How to Switch and Migrate your old eCommerce website to a new Shopping Cart Elite Platform? [Shopping Cart Migration]
I pride myself to have gone through the extreme cases of Migrating an old eCommerce website to a new Shopping Cart (specifically Shopping Cart Elite). The results? You will want to read this post if you want to save A LOT OF TIME and MAKE A LOT OF EXTRA MONEY.
IN ADDITION WHILE WRITING THIS POST (IRONIC) I DISCOVERED A WHOLE NEW BUSINESS MODEL THAT WILL MAKE YOU MONEY! YOULL WANT TO READ THIS, BELIEVE ME!
Just so we are on the same page here is what my Shopping Cart Migration experience is:
Ive hard switched at least (5) of my own HIGH TRAFFIC website to a new Shopping Cart platform.
Ive hard switched at least a dozen Medium Traffic websites to a new Shopping Cart platform.
Ive helped at least a hundred clients Migrate to a new eCommerce platform successfully.
Ive created funnels from an old domain to a new domain while slowly migrating the website.
Ive created sub domains for new websites on existing old domains while keeping the old website.
So now that we are clear on my expertise, lets talk about Pros, Cons, Nightmares, Tips, How Tos, etc.
WHAT KIND OF ADVICE CAN YOU GIVE ME IF I WANT TO MIGRATE MY OLD SHOPPING CART WEBSITE TO A NEW ONE?
If your current website makes you money (regardless of the amount) you should consider the options in this post. Even if the website doesnt make any money but has at least 1000 unique visitors per month you should also consider your options.
My first take is if the website makes money or has high traffic just leave it alone and make a new website on a new domain or a subdomain. You can also decide if you want to turn off the ADD TO CART on the old website and start funneling the traffic to the new website if their are no to little sales on the old one.
WHEN WOULD YOU CONSIDER KEEPING YOUR OLD AND NEW WEBSITE?
If you REALLY HATE your old website because you want to renew your brand, change the look and feel of your company, and you really care about taking the old website down then you should consider the Pros and Cons of it:
PROS: Switch and your Done
CONS: You Can Lose some Old Traffic
CONS: Even if you dont lose old traffic, you would not gain new traffic (I will explain later)
Having done all possible variations here is my experience and what I would have done differently.
FIRST EXPERIENCE - HARD SWITCH WITH NO 301 REDIRECTS
When I switched my first website (which you are probably planning to do) I literally killed it. It wasnt a big deal because it was my personal Adsense website but still, I blame Google for misleading me. According to Google you can simply change your website address in webmaster tools and they will find all of your new content .WRONG!
The only possible way they would migrate the old content with the new content is if only your domain name changed and not your complete URLs which typically do when you switch Shopping Carts. So I thought they would find the new URLs and deindex the old URLs pretty quick.
Nope. not only did it take 3 months for them to deindex the old URLs, which completely killed the traffic because the traffic would reach a 404 page not found.
But after the new URLs were found, all of the old rankings dropped and never came back. I had to start ranking it all over again even though the content was 100% the same from both websites ANNOYING!
PROS: NONE! DO NOT DO THIS
CONS: KILL YOUR WEBSITE
SECOND EXPERIENCE - HARD SWITCH WITH 301 REDIRECTS
When we switched our first HIGH TRAFFIC website, we had developed a module called 301/404 REDIRECT in Shopping Cart Elite which would automatically funnel the traffic from the old URLs into the new URLs.
(Note: In addition if you ever change the product URL, or any URL in Shopping Cart Elite it automatically stores the old URLs and maps them to new ones to avoid Search Engine Traffic reaching error pages)
If your curious how that module in Shopping Cart Elite works here are two videos:
Risks you Face by Migrating Shopping Cart Website Video
How to Set up 301 Redirect App within Shopping Cart Elite
After this switch, what initially happened is the traffic actually grew in the first few months, we went from 1,500 daily unique visitors to 3,000 daily unique visitors. The problem was that whatever products we no longer carried, we mapped those URLs to the homepage. In the beginning those URLs would get traffic which would be funneled the homepage and it was great. But several months later Google deindexed those old urls that were mapped to the homepage and the traffic for those pages dropped off. Once everything was said and done, we were left with about 1,200 daily unique visitors due to the old URLs no longer indexing and since we removed products and didnt add new products it is perfectly understandable why this happened. Still sucks though in my opinion since those visitors may have bought something else.
PROS: Having one New Website
PROS: Save your Old Traffic as long as every single URL is mapped
CONS: Takes forever to map the URLs properly
CONS: You may lose traffic if you dont map all the URLs to new URLs
CONS: If you have an old website, you lose years of work which otherwise could have been saved if you had kept both websites
THIRD EXPERIENCE - LEAVE THE OLD WEBSITE & START A NEW WEBSITE ON A BRAND NEW DOMAIN
A client of mine said he wants ZERO RISK when it comes to losing old traffic and current search engine ranking. Even though I knew the 301 Redirect is Safe, there is still risk involved if he doesnt map all of the old URLs to the new ones or the old web pages may have slightly more unique content than the new one and the rank drops.
In addition some clients told me that their visitors love their (bad looking) old website and they didnt want to risk doing a hard switch to a new look and possibly losing business.
The first client we worked with that had this concern, I advised him to start a new website and funnel the old website traffic to the new website. Ultimately this worked very well for him and he was happy with the results. But there are Pros and Cons to this and I found an ever more ideal way to handle this.
Ex: thechromepros.com - OLD
Ex: thechromeprosfitment.com - NEW
PROS: NO Risk that your Old Website will lose anything
CONS: The new website has no ranking and you dont benefit from your SEO on the old domain
FOURTH EXPERIENCE - LEAVE THE OLD WEBSITE & START A NEW WEBSITE ON A SUBDOMAIN ** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED **
Honestly I have no idea why I didnt think of this before. IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE to simply start a sub domain on your existing HIGH TRAFFIC, OLD DOMAIN that has GOOGLE AUTHORITY and benefit from years of work plus the new content from the new website.
Think about it, you worked hard for years to build the new content, generate sales and generate traffic to your old domain name. Few years later your features and the look and feel of your website is outdated but you still have all this work that you completed. Why bother spending time thinking how to migrate, mapping URLs or risking losing all this work when you can keep it AND HAVE MORE NEW CONTENT on your HIGH TRAFFIC, HIGHLY SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED DOMAIN NAME?
If I was to take this approach in my second experience, I would have left everything as is and continued to get 1500 unique visitors. Then I would add all this new content, and instantly add another 500 - 1000 unique visitors JUST BECAUSE OF THE NEW CONTENT.
Then it would only grow from there I would have risked nothing for losing old business or old traffic and I would only gain.
Since I did not want the ADD TO CART on my old domain, I would simply create links from the product pages to my new website and strictly use the old website as a content library to funnel visitors to my new website as well as selling Advertising through Adsense. (I am planning to go back and sync the old content)
Sure it doesnt look as professional as it can be this way, but if you care less about your look and feel, and branding then do this option. If you rather make more money and get more traffic, this is an ideal solution. The best part is you can add a new store on a sub domain instantly and slowly work on funneling the traffic from your old website without affecting your daily operations.
THE MAIN BENEFIT YOU GET FROM ALL OF THIS IS ALL THE SEO WORK YOUVE DONE ON YOUR OLD WEBSITE, IS NOW TRANSFERRED TO THE NEW SUB DOMAIN BECAUSE YOU ARE STILL USING THE SAME DOMAIN NAME.
Ex: diamondhotrimz.com - OLD
Ex: store.diamondhotrimz.com - NEW
PROS: KEEP YOUR OLD TRAFFIC, AND YOUR OLD SALES
PROS: SUPER EASY, NO HASSLE, NO HEADACHE SWITCH
PROS: GAIN NEW SALES AND NEW VISITORS
CONS: HAVE TWO WEBSITES
CONS: Create banner advertisements or links to funnel traffic to your new domain
I JUST DISCOVERED A NEW BUSINESS MODEL (LITERALLY) WHILE WRITING THIS BLOG POST - (I amaze myself sometimes. This is why I love to write a blog it opens my mind as I speak to myself :))
My partner Tom has many Nissan Vehicle related niches. I am going to advise him publicly on this blog to take the parent company domain name (www.customenterprise.com) and create subdomains for each vehicle
nissanmaxima.customenterprise.com
or
maxima.customenterprise.com (to avoid trademark infringemene)
altima.customenterprise.com
sentra.customenterprise.com
etc.
NOTE: The beauty behind about sub domains, is if Nissan decides to file a trademark infringement on a subdomain, you can easily change the subdomain and keep your SEO ranking that you built up on the main domain (We can also map the old subdomain to a new one). However if they file the infringement on your domain name (because you used Nissan in the name), you will lose that domain name along with all your work that you put into it. In addition if you decide to start another store on the subdomain, you are already ranked for NISSAN and MAXIMA so you benefit for the NISSAN term and you simply need to do a few backlinks for ALTIMA.
TIPS: Shopping Cart Elite has an app called Data Sharing allowing you to have a master database on one website and sync the product data to any other Shopping Cart Elite website. So you can have CustomMaxima.com as the master database and leave the operations of it as is, add maxina.customenterprise.com and this will only benefit you from the additionally ranking and sales that customenterprise.com will provide.
In addition Tom can concentrate on the ranking of CustomEnterprise.com and fund a full SEO effort to gain its authority which will automatically pass it down to all the sub domains.
We may even experiment doing something like maxima.autoaccessorystore.com (On the other high authority domain Tom operates) and syncing the CustomMaxima.com data to that store AS WELL (It will be interesting to see what kind of results can be achieved using this method). I will keep this blog post updated with the results.
How about starting a NICHE BRAND WEBSITE for AEM or INJEN
aem.autoaccessorystore.com
injen.autoaccessorystore.com
etc.
AND ONLY HAVING THOSE NICHES ON THOSE SUB DOMAINS!
Realize that it would take $150 (one month of SEO that we provide) to rank injen.autoaccessorystore.com for the term Injen because of the thousands of the authority backlinks that already exist on AutoAccessoryStore domain versus creating a brand new domain which would take 6-12 months to get the same results.
Tom can also consider licensing out the virtual real estate space of his subdomain on AutoAccessoryStore.com for others to run their niche stores and use his ranking to get fast results. Its like buying a land and building a community around it where everyone has a house in their land, while you keep maintaining the land (via SEO).
Genius or What? - I think if Zac (coopscustoms.com) is reading this right now and experiencing an extreme A.D.D - Overdose with potential ideas of how he will create his empire and you should too.
Yes Shopping Cart Elite can handle the sub domain names for brand new standalone stores on your existing domain name and you can start your new store immediately with a discounted price if you already have one website with us.
MORE TIPS: Tom can also start a whole new vertical business model, by starting new niches on a subdomain and give them out to his Affiliates to operate and create good unique onpage content (since they are standalone stores) and with no effort these stores will rank very well.
To make a long story SHORT this is another GAME CHANGER by SHOPPING CART ELITE and about to change everything once again. It is time to join forces with someone who has a powerful, highly ranked domain name and really do some damage in Google.
IN CONCLUSION
If you have an opportunity like our Wheels clients do, to add another store on a sub domain of your website, you should do it RIGHT NOW! You risk nothing but you can benefit a whole lot. Since we start the website with full TURNKEY DATA, why would you not add all that additional content? Especially IF YOU ALREADY HAVE TRAFFIC and RANKING!
If you have any kind of opportunity to add a whole new store with data to your existing domain name, you should do it asap because you can only benefit from the increased traffic and sales.
If you want to learn more about Shopping Cart Elite visit our website.
UPDATES:
Found another way.
1. Leave your old web pages as is so they can still be located according to Google. Disable add to cart and direct people to the new sub domain store.
2. Add a sub domain for the new store
3. Change the homepage completely to make it a portal for a social website like ning.com, blog, and the store on the sub domain
What you will achieve is
1. Your old pages are on still indexed and driving traffic
2. Your homepage is re-branded to point to the new store and make your website more social / branded
3. Your new store pages are online
4. You keep the branding and dont lose the traffic.