Migrating from Magento Go to Magento Community

You’ve probably already heard the big news: Magento Go will be shutting down for good on February 1st of 2015. You’ve probably also heard that if you’re a current user of the e-commerce shopping cart program, you’re faced with an important decision that requires action sooner rather than later.

If you’re a current subscriber of Magento Go, one of the first options you were probably presented with is migrating from Magento Go to another Magento program, such as Magento Community. Below are some tips, suggestions and details for migrating from Magento Go to Magento Community.

What Community Has That Go Doesn’t

Magento Go is designed for small-scale retailers and local storefronts, so until the announcement that it will be closing out on February 1st, this program was ideal for many small businesses. However, even though Magento Go is reaching its end, there are still some mentionable features to Maneto Community that Go isn’t equipped with:

1. A Wide Range of Add-ons and Themes

Magento Community is created from open source code, so the basic framework of the program is free. What costs money is everything you choose to add on to your storefront and shopping cart, which can become costly. However, there are a lot of different customizable widgets, background tools and useful subprograms to fit the specific needs of your business.

Magento Community also allows for thousands of different themes for customizing your e-commerce storefront. If you’re used to using Magento Go, you’re probably used to the set of around 50 different themes to choose from with your online shopping cart. Migrating from Magento Go to Magento Community would mean being able to access an enormous library of different store themes.

2. Multi-Stores

If you have the need for multiple storefronts, which quite a few retail outlets do, Magento Community allows for multi-stores with shopping cart technology. This can come in handy if you’ve previously been using Magento Go and have been limited to a single storefront.

3. More SEO Capability

Since Magento Community is open source, it allows for more SEO-friendly content and site development. Community allows for access to both .htaccess and robots.txt.

Especially with the prevalence of online shopping these days, having a website and online store that are search-engine-friendly is huge. You want to make sure that wherever you choose to migrate to from Magento Go, the new program you utilize is designed with SEO capabilities in mind.

SEO is one of our specialties, and we can help your business or website be optimized to the max for search engines. Find out more here.

Making the Switch

When considering switching from Magento Go to Magento Community, keep in mind that the main component of Magento Community is the open-source nature of the e-commerce service. If you don’t consider yourself or someone on your team to be tech savvy, Community might not be the best choice, especially if you’re used to Magento Go and the simplicity of store maintenance and services.

Contact us at Coalition Technologies if you’d like to discuss your options in migrating from Magento Go. Our team has worked with Magento since its creation, and we understand the framework inside and out. We also have partnerships with other major shopping cart providers like Bigcommerce and Shopify, so we would be happy to make a custom, expert recommendation to meet your specific needs. Contact us today.

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