Migrating your website onto shopify
- Readtime: 4 mins
- Techlevel: low
- Keypoint: choose your CMS based on your business needs, not a PowerPoint presentation
- all products
- all your customer details.
- accountability — Shopify are accountable for the upkeep and security of their eCommerce platform
- continuous support, and
- hosting is included in the subscription cost.
CMS platforms go in an out of popularity over time. An example of this is Business Catalyst which was backed by Adobe - a world leading software solutions company.
Now that Business Catalyst (BC) is shutting down, the question is where to migrate next? Business Catalyst was a create solution for small to medium sized businesses. As of the time of writing this article - 2017, there are products and systems that would be a great solution for small to medium sized businesses.
It's impossible to predict what will happen in the future with these types of systems. Adobe BC was a Software as a Service (SaaS) product. A prominent SaaS e-commerce solution right now is Shopify. Since it's an SaaS product, it's fully hosted which means there's no ongoing need to focus on the maintenance and patching of the system. It's extremely popular, with 690 000 live websites that use Shopify (as of 2017). However, in five to ten years, who knows what will happen. As of today, it's an excellent SaaS ecommerce solution.
Migrating your website into Shopify
We can set up a new shop for you in Shopify using one of the many Shopify templates (see the costs of hosting your shop through Shopify).
Contact us for a customised quote to suit your business requirements.
We can then migrate all your products out of Business Catalyst and into Shopify. This includes:
Client feedback
What you'll see: Project owners talking about the customer service they received.
Benefits of a hosted eCommerce solution
Some of the benefits of an SaaS include:
Pros and cons of ecommerce options
| Magento |
Neto |
Shopify |
BigCommerce | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business location | Sydney | Brisbane | United States | United States |
| Australian servers | Yes | Yes | No but they have a CDN that spans the globe including Australia | No |
| PCI compliant | Depends on host. Polished Pixels offers PCI compliant hosting | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Level of PCI compliance | Depends on host. Polished Pixels offers Level 2 | Level 2 | Level 1 | Level 1 |
| Automation with Aus post courier | No but configurable with customisation / addon (extra time and effort involved) | Yes | No but configurable with customisation / addon (extra time and effort involved) | No but configurable with customisation / addon (extra time and effort involved) |
| Automation with Aus post calculator | No but configurable with customisation / addon (extra time and effort involved) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Australian support | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 24 hour support | Depends on host. Polished Pixels does not offer 24 hour support. | No - only business hours | Yes but not Australian based | Yes but not Australian based |
| Support available | Depends on host. Polished Pixels offers business hours Australian phone, email and in person. | Australian based Phone and email | phone, email or chat. Phone is through the Philippines so the phone connection is not great | phone, email or chat. US or Au |
| Re-occurring payment supported | Yes | No | Yes | Yes w/ extension |
| Digital magazine files (PDF) support | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Eway support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Stripe support | Yes w/ extension | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | No | No | No |
| Drop shipping integration | Yes w/ extension | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hosted and maintained / upgraded | Depends on host | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Discounted Australian Post costs | No | No | Yes | No |
| Cost of Stripe included | No | No | Yes | No |
Business Catalyst to another CMS
As for businesses that weren't using the eCommerce feature of Business Catalyst, and were using it more as a CMS, there are a number of other CMS options available. Business Catalyst was a Software as a Service (SaaS) product. If you wanted to stay with the SAAS model, then another CMS that's very similar to Adobe Business Catalyst in many ways is Kentico. Like Business Catalyst, the features or components of Kentico are very well integrated with each other out-of-the-box, which is important for:
- speed of set up
- ongoing management and
- ease of use.
If you wanted to go with an Open Source model, then Squiz CMS is an excellent enterprise class CMS.
Wrapping up
History of Adobe Business Catalyst
Ten years ago competitors to Business Catalyst such as Shopify, Big Commerce, Weebly, Square Space etc (the list goes on), either didn't exist or were still in their infancy.
Even with Shopify - right now it would be a great solution for many businesses - but no one can guarantee that systems like these will be around forever.
Adobe Business Catalyst used to be a product called Good Barry, which was an Australian company. It was a great product because it was a low maintenance alternative to WordPress. It was secure, it was hosted, which meant that business owners could focus on promoting their products, rather than getting entangled in the technology complications that can come with building a website.
The main advantage of Adobe Business Catalyst was that it was a fully integrated solution. That is, you didn't have to plug and stitch together a whole stack of plugins and add-ons. Business Catalyst already had all the most popular and common tools, out of the box, and it was fully integrated around a CRM (a Customer Relationship Management system). Adobe BC was never an enterprise class CMS, but it was scalable for small to medium sizes businesses because you could turn on and off features if you didn't need them.
If you are interested in getting your e-commerce website migrated out of Business Catalyst and into Shopify, please contact us.
