Bigcommerce Takes Over as Magento Go & Prostores Shut Down

The two eCommerce platforms – Magento Go & ProStores, owned by the largest retail division eBay Inc, are going to shut down the online shops of more than 10,000 online merchants on Feb 1, 2015. Both the platforms catered to small & mid-sized businesses across the globe providing software-as-a-service, precisely a hosted eCommerce solution. eBay has selected Bigcommerce – the fastest growing Sydney based eCommerce enterprise as the transition SAAS provider to migrate all the affected online merchants.

Mark Lavelle, eBay Enterprise head of product & strategy, said in a conversation – “Magento is dedicated to helping fast-growing retailers succeed. We chose Bigcommerce to help with the transition because of their shared commitment to client success & their proven track record of migrating large groups of merchants onto their platform.”

How big is the acquisition deal for Bigcommerce ??

Bigcommerce already counts more than 50,000 online retailers in 25 industries across 100 countries & the total sales of all merchandise sold on eCommerce stores is about to touch $4 billion approximately.

In a news posted on Wall Street Journal nearly 15 days ago, it was revealed that Bigcommerce signed an agreement with Global Payments Inc, one of the largest worldwide providers of payment solutions, to grow its business by leaps & bounds. In view of this, the partnership deal put forward by eBay to acquire nearly 10,000+customers of Magento Go & ProStores is like icing on the cake for Bigcommerce – a golden opportunity to expand its customer base fast.

In an interview, Eddie Machalani, CEO of Big commerce said – “We are prepared & excited to work with ProStores & Magento Go merchants to help them continue their success using the Big commerce platform. We understand that the to-do list for small business owners is never ending, and our teams are standing by to deliver the very best migration & on boarding experience so merchants can focus on growing their businesses.”

What eBay is doing to ensure smooth migration of its clients from Magento Go & Prostores to Bigcommerce or other new platforms ??

To ensure customers can plan the transition before Feb 2015 (~7 months), eBay is making efforts to help its clients decide what to do next & migrate their stores without any hassle. Here are the offerings the company plans to provide as of now.

1. Customers of both the platforms who plan to stay with the hosted ecommerce solutions can choose to migrate to Bigcommerce subscription-based SAAS plans that are similar to what they used to avail earlier from Magento Go or Prostores.
   The transition will be free for all the customers who plan to go with Bigcommerce. Plus, they can take advantage of the checklists, planning resources & special offers updated on Magento Go Migration center & Prostores Migration center respectively, before taking transition to any new ecommerce solution.
2. For those merchants who are looking forward to self-hosted eCommerce solutions & consider themselves the right fit for Magento EE or CE editions, they can upgrade to these more flexible platforms & can take advantage of the migration support and migration tools on Magento ecommerce extension library. Alternatively, you can also hire Magento ecommerce development company offering customization & migration services at an affordable cost.

What Bigcommerce has in box for Magento Go & Prostores customers ??

1. Securely hosted eCommerce tools with 100+ features included right from the start
Bigcommerce gives you a fully packaged eCommerce solution for inventory management, order management & purchasing management with nearly 10 hosted eCommerce tools that includes a mobile-optimized website, a domain name for your online store, a CMS with WYSIWYG editor, a built-in blog, fully-featured shopping cart, product catalog; secure payment gateway& multiple email accounts.

2.Built-in SEO & Exclusive Marketing Tools

With discount options & coupon codes, social media integration facility, newsletters for email marketing, automatically generated customer lists & tens of exclusive features like abandoned cart saver etc; Bigcommerce gives you more marketing tools than anyone else can.

3.Best in-house support

Bigcommerce has a dedicated support team that can help you with everything –from setting up your store to importing products & fixing other bugs, inventory issues or payment transactions. With 500+ support articles, detailer tutorials, webinars from experts & an online community of hundreds of store owners; they’ve got you covered.

How to plan successful migration for your online shop ??

As a consequence of the sudden shutdown, we’ve got more than 100 migration requests from Magento Go & Prostores clients asking to suggest a better solution, recommend a successful plan& transit their store as soon as possible. Our Magento ecommerce development team of more than 20+certified professionals have already migrated more than 50 stores successfully without affecting the inventory & sales. When one of our clients asked to share the strategy we’re using for data migration & design migration, I along with my team of ecommerce development experts decided to sum it up as follows and also share some tips to help other online businesses.

Step 1 –Analyze your current e-shop & decide whether you would like to go for self-hosted solutions (licensed & open source) or fully-hosted ecommerce solutions (SAAS)

What we recommend–If you’re planning to add more & more customers and invest big in your current venture to turn it into a million dollar business in near future, you can go for the free Magento Community Edition (open-source) or the paid Magento Enterprise edition. For this solution, you will require expert services & you may need to hire dedicated Magento developers to make your online business a huge success. But if you are a small-sized online retail business, it will be a smart move to stick to the hosted solutions & go for Bigcommerce. If Bigcommerce doesn’t seem a good fit, you can plan for another popular ecommerce solution – Shopify.

Step 2– Choose an external vendor for successful migration

What we recommend – Be careful while deciding the vendor to avail migration services for your online shop.Hand over the work only to an ecommerce development company who has prior experience of migrating shopping carts successfully& is ready to provide best post-delivery support. If you’re unsure of any such company providing expert services along with 24 X 7 support, you can contact us & our technical team will assist you.

Step 3–Ask your vendor to test everything before going live with the new store & don’t forget to run a mini-check yourself too.

What we recommend – Once everything’s up, make sure your vendor carries out a complete check before launching it. After this, you can yourself run a couple of mini-checks to see whether your store is running successfully. This can be done by inviting some friends, family or loyal customers to shop from the store & send you the feedback.

The Final Note

Ecommerce platform Migration is not a cakewalk. Besides your hundreds of dollars, your hard-earned customer reputation is at risk. Make sure you go through wisely & as painlessly as possible.