Background

Stored and Handled wanted to move from their Magento 1 store to a more stable platform with ongoing support for security and scalability. Their current store was slow, as a multi-channel retailer it didn’t sync well across eBay and Amazon. As an agency, we were spending more time fixing problems and applying security updates rather than introducing new features and increasing revenue.

There are tools available such as Cart2Cart which we were recommended as a solution by Shopify however, our store had been linked to eBay for quite a few months and there were multiple duplicate products, missing item references and incorrect image links. The only alternative to cart2cart was for us to import the products manually or via a CSV.

This client is moving to a standard Shopify store, the import process below is the same for all of the Shopify plans.

Magento Export

We exported all product from Magento using Dataflow – Profiles this gave us approximately 1,150 lines for 515 products, this list required cleaning quickly as the store itself only had 27 configurable products and 51 simple products visible.

Data Cleansing

Rather than writing a script to clean the data, we imported all of the data into LibreOffice as we wanted to ensure that all of the product metadata had been assigned correctly and revised where appropriate. The previous product catalogue had been created over a number of years and had been used on a couple of major site revisions leaving some data missing and multiple attributes which were no longer required.

We decided the best way to clean the data was to filter all of the visible products within the store, this gave us a much more manageable number of 78, this was then separated into simple products and configurable products.

Many of the standard Magento columns were removed leaving the following columns, we also had several custom attributes which we required for filtering and selecting products.

Data Mapping

There are a few things to be aware of when mapping data from Magento to Shopify.

• The Magento export file shows weights and quantities with four decimal places, Shopify requires an integer.
• Magento only shows the relative path to the image.
• Shopify doesn’t use the short description.
• There is a 20 megapixel limit on images.

Configurable Products

The configurable products are more complex to import, we took the time to create the feed file and check our information against the current Magento site, this would have been much easier to automate had the client not had multiple listings for the same product imported from eBay and Amazon.

A couple of things to note:

• Shopify only supports three options per product with a maximum of 100 variations.
• The parent product is listed first and the variations are listed below, this is the opposite way in which configurable are imported into  Magento via Magmi.
• The variation price is the actual sale price on the website rather than a price increase/decrease.

Setting up the import file was fairly quick and could have been scripted for a larger database, in total we had around three hundred lines between the simple and configurable products.

Data Import

We imported the simple products into our test store before moving over to the configurable products or migrating to the production store.

Once we had checked the data imported without and issue we ran the upload file on the main website, the file imported in a couple of minutes and pulled all of the original images straight from Magento.

Final Thoughts

The whole process took around six hours and allowed us to check data while importing, the automated import looks great if you’re importing a list of simple products or don’t have lots of different variables but we found a couple of issues in our own data set which we didn’t want to spend days finding and fixing.

For customers with more than 100 products and 400+ variations, we would write a transfer script to sterilise the data before importing into Shopify.