How I Migrated 11 Sites from Magento to BigCommerce, Saved $1,000,000 and Increased Conversions 312% – All in 90 Days

When a boat has a hole, the crew spends half its time rowing and the other half with buckets, frantically scooping out water to try and keep the thing afloat.

That’s how things were for us.

I joined SUCCESS Partners at a time when they were limping along with a hacked-together version (or rather, versions) of Magento Enterprise. And when I say ‘hacked-together,’ I mean it.

Imagine a complex portfolio of clients, all of them busy entrepreneurs, each with a thirst for profits.

Their ecommerce offerings — which are a part of what we handle — were being hosted with on-site servers, and were so hopelessly customized it was mind-boggling and soul-sucking.

I refer to those days as having to pay off my digital debt, when I was paying for decisions that were made in the past. That’s really what was going on — and it was costing us dollars in revenue and in overhead.

Our uptime then was 80%, maybe 85%. Everything was on-premise and managed in-house. We had a lot of bloating in terms of staff just to keep the thing afloat.

That’s when the inevitable happened: staff and client turnover.

After all, when you’re on a sinking ship, the choice is always there to jump overboard.

We learned our lesson the hard way: we’re only as good as the technology that we use. It was imperative that we stop running from that.

As scary as it is for a company to reevaluate tech and what that means in terms of investment and taking risk, we just figured that it was the perfect time — we had nothing else to lose — so we dove in.

And to get straight to the point, we’re saving over $1,000,000 per year by switching from Magento to BigCommerce.

It’s been the best business decision we’ve ever made, and not only because it’s saving us so much money, but because it’s making us so much, too.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Free Magento Data Migration Tool

The BigCommerce data migration team has done *so many* Magento migrations that they built out their own custom code to get it done faster and more accurately. Now, that code has been turned into a free app you can use to move your Magento store over to BigCommerce — right now.

It’s that easy. No kidding.

Move your store from Magento to BigCommerce right here.

You’re Only as Good as The Tech You Use

Imagine you’re lost in the woods. What’s the first thing you should do?

I say you ought to turn out your pockets.

Why?

If you’re struggling to light a fire, you don’t want to find a book of matches in your pocket when you’re eventually rescued.

That is to say that when there’s a problem to be solved, it’s only by knowing exactly what you have, don’t have and need, that you can begin to make sensible decisions.

Magento wasn’t a sensible decision — and we couldn’t afford to make another one like it.

So, we started by laying bare everything we currently had with our current platform, next to a list of things we wanted.

We also had to account for what we might want in the future, and whether our chosen platform could account for it.

During the first round, we identified 10 of the top-performing platforms, both SaaS and on-premise.

After checking everything off our list, we whittled those 10 down to three:

BigCommerce
NetSuite
Shopify

NetSuite got cut right before the finals.

When it came to choosing between Shopify and BigCommerce, a lot came down to the API, specifically the speed at which our clients’ websites needed to perform.

Shopify couldn’t keep up.

BigCommerce’s API is more robust and the API call limits are much higher than Shopify’s.

BigCommerce’s Pro Plan, for instance, allows 60,000 API calls per hour. That means a product catalog with 50,000 SKUs would complete a sync in about 50 minutes to an external source. For BigCommerce’s Enterprise plan, BigCommerce’s API can process over 400 calls per second and complete a 50,000 product catalog sync within 2 minutes.

That makes BigCommerce’s API 100x faster than Shopify Plus when you compare Shopify’s max 10 requests per second to the 100+ requests per second with BigCommerce Enterprise.

And for larger merchants, like our customers, in need of API connections to external systems or databases, the additional speed and power of the BigCommerce API was critical.

But we had a more specific use case:

As part of our services at SUCCESS Partners, we organize and host events around the country. As a result, our clients’ websites often experience vast spikes in traffic.

It was imperative to us that those spikes wouldn’t be a concern and that all of that traffic wouldn’t take the site down, that those visitors could check out and that everything would sync appropriately with any ERP or external database as needed.

Having spoken to several people — and having experienced some issues during my consulting work with stores on Shopify during these exact spikes — it became clear to us that BigCommerce was the right home for us and our clients.

Free Shopify Data Migration Tool

Sure, we can move stores from Magento super easily – but Shopify is a SaaS platform, just like us. There are some pretty big differences in terms of scalability, but moving a site from a one SaaS platform to another is much easier than from a platform like Magento.

So, if we were able to figure out a way to allow you to move your data from Magento to BigCommerce, of course we have a way for you to do it with Shopify, too!

Move your store from Shopify to BigCommerce right here.

The Migration Process: 11 Stores in 90 Days

So, we migrated 11 sites in 90 days.

That’s not a brag, although it was one hell of a task.

What it was, as with many of life’s great endeavors, was a necessity.

We were 90 days out from having to renew our licenses with Magento, and having decided that BigCommerce was going to be our new home, we knew that in order for us to avoid those re-licensing fees, and to get our clients happily migrated, we were going to seriously bring our A game.

Everything we had was built from scratch.

What we had at the time was all mom-and-pop stuff. Figuratively speaking, it was all strung together with staples, thumb tacks and fishing line.

What we had to do when we migrated to BigCommerce was to replicate what we had in a totally new environment, only this time with the kind of future-proofed industry standards we should have been adhering to a long time ago.

It was only possible for us to do all of this in such a short span of time because of how easy and intuitive the BigCommerce platform is to use. That, and a cohort of crazy smart development wizards at SUCCESS Partners.

Are the cogs turning on your own decision-making wheel yet?

If so, you might be interested to know who we chose to handle our other services:

For our shipping software, we chose ShipperHQ
For our tax software, we chose Avalara
For our address validation software, we chose Addrexxx
For our print-on-demand software, we chose XMPie by Xerox

Free Tool: Magento Data Migration

It’s that easy. No kidding.

Move your store from Magento to BigCommerce right here.

2 Week Deployments + 312% Increase in Conversion

From everything custom-built with no rhyme or reason with Magento, we are now able to onboard clients with an industry-standard, totally cloud-based and customizable website in under 2 weeks.

Before, it might take us anywhere from 6 to 8 weeks just to hand over a bare-bones site which looked like it dropped out of 1999.

It seemed incredible to me at the time, and still does, that we had no idea what we (and therefore our clients) were missing out on.

I remember when we launched our biggest client on BigCommerce; they saw an increase in conversion rates of 312% on Day One.

Yes, on Day One!

That’s how we knew we made the right decision.

Usually, you have the choice to save time or save money. We saved time and made money.

Agency-Friendly Focus for Our Suite of Customers

All of the front-end features and beautiful mobile-ready themes, not to mention the extensive app store, are all cake with BigCommerce, but one deeper feature all of us love lives in the back-end — analytics and reporting.

Of course, we still produce monthly sales and inventory reports, but with the BigCommerce dashboard, clients are able to log-in and see exactly what’s sold, what’s selling best, and where they might want to focus their efforts next.

They can do and see everything a business owner ought to be able to, in a single portal, all without having to learn anything too complex.

You know that old saying, about how you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?

After migrating 11 sites to BigCommerce, launching 3 more and saving over $1,000,000, I can say that the reverse is true, too — you don’t know what you can have, until you’ve got it.

The Metrics: 11 Sites Migrated, 3 Newly Launched

A lot of folks don’t believe us when I tell them we moved 11 sites from Magento to BigCommerce in 90 days. They also don’t believe us that conversion increased as much as it did, that page load speed was up, that more than $100,000 in sales was made in just 2 weeks.

So, I show them the numbers. Here are the 11 sites we migrated, the 3 we launched and all of their metrics.