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress and all of it is... You can do whatever you want to it.
And that's, I think, the beauty of Shopify is it doesn't allow people to make the wrong choices and it gates a lot of that stuff away.
Kurt Elster
That’s what we were... What? In 2009, 2010, we were WordPress developers. And then we made the switch to Shopify.
And that was a big part of it. It was like, on WordPress, if a client made a request, all requests were seemingly plausible when you had... They'd given us more than enough rope to hang ourselves in the form of open source.
Versus Shopify, you're playing in their sandbox and they're like, ‘Hey, we're gonna give you all the room to design and do CSS however the heck you want.’ But under the hood on the backend, you know, in the admin, that is Shopify's territory and you're not gonna worry about it.
And it was such a relief to have some of those constraints put on you. And now over 10 years later, I have learned constraints breed creativity.
Chase Clymer
Exactly. And I also think that for a while, those constraints were something people would argue as to why you wouldn't want to move to Shopify.
And I just think it goes back to our conversation of they don't want to think creatively on how to rearrange their process to make Shopify work for them.
Kurt Elster
For sure. I feel the same way about people who are mad at blog editors.
Chase Clymer
Okay.
Kurt Elster
It's like...I think you just don't want to do the homework. You don't want to have to write.
And so you're like, ‘The problem why I don't blog is because the blog editor doesn't let me do what I want.’
Yeah, I think you just... You don't want to do the homework. Which is fine. Writing is not for everybody.
Chase Clymer
That's a whole different conversation about blogging. It’s just content creation and its SEO, why does it really matter what it looks like when the point is to get more clicks?
Kurt Elster
Yes.
Chase Clymer
So we hadn't really specifically talked about the thing that I brought up at the beginning though.
Hopefully, I had a successful Q4. And I do have some money set aside for a project.
And I'm thinking about migrating from another platform to Shopify. What are some telltale signs? What are the more obvious reasons that I should be considering a migration? And a migration might actually help my business other than the vanity of wanting to redesign my website.
Kurt Elster
Okay. As long as you're willing to be honest with yourself, just like, hey, Shopify seems like a shiny toy and I want that toy and I've got the money to do it and my current site's five years old.
You know what? Why not? Go for it, dude.
Chase Clymer
You know what, Kurt? I love this conversation because it's like, I'll find you five good reasons right now. Let me get back in there.
Kurt Elster
You're absolutely right. It's like, all right, if we just think through it, we can figure out the process and reasons here.
I think Shopify has network effects. I think they've got phenomenal features and it's a great platform.
But more importantly, there are a few features of the ecosystem of the platform that only can occur because of the sheer size and volume of what Shopify has become.
ShopPay, where if I'm a customer and I sign up for a ShopPay account on one store, there are a million other stores that may interest me. And when I get to check out on those stores, it might remember who I am and fill that info out.
Or as soon as I put in my email or phone number, it's going to send me a 6-digit shortcode via text, log me in, and now it's auto filled everything. It'll have my billing address, it'll have my shipping address already in there.
And potentially, I could just pay and be done. How cool is that?
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. So if my platform doesn't have a tokenized, quick checkout solution and nowhere, no way, and no how will it ever be as big as Shop Pay.
But if you don't have that feature, that could be a good reason. Especially if you have an older customer and they are forgetting their credit card information or whatnot, or you have a highly... Not a subscription but a replenishable product, which it should be a subscription, honestly.
These quick checkout solutions do make a heck of a big difference.
Kurt Elster
Oh, absolutely.
The other common complaint we hear, like if you're on an old system, is it'll be like bolted together and they'll just have these tremendous legacy costs.
Whereas like, we pay so much to host it, we paid so much to maintain it, and you're still like for all you're paying, you're still not getting anywhere near what you would have out of the box on Shopify.
All right, that's where it may be time to go, like, let's quit throwing good money after bad and move on to this other platform. I hear that one a lot.
And this one baffles me, people just get into situations with their payment gateways on other platforms where like they just, a good chunk of payments just won't go through, won't work right.
That one I am baffled by because you don't experience stuff like that when you're using Shopify and Shopify payments as your payment provider, and then running it through the Shopify checkout, like, Oh, you know, suddenly everything just works.
That one, surprisingly a common, common reason.
And I think the other thing you're getting is that Shopify ecosystem. If Shopify has a feature, if Shopify doesn't have a feature that you want, it is almost certain that there is an app integration or person that can provide it to you.
And if you need assistance with a Shopify store, there's an entire ecosystem of people like ourselves who would be happy to assist you with it, right?
I don't think, and that from the beginning, they've been investing in this partner ecosystem and it has worked out very well for Shopify, the partners, but more importantly, the merchants who have access to those resources.
So really investing in that ecosystem around them has been very beneficial for everybody.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And I would even go back to the beginning of the question, which is if you want to redesign, the best time to think about a migration is during a redesign because so many things are going to change.
So that actually might be even a good reason to migrate over. But if you want to… I think my only argument here against migrating is if you want to migrate and change nothing about your business, it is probably not a good idea.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. It's just gonna end up being harder.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And also, you don't sound like a good client. That's the real truth.
Kurt, we could probably chat for an hour more, but I need to let you go.
Is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you want to share with our audience?
Kurt Elster
I think the other unsung thing about Shopify is the like six different ways you can implement a discount, right? Like script editor, automatic discount, regular discount.
I could start messing with hiding product variants and Shopify functions, right?
Chase Clymer
Functions are cool.
Kurt Elster
Functions are fun and still a developing feature. I'm curious to see where that goes. But you don't want to be limited in what you can do and what you can offer.
And Shopify the platform and Shopify the ecosystem, I think those two combine, you should be able to achieve 99.9% of things you want - of promos, campaigns, and things you want to do with your store if you switch to Shopify.
That's been my experience.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I've been a team Shopify for 8 years in a row. Touching other platforms gives me an icky feeling.
Kurt Elster
Eww!
Chase Clymer
And there's the road caster. We talked about that before.
Alright, Kurt. Where should people go if they want to learn more about you, check out EtherCycle or listen to your podcast? Give the people a call to action.
Kurt Elster
Sure. Google me. Head to kurtelster.com. And you can sign up for my newsletter there. And there's links to everything there.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Kurt, thank you so much for coming on.
Kurt Elster
Thank you for having me.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.co to get each episode delivered right to your inbox.
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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!