Learn more about us at ATAKInteractive.com Started your store on Shopify, and run out of options? Shopify can be a great way to get your ecommerce store off the ground, but business owners often hit a point where the complicated customization no longer pays off. ATAK Interactive is an ecommerce development agency that helps ecommerce businesses graduate from Shopify stores to customized, fully-integrated Magento and WooCommerce stores. We wrote this migration guide to help Shopify store owners understand how Magento offers new horizons for customization and design.

1. PAGE 01 / 08
Why Ecommerce Businesses
are Graduating from
to

2. PAGE 02 / 08
Why Ecommerce Businesses are Graduating from Shopify to Magento
When ecommerce store owners start to see real growth from their Shopify site, they all too often find that
Shopify can’t grow along with them, and provide the tools that a more robust business requires. At ATAK,
we help businesses migrate from Shopify ecommerce stores to custom-developed Magento stores, with
custom design and integration – and delivered with a seamless hand-off.
Day One Problem: How Do You Stand Out on Shopify?
One of the biggest challenges ecommerce businesses using Shopify face is that of differentiation: When
you’re using the exact same toolkit as everyone else on your platform, how do you stand out? If you start an
ecommerce store with Magento, you’ll be able to provide a totally custom experience from the start. Shopify
makes this much harder to attain.
Theme Theme
New Product
Database
Custom
Finalize Template Connect to Database
Add Products
INTEGRATE ALL AVAILABLE CARRIERS Fulfilment Architecture
Install Apps UX + Ecomemerce Modules
Go Live
Continuous Optimization
Go Live
Custom Custom
Existing CRM / ERP
Community

3. PAGE 03 / 08
First, what makes Shopify and Magento different?
As a hosted ecommerce site, Shopify provides a simplified ecommerce storefront
experience for busy shop owners, or shop owners not interested in time spent on
site maintenance and customization. Shopify controls most of the decisions
that can be made with its customization and implementation.
Simple to administrate and run; support is handled
by Shopify’s support team.
Sophisticated software requires experienced
administration, but your support options number
in the thousands.
Make cosmetic changes without coding knowledge
or installing outside plug-in tools.
Customization requires PHP, HTML, and JavaScript
knowledge, and functionality of outside modules
must be tested.
Without knowledge of Shopify’s Liquid theme
language, customization options are limited to
those offered in the Shopify admin.
Magento developers can use open-source tools to
customize virtually any part of a site’s appearance.
Even with Liquid, customization is limited to
template-level customizations.
Any part of Magento can be integrated with third
party APIs to your taste or business needs.
Hosted Solution: All of your hosting and support
comes from inside Shopify – if anything goes
wrong, they’re your only resource.
Completely Open: Host anywhere, and maintain
with anyone.
Simple for shop owners to administrate. Simple for shop owners to administrate.
Central hosting means no cost for higher traffic.
Hosting your ecommerce yourself means as traffic
grows, so can costs.
Efficient platform for testing the viability of a
product, pre-investment.
Complex to set-up only for a preliminary product
viability test.
Magento, on the other hand, is open-source ecommerce software that is used and
maintained by millions of shop owners, developers, and agencies, worldwide.
Because Magento’s code is freely available, the customization available to
shop owners is limited only by the skill and size of their development team.
PAGE 03 / 08
closed
closed
open
open

4. PAGE 04 / 08
Why Ecommerce Businesses are Graduating from Shopify to Magento
Most business owners are interested in moving to Magento because their operational needs have become
complex beyond Shopify’s ability to serve their data. A business that has grown to have a large marketing
database, warehouse, fulfillment, and shipping infrastructure requires an ecommerce platform that can be
tailored to their needs.
Magento was built with sophisticated tax and shipping laws in mind. Shipping
weights, dimensions, zones, and tax rates keep expenses accurate, and reduce
the overhead of supply management.
Marketing departments love Magento for the complete control the platform
gives them over design, user experience, and site behavior for conversion
optimization and marketing message opportunities. Magento’s category and
related products tools give marketing departments the ability to showcase
products in a variety of ways.
Magento knows the value that wholesale customers bring to an ecommerce
business, and that’s why wholesale accounts are built into the platform.
Wholesale is made simple, and retail customers will not have access to
wholesale prices, sidestepping pricing confusion.
Marketing also loves advanced integrations with customization, database, and
data analytics platforms – allowing them to run tests, collect data, and make
better decisions.
1. Why Organizations Love Magento
YOUR IDEA wAREHOUSE WEBSITE MKTG DATA

5. PAGE 05 / 08
Ecommerce business owners love that the Magento development community
has created a marketplace of modules providing almost anything they desire,
without needing to code from the ground up.
IT and legal departments love it because they have total control over customer
data and security. Hosted solutions can encrypt data, but keeping everything
in a centralized environment risks a breach or leak affecting your customers
– something you have no control over! With Magento, customer data can be
transmitted and stored securely, whatever your security architecture.
And, of course – Ecommerce business owners love being free from Shopify’s fees, and only paying for
features, functions, and maintenance they’ve chosen and requested.
Fulfillment and warehouse departments love that Magento simplifies the sale
and fulfillment of products from multiple storefronts, including wholesale
accounts, within a single system. No more chasing data from a patchwork of
sources, and leaving your wholesale accounts hanging.
FULFILLMENT CARRIER CUSTOMER DATA + ANALYTICS

6. PAGE 06 / 08
Why Ecommerce Businesses are Graduating from Shopify to Magento
2. Shopify Migration Basics
Making the decision is much faster than making the switch – but in the right hands, you’ll have an easy
transition to Magento.
If you choose the manual route, you will also need to take a close audit of your shop data and functionality.
This means you’ll need to make comprehensive back-ups of important things like:
If the manual route seems too risky for you, another option is to have an agency like ATAK
Interactive handle the migration for you. A specialized agency has done migrations many
times before, and will be able to support and assist a shop owner with migrating their store
to a new site design.
The benefit of hiring an agency is that you’ll have an experienced Magento developer on your side, to
ensure everything is properly implemented and tested before your site goes live. A focused agency will
know how to map your previous store to the Magento Data Flow without disrupting your database.
Full Catalog PromotionsPersonal and
Customer
Merchandising
critical data sets
Back Office and
Settings
If you’re confident with technology, you may want to try a migration tool that takes advantage of Magento’s
Data Flow. Data flow allows other systems to communicate with Magento, even if those systems have
different names for the name used in Magento’s database. With careful application of Magento data flow,
you can export your Shopify store stock and load that shop data straight into Magento, without the hassle
of re-entering your data.

7. PAGE 07 / 08
Our Magento Customers Enjoy These Perks The Most:
Install Wordpress to run integrated with your Magento shop, so that you may have a blog, careers
information, and other company information.
Completely customize your website, from product and category pages, to front page layout, fonts, and
more.
API Integration with software and apps: accounting, CRM, live chat, inventory, ERP management.
Custom reporting dashboard providing numbers and data analysis based on what your business metrics.
Functions and extras: product image gallery, 360 views, customer reviews, dynamic store locator,
video integration, shopping cart incentives, and more.
A/B Testing for conversion optimization.
Predictive search for better user experience.
Custom checkout options based on warehousing and store locations.
Custom configurators for uncommon product options.
Integration with freight shipping carriers for large orders.
User type and shipping rule customization to simplify business-to-business fulfillment.
How long
does it take? Your biggest challenge:
Finding a qualified migration team. As with any
code and development project, making the right
hire is important. A qualified development team
will have Magento projects in its portfolio, and
be able to speak candidly about the issues
businesses may face during migration.
A good agency will be happy to give you
references! If you’re speaking with developers
who can’t send you a list of previous or current
clients who you may contact, this might be a sign
that their customers aren’t entirely happy!
Between 2-6 months, depending
on the scope of the project.
PAGE 07 / 08
2 months
3
2
6
4
5
6 months
less custom
more custom

8. PAGE 08 / 08
Why Ecommerce Businesses are Graduating from Shopify to Magento
Once you’ve finished your move…
Moving from a simplified, managed system like Shopify to one like Magento will require a shift in thinking
about your website’s administration.
By taking control of your ecommerce store, you face an increase in responsibility. These responsibilities
include webhosting, MySQL database management, and security updates. However, you’ve also opened
your business up to more opportunities and functionality.
“While the initial expense
was higher than getting us up
and running with Shopify, the
lifetime expense of Magento is
going to be much lower for us.”
The most common raves:
LEARN MORE ABOUT ATAK
WWW.ATAKINTERACTIVE.COM
1-855-472-1892 / INFO@ATAKINTERACTIVE.COM / 941E. 2ND STREET #201 LOS ANGELES, CA 90012
“Setting us up on Magento
meant that we could grow the
business much more easily,
from one platform that was
ready to expand when we
were.”
“Migrating to Magento after
we had started our store and
grown our business would
have resulted in an even
more expensive, complicated
migration.”
Was the move worth it?
Ask a business owner if the move to Magento was worth
the work and expense, and most will say,
“Yes!”