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:
- Why you need a detailed plan to migrate data
- What you need to migrate and why: customers, orders, products & other essential data points
- Key considerations for your project & lesson learned
Key Discussion Points
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- With the catalog migration, what SEO considerations are there?
- 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.