Here are a few considerations that would help you in your decision making when considering migrating to Magento 2

• First, you Calculate the maintenance cost incurred on your existing platform bearing in mind that a stable platform would drastically reduce its associated cost by at least 50%
• While considering your industry and business model, in order to get a cross-section of anticipated growth, you are expected to streamline and review your projected online revenue, anticipated to be generated, using at least 3 years revenue data, from there you build conservative, moderate and aggressive growth plans.
• When trying to determine a budget for the upfront cost of the platform, we suggest you review the cost of building and customization for the existing platform over the past 3 or more years. Not living behind the minute expenses, fees paid for services as well as other internal resource costs and salaries.

This should not be overlooked and treated with utmost importance if the baseline goal is to establish feature/function parity from current to the future site.

Forrester while talking on platform migration budget recommends using a factor of 5:1 to allocate for the cost of upfront implementation vs. platform licensing costs. Where the capital expense becomes much more than is budgeted, we at Christopher Queen Consulting could provide options to allocate that cost over time as an operational expenditure.

• We advise that you evaluate the costs of transactional errors if orders are managed through an outdated platform or fax or phone if you are expanding from an existing B2B footprint. With a projection and assumption that a new platform will lead to a much significant decrease in costs associated with errors and it would also translate to more efficient self-service transactions for your customers. Everyone is happy!
• Is your business on the look to make its first push into the digital B2B, Magento is the right choice as over time its shown its effectiveness at leveraging B2B and direct-to-consumer experiences as can be seen with RXBAR and Intelligentsia where they partnered with Magento to create single commerce experiences, which has helped them in achieve the multi-faceted goals set for business and their consumer customers.

Re-evaluate the cost per acquisition of present clients and assume that it will reduce with this upgraded brand exposure. This is very true in a business model where future generations and new accounts are well focused on with the upgrade.

• Review the current cost of incorporating legacy systems handling order management and see if there is a need for an order management system (OMS) upgrade.
• Consider the current site conversion rate and know that the rates can increase by page load times and improve performance across devices.
• For older site: Look into the bounce and conversion rate across desktop and mobile. All Magento 2 platforms will use responsive design and will boost the experience of a buyer using a mobile device.
• For existing Magento sites: By the year 2018, Magento will no longer support the Magento 1.x sites in any way, even though security patch updates. Switching is highly essential so as to retain a safe and PCI compliant platform for future purpose. The cost associated with PCI compliance and customer data breaches should be well considered.

Key Business Case Considerations when Evaluating a Magento 2 Migration

Ever introduced a beautiful product into the market and it met a brick wall just because it was new, affordable and its functions look too good to believe!

That was the feeling when Magento commerce met with when it was introduced into the market in the year 2008. Skeptics were of the opinion that large corporations and blue chip companies would not readily accept an e-commerce software that doesn’t have a license cost.

Its successes have been unparalleled since its introduction and over time its evolved from something that came as a disruption to the usual technology to being the most sought software by industry analyst, serving a large chunk of the market, which includes very high potential volume e-commerce initiatives, the ever-growing medium-sized businesses and not forgetting enterprise merchants that emerge daily.

Is your business running on an older version of Magento 1.X or you are considering a platform, we at Christopher Queen Consulting recommends that you place your investment into a scale, marketing, and features and function, and not necessarily sticking and managing an outdated commerce platform just for the sake of being visible.

As exemplified by Christopher Queen Consulting’s recent Magento 2 launches of aftermarket, all-terrain vehicle parts manufacturer SuperATV and whole food protein bar brand RXBAR, the business case to migrate to Magento 2 hinges mainly on reallocating maintenance costs to investments in stable technology and growth potential. As RXBAR and SuperATV continue to scale their physical and digital footprint, their decisions to select Magento 2 as their next platform has been strengthened by a robust roadmap which has already come to fruition since selection. More to come on this later.

Merchants who have migrated to Magento 2 testifies to its success in areas that relates to its ability to run both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business operations on a single platform, has left merchants room for options and has alleviated their fears of it being obsolete or the fear of having to outgrow the platform in the coming years.

Having said that, here are a few pointers to take into account that go beyond implementation costs and software licensing fees

KEY FEATURES, FUNCTIONS AND UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGY OF MAGENTO 2.

We urge any company reviewing Magento 2 to initiate a demo and discussion for a deeper insight into the following upgrades. These features should be reviewed against the present Magento 1.x functions only if you are currently a Magento merchant, it should be evaluated against other competitive platforms.

THE GUIDE TO MAGENTO 2 UPGRADES.

UPGRADES: “Perfect upgrades” have been the main part of Saas platform over the years, and Magento has taken huge steps towards making it easy to upgrade to Magento 2 with changes to the whole site structure. The use of service contracts indicates that modules and customizations have a little effect on Magento’s central code and leads to a faster and seamless upgrade.

SITE PERFORMANCE: With extra current technology like PHP 7+ varnish for caching, the sites will experience an increase in page load speed and performance mostly during high peak periods like the festive holiday period. As mentioned in the business case, this has tangential advantages such as page load and conversion rate boost which is one of the factors used in ranking in SEO.

ORDER PROCESSING PERFORMANCE: The way Magento 2 is built allows for split databases including checkout to mitigate peak order stalls and decrease the number of resources required to handle those situations.

CHECK OUT/CONVERSION: With a large number of merchants using former versions of Magento with a checkout process that is almost the same, Magento evaluated data and took the best form of approach to efficiency and user experience to have an organized and efficient check out process.

PAYPAL/BRAINTREE: The move from eBay has allowed for PayPal to boom in inventions, and they still maintain a strong relationship with Magento. PayPal and their fellow company, Braintree have really become a standard means of payment with the launch of Magento 2.1. It now has features such as saved credit card, and an in-line modal check out experience, PayPal makes the customer’s way to conversion faster and reduces the merchant’s stress of maintaining PCI compliance.

Braintree’s hosted field gives room for total innovative control over the look and feel of checkout with the use of small, clear iFrames to safely coordinate and transmit payment data.

PCI COMPLIANCE: Asides PayPal and Braintree, all the other local Magento 2 payment t modes have been remodeled from the beginning to allow lower PCI burden technologies like the direct post.

CONTENT: Because of the fading lines between content and commerce, we have witnessed local e-commerce platforms boost the abilities in terms of staging, content production, and deployment of non-products content pages. Magento 2’s staging abilities will give room to marketers to display content without the help of IT or development resources to release that vital how-to guide, feature list, blog post or explained video. The procurement and installment of pre-built incorporation with the old Magento’s CMS abilities to further be in line with the expectations of the industry.

PROMOTIONS: Marketers and merchandisers can display promotions and benefits together, see how they react, evaluate changes in the “day of mode”, look through checkout to know if all discount rules are applied the way you want. For example, a sportswear seller expecting a win from one of their well-known teams could just organize a congratulation post using the picture of a hero and placeholder text to celebrate the win in advance, fix a promo code and make sure you run a test on everything before high traffic inflow.

B2B: The order given to businesses to make use of B2B digital commerce amongst different industries over the past years has been cleared and the B2B commerce horizon is gradually increasing to include goods and services sold online. In addition, indigenous B2C companies are gradually developing their platform with the inclusion of a B2B foundation, including features for user levels, cart to quote, purchasing workflows and tight integration with their vital downstream back office systems. At the end, a common platform provides enough benefit in reducing maintenance overhead and boosting platform usability with the aid of an upgraded feature set.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS: It is obvious that a huge number of merchants using Google Analytics for a primary view into their e-commerce channel’s KPI. As a strong tool, GA’s application is built for all forms of websites and not made to get information specific to a digital commerce channel with no obvious configuration. Magento business intelligence was created out of many years of research and development with e-commerce business leaders to have a convenient, configurable platform that is situated within the Magento catalog and customer data. The Christopher Queen Consulting approves Magento BI as a basic Google analytics as a substitute for validation.

HOW TO PRE-PLAN FOR A REPLATFORM TO MAGENTO 2.

Just like the other major platform upgrades, audit processes need to be well considered when switching to Magento 2, regardless of the current e-commerce platform. Christopher Queen Consulting has given the following examples, but for a wider reviewing, please visit Christopher Queen Consulting e-commerce platform checklist white paper.

USER EXPERIENCE FUNCTIONALITY COMPONENTS:

Enhancements that have been done on the site over the years should be examined to know if your customers are still using it. This is a chance to decongestant the gift guide, blog or product widget that was the major idea years back. In some situations, Christopher Queen Consulting has discovered that less is more and total feature to feature parity from your current platform is not always the best measure.

You could also use the money to post-launch marketing, A/B testing and drive initiatives instead of wasting it on rebuilding a module with no driving value.

• BACK END DATA MIGRATIONS: The first thing to do is to examine the online catalog content porting from your existing system and know that some data needs to be erased and some needs to be created, this depends on the status of the available product information. You should also think if and how to move existing customer and order information into the Magento interface or if it will be a net new idea. Magento has made provision for current customers and the necessity for them to retain site data as they switch to Magento 2. With this objective in mind, Magento has formulated a large and extensible set of data switching scripts to help solution providers and their clients’ port legacy data and to make sure current customers migrate smoothly to the latest Magento 2 power site.
• MODULE AVAILABILITY: If your current site uses 3rd party modules and middleware, this is a chance to evaluate the data integration and know if Magento supports pre-built software connector. In cases and compatibility. The updated list of certified 2.0 modules can be found here: The guide to Magento 2 upgrades Christopher Queen Consulting.
• 3RD PARTY INTEGRATION: It is clear that some current back-office systems (such as the ERP) are vital to your downstream business even beyond the e-commerce channel. The level of effort put into it will be determined by the number of current “hooks” into the systems and the rate at which you want the systems to communicate. With good motive, IT personnel pay close attention to service providers who have experience integrating with certain software because of jobs done in the past. Fortunately, Magento2 has removed the fears of bulky and expensive 3rd party integrations with its asynchronous technology. Not forgetting overly technical, this indicates that bigger “piping and wiring” are put in place locally to link data to another system. Knowing and understanding your current commerce system ecosystem in a flowchart is a good way to understand the data that comes in and leaves the platform.

With a number of Magento 2 customers transacting with huge millions of dollars till now, and a whole lot more coming to the launching pad, the Christopher Queen Consulting will continuously share ideas with the new set of Magento merchants. Do not hesitate to ask for assistance or complete replatforms or a platform move from a legacy Magento application. Our team will assist you to get to the right place of grading, stability, and growth of your e-commerce platforms.