Data Migration For Ecommerce Projects – Lessons Learned & Key Considerations
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Data Migration For Ecommerce Projects – Lessons Learned & Key Considerations

In this ecommerce podcast, hosts Paul Rogers and James Gurd discuss lessons learned handling data migration for a wide range of ecommerce projects, explaining the different data types you need to consider and providing advice.

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Data migration is an essential part of all site migrations. However, it’s not always focused on enough during Discovery resulting in a lack of detail in statements of work, which can cause problems further down the line in the project, for example scope and cost creep..

In this ecommerce podcast, Paul & James share their advice and project experience, discussing what a good data migration looks like, covering the different types of data businesses need to plan into their migration and what to look out for to do this effectively.

Tl;dr – what we cover:

  1. Why you need a detailed plan to migrate data
  2. What you need to migrate and why: customers, orders, products & other essential data points
  3. Key considerations for your project & lesson learned

Key Discussion Points

  1. Why is this important to define before you start your project?
    • Set expectations for your dev partner & ensure it’s covered in scope
    • Be clear who is responsible for what e.g. if migrating from proprietary to modern SaaS, what data & format the data is needed in & when needed by
    • Roles – can take a lot of time
    • Compliance: know what data you’re legally required to maintain
    • Customer Service: what do they need to effectively service customers & handle queries
    • Revenue: ecommerce data you need to sell products/services online
    • Variables around third parties and not understanding platform
  2. What should you migrate?
    • All orders or only the recent history: how does a partial migration impact LTV and lifecycle marketing?
    • All customers: maker sure you’ve got a clean data set before porting them across, consider purging obsolete data
    • All products – as much as possible while keeping clean
  3. Who should be responsible for migrating data?
    • Order and customer just needs to be someone good and experienced, with time to spare
    • Testing is key
    • Product – like to have the client team heavily focused on this. We’d usually do to ensure that all opportunities are taken advantage of and also so all considerations are factored in – e.g. new attributes for new third parties, or data impact on categories etc etc – new platform may work differently
  4. What are the opportunities around data migration for a business
    • Clean up + remove errors etc
    • Improve team knowledge
    • Unify people around improved data standards
    • Make more consistent across systems
    • Further enrich from what you already have
  5. With the catalog migration, what SEO considerations are there?
  6. What else needs to be considered?
    • ESP / CRM for order and customer – need to ensure that data is same format / fields etc – data needs to be mapped
    • ERP / business systems – often need an identifier migrated across, important to unify etc
    • Third parties with catalogue: migrate for things like on-site search & product recommendations history
    • Gift cards, promo codes & store credit

Want to suggest a topic or guest for a future episode? Contact us via the website or on Twitter.

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