Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform based on PHP. Magento Development Service is extremely powerful and flexible and completely free to implement. It has wide developer support, resulting in no dearth in the availability of apps and extensions.
Magento makes hosting the absolute best web design so easy, it is an obvious choice when launching an e-commerce venture.
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However, migrating an existing venture onto the Magento platform comes with its fair share of challenges.
Unless properly managed and accounted for, hassles resulting from mismanagement can easily balloon into unrealistic proportions.
- Improper Duplication
The cardinal problem related to any automated platform migration is an unnecessary duplication of content related to the canonical URLs.
Layer navigation, pagination, and proper product sorting can get really messed up in platform transitions and can be a big hassle to figure out later on in a brand-new platform with no experienced administrators.
Dynamic URLs need to be checked so as to not link to the same content and the URL-generating algorithms must be reconfigured for optimal performance.
These kinds of errors are doubly confusing to customers since the link “seems” to be working properly.
This can result in greatly reduced customer confidence in the venture due to the bad user experience.
Also, in case of improper page duplication, framed content may not load properly or at all, resulting in a page that looks badly rendered and corrupted.
- Data Loss
Prior to migration, all site data must be properly cached and re-hosted on the server.
This crucial step is often missed in tackling the more “religious” parts of the migration and can result in serious downtime if not made before the platform switch takes place.
Considering how important proper web hosting is to the user experience on an e-commerce platform, the importance of this particular point cannot be overstated.
Loss of data can take months to re-plan and re-code, resulting in significant expenses from an administrative standpoint as well as severe customer attrition resulting from the extended downtime.
If proprietary data cannot be recovered properly, it can also have severe financial repercussions like lost accounts and profit records.
- Contingency Plans
In the case of a failed migration or data loss, you must have a contingency plan including alternate server hosting and data backups so that your site is not affected by the downtime.
Although this is advisable for all instances of server maintenance and software upgrades, during crucial events like platform migration, it becomes doubly important to be able to properly and safely roll back to pre-migration.
Server downtime can severely affect your e-commerce venture and so having contingency plans to safeguard it is a must. Consider backing up your data offsite or onto the cloud for maximum protection.
- Error Handling
A platform migration always carries with it the possibility of creating dead and orphan links. This, however, may put the user in a quandary. A bookmarked link suddenly throws up an error.
To properly tackle these scenarios, the error pages must be rewritten so that on the unfortunate chance that an error does occur, the customer is properly guided back to the main home page safely.
Many sites do their own unique tweaks to error pages, especially the 404 Page Not Found code and it serves one singular purpose to prevent customer attrition.
In appropriate cases, it may also be wise to simply redirect a dead link to a search engine that will then do the needful and point the user to the page that was originally pointed to by the old link.
Taking preventative measures to combat scenarios like this is extremely important in keeping your existing customers and generating good press to gain new ones as well.
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