I was recently asked by a customer to help them fix a number of issues with their Magento based ecommerce store. Myself and one of our developers started looking under the hood and we’re pretty horrified by what we saw – having had great experiences in the past with Shopify, I recommended migrating to it as a fix to all of the problems (and likely a cheaper on too).
The Problem
The problem was the customer had an inventory of over 5,500 products with well made product images, pricing and lengthy product descriptions – it would be difficult to write a translation script and simply not practical to re-enter all the data in to Shopify.
I started working through the Shopify importer to grab a copy of the sample CSV file they provide as a template to for preparing data from other systems.
While there I noticed a discrete little link that said “Need to import products from another platform?” – I clicked it not expecting much and found three importers for Ebay, WordPress and – yep – Magento!
The Solution
I checked out the price of the Magento importer and was overjoyed to see it was FREE. This put me in a great position – I was able to setup a FREE trial store using Shopify, install all 5,500 of my customers products in to the site and then display to them as a potential solution with 90% of the hard work done! You can check out the Magento Importer Plugin video here:
Gotchas / Pitfalls
The Shopify team have done an amazing job on the Magento importer app but as you can imagine there will always be some data that’s mapped differently than you would wish. To that end, we’re using the Shopify API and PHP to make bulk updates to the 5,500 products – I’ll post scripts here as we develop them!
