Magento is Closing the Doors on Magento 1

As the end-of-life date approaches for Magento 1, merchants still operating on the system should begin to think about what steps they need to take now to ensure a smooth transition. Magento 1 will cease to be supported at the end of June 2020. If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of retailers worldwide operating on Magento 1, you may be wondering how this will impact you and how you should proceed.

Magento 1 Sunset Coming Soon

When support ends, Magento 1 sites will become increasingly vulnerable to security threats and no further features or innovations will be added. This means the continued security of your customers and your business will be at risk.

How Will This Affect Your Business?
Magento 1 end of life doesn’t necessarily mean that your store will stop functioning after the prescribed date. However, you won’t receive any direct upgrades from Magento (And that’s dangerous).

Wondering what the possible options are?

1. Migrate to another platform
2. Continue commerce with Magento 1, Or
3. Migrate to Magento 2

Magento 1 to Magento 2 Migration

For those considering transitioning to Magento 2, retailers should view this as more than just a simple “version upgrade” or “migration.” Effectively, it’s an entirely new platform with substantial framework differences from Magento 1. In order to ensure success, you should treat the transition effort as a new build or rebuild effort. All extensions and custom code will need to be reviewed, rewritten, and made compatible with Magento 2 and more recent versions of PHP. These types of efforts are often large and involved, so begin the process and start upgrading now to make sure you have optimal time.

Retailers currently on Magento 1 are in a perfect position to reevaluate their eCommerce platform decision, considering multiple facets of the customer experience like on-site personalization and targeted marketing options.

Plan Ahead Now For The Transition

Most importantly, with only a little over a year to go, you should begin producing a business plan and put a schedule in place to replatform and transition your Magento 1-enabled eCommerce website to a new platform, either the Magento framework or another, with an aim to beat the summer 2020 support deadline.

Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform

Selecting the right eCommerce technology is critical to guarantee the success of any eCommerce website. With so many robust eCommerce offerings, it can be challenging to choose. As you consider upgrading your existing eCommerce platform or switching to a new platform, we’ve outlined a few key areas to steer your investigation that can help arm your decision makers and stakeholders with the necessary information to make this significant decision.

Every eCommerce platform touts their benefits and features, but let’s talk about the other factors that can go into making your decision. Failure to select the right technology could potentially damage your brand, impact your revenue, and even deter customers from ever returning.

Learn more about your options here: the Rainfire Media ecommerce platform comparison of Magento, Shopify and Woocommerce

What Does Your Catalog Look Like?

At the core of any eCommerce solution there’s a catalog of products and categories, depending on the platform selected there might be limitations that could prevent you from running your business effectively, for example, some of the SaaS solutions out there don’t allow for complex catalog taxonomies and limit the number of variants a product can have.

Therefore, we recommend asking the following questions when evaluating a platform:

• How many products do you want to sell online?
• Do you intend on displaying your full inventory or just a sample of your products?
• How complex is your product taxonomy?
• Are your products digital or physical?
• Are you using subscriptions, drop shipping, internationals sales?

You Need Room to Grow

Sluggish load times, frozen pages, and error messages are sources of frustration for the customer and will drive them away. Not only the platform but the solution as a whole needs to be able to grow along with your business, in a painless manner.

A good way to think about this is how would the eCommerce solution reacts to an unexpected spike of traffic like Black Friday or Cyber Monday for that matter, and how fast can it respond to unexpected situations. Other important items to consider are what kind of monitoring systems are available with the platform, what type of data storage do they offer, and does the platform offer multi-tenancy and multi-site.

Hosting is a major part of a robust system.

Cloud based solutions offer fail-over support and scaling options with increases in traffic. You may consider AWS elastic Beanstalk or other Azure cloud services to optimize performance and load balancing. An outside solutions provider may also be part of the overall solution as these systems are complex and need custom setting to work in each unique environment. Rainfire Media provides enterprise level solutions that are built on cloud based technologies that are tested for true performance.

Payment is a Critical Part of Experience

How you accept payment is a critical consideration when it comes to planning your ecommerce website. Security is not the only consideration here, but also what kind of experience we provide to the customer. Some SaaS solutions are limited on gateway support and workflows and might force you to implement a hosted payment page, which results in poorer customer experience and fragmented checkout. Therefore, a few items to consider here are; does the system support multiple payment gateways? Does the platform support credit card vaulting? Does your business have any special requirements around payments and authorizations?

It Takes a Village

Take a look at the ecosystem and community around these platforms, and look for signs of healthy collaboration, multiple vendors for a particular piece functionality, and a rich ecosystem that can allow you to respond to an ever-changing market.

Time is of the Essence

Timing is critical when it comes to getting your Magento store ready for EOL. The development of the new platform required for migration can take around two or more months to be completed. With June 2020 being the final deadline, ensure that you have sufficient time for the completion. Because It is important that the developers get ample time so that they are able to work methodically rather than hastily on the project.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
– Socrates