You might have a lot of reasons for Magento 2 migration, in other words, a big WHY to do it. However, you may get mad sometimes due to a huge amount of information needed to migrate or tons of related work. We used to be in such an uncomfortable situation but then we found a way to simplify the process. Let us share with you our story which can help you ease the Data migration Magento 2 process to enjoy the power of such robust platform.
1. Customer overview – Data Migration Magento 2
In the article of Magento 2 migration: How difficult is it, we explained roughly the complexity of data migration. Although we have migrated data from a lot of different systems to Magento, this is one of the most memorable projects as the project seemed to be easy at the beginning turned out more complex at the last minute.
Online and offline stores
To start, this client is a retailer running a business in the wine industry. He has 2 physical stores in the US and 2 websites on Magento 1.9 CE. He has operated his business for about 15 years and has used the Microsoft POS system since the beginning. He built the first website 13 years ago and the 2nd website 4 years ago. As these 2 websites are used for 2 different target customers, there’re only a few shared products between the 2 websites, so it’d be better to build a separate Magento server for each. It seems to be true at that moment that, this is not a big problem from the end customer’s side (the visitor’s side). However, when he had more and more shared products, he encountered difficulties in uploading the duplicate data. Plus, he planned to fulfill online orders from both locations but the 2 Magento servers couldn’t help him realize that customers cannot get stock availability updated properly in real-time.
But at least, these websites are connected to the Microsoft system in terms of a few important fields then the store owners can centrally manage data in one place. Specifically, the fields which are synced between 2 systems are customers, products, and sales orders. However, the reward points customers earned through offline channels cannot be synced to the Magento site so customers cannot enjoy any loyalty program when buying online.
Problems the customer had with Data migration Magento 2
At the end of Magento 1 life cycle in 2019, taking advantage of upgrading the site from M1 to M2, John – the store owner has thought about changing the old system to the new one comprehensively. Therefore, he has started to do research and plan to apply the Omnichannel Strategy for his business.
In about October 2019, he came to us to check our POS Omnichannel Solution. He then decided to leave the old system for Magestore POS which natively integrates with Magento. It means, he had to migrate all data from different systems (including data from 2 websites on 2 Magento servers and Microsoft system) to Magento 2 central system. Meaning, we first had to migrate the shared data from Magento 1 directly to Magento 2 such as Products, customers, sales orders and remove the duplicated data of 2 Magento sites. Second, we needed to migrate data that are not synced between Microsoft and Magento 1.9 sites (eg: Suppliers, pricelist of suppliers, etc.) to Magento POS Omnichannel system. Please note that migrating data from M1 to M2 is always easier than migrating from another system (such as the Microsoft system) because Magento has a similar database structure between versions.
However, the sales season came quickly and he was busy with Black Friday then Christmas as it was the holiday season. He only could get back to us at the end of January, but, the Magento system had issues and stopped to sync to the Magento system since Nov 2019. In this case, the only approach is to migrate data directly from the Microsoft system and 2 Magento servers. Then we have to answer the following questions.
2. Which data did he need to migrate?
Based on his sharing, we supported him to confirm the data fields needed to migrate by the following checklist:
- Customers
- Orders
- Product
- Product image
- Purchase Order
- Supplier list
- Pricelist and product list of suppliers
- Stock in each warehouse
- Reward Points
3. Data record and synchronization
Better illustrated questions are Which system are data recorded in and how is the data recorded in each system as well as synced between Microsoft and 2 Magento servers?
To answer these questions, we also need him to export data from Microsoft and check Magento backend carefully. John is not a technical guy so he’s not familiar with exporting data from the old system. We supported him by Teamviewer to export data from Microsoft and as a store owner, he understood his business so well in terms of business operation. This helps us a lot with understanding the meaning of each field in each system clearly.
Specifically, for this process, we inspected his old system carefully and posed a lot of small questions internally and externally. You can consider them as a checklist in the process of Data migration Magento 2. Here comes the question list:
· Product ID of 2 websites can be different from Magento and we still need to migrate from Microsoft => Which website does this product belong to?
· Which fields in Microsoft filed are linked to the corresponding fields in Magento site?
· Which fields in each kind of data (Product, Customer, etc) can we remove when migrating data?
· When we set up 2 Magento sites in the same Magento server, should we enable or disable customer account sharing for 2 websites?
· After we migrate products and customers, we can start migrating the orders => Where can we find orders/payments/shipping methods in Microsoft? Which field can we remove or replace during migration to save the fee? (E.g: shipping method with detailed info: by DHL/FedEx, tracking number, etc of the old orders are unnecessary for migration or we can simply label all of them as 3PL shipping)
4. Workload of the data:
· How many rows of data in each type do we need to migrate?
· Can we do migration for that kind of data manually or should we build tool to import them?
It takes us a few weeks to work on client’s old system to clarify everything clearly and confirm the data he wants to migrate or accept to remove. Finally, all of data is properly migrated to the old system, although longer than expected, is guaranteed with accuracy. Now, John can easily set up everything quite quickly, control system in one place and develop his business with Omnichannel Strategy more powerfully than ever. If you’re using other platform and would want to move to Magento, don’t hesitate to discuss with us for a proper data migration process by a talk with our consultants.
