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Migrating to ShopWired

With a detailed plan, migrating your current website/online store to ShopWired can be a hassle free process.

Below we have listed the steps that should be taken for a successful migration to ShopWired. We recommend that you follow the order of these steps, skipping any that aren’t relevant to you.

• Step 1 - Add your business information
• Step 2 - Configure your settings
• Step 3 - Increase store functionality
• Step 4 - Create categories and products
• Step 5 - Import customer information
• Step 6 - Choose and customize a theme
• Step 7 - Configure content pages and blog posts
• Step 8 - Set up the checkout process
• Step 9 - Set up 301 redirects
• Step 10 - SEO planning
• Step 11 - Change domain name settings
• Step 12 - Launch your website!


Step 1 - Add your business information

First, you should add your business’s information in the settings section of your account. You should add your contact details, your logo and any links to your social media pages.


Step 2 - Configure your settings

ShopWired has a range of settings that you should explore and configure to suit your business:

Taxes
Configure your sales tax settings to ensure you’re collecting tax when and where you need to be.

User accounts
Use the user accounts app, to allow users to access the aspects of your ShopWired account that you want them to see. How many user accounts you can create depends on the plan you choose.

Automatic emails content
Customize the content of any automatic emails that can be sent from your website (such as the ‘order confirmation’ email).

Visitor tracking
Set up visitor and conversion tracking code. We recommend you use Google Analytics.

Order PDF
Add your logo, company details, return address and any other information you want to the order PDF that is sent to a customer when they place an order.

Order status
Customize your account’s default order status to work with how you operate your business.

Cookie consent widget
Configure when you want cookie consent to be obtained.


Step 3 - Increase store functionality

To extend the functionality of your store, ShopWired offers a number of apps. Before continuing with your migration, we recommend you look through all of the apps to decide which ones are essential to your business at this stage. Installing these apps can affect other aspects of your migration, such as importing your product data. Before adding any products you should pay particular attention to the ‘Product enhancements’ apps.

Recommended apps for every store include:

All apps are free to use during the free trial period. While most apps continue to be free once you have signed up for a plan, some apps may incur a small monthly charge depending on the plan you choose.

A few apps may require some coding changes be made to your live theme in order to operate correctly. This will be clearly indicated on the app’s installation page.


Step 4 - Create categories and products

Next, you will need to create your categories and products within your ShopWired account. There are two ways you can do this:

  1. You can manually create each category and each product.
  2. You can use the category import system and the product import system to upload the data in bulk.

We strongly recommend you create your categories first.


Categories

Before you begin adding your data, you will need to consider what your category structure should be within ShopWired. Because other platforms may handle product categorization differently to ShopWired, you might need a slightly different category structure to what you currently have.

On ShopWired your category structure can consist of subcategories and parent categories. Click here for more information about determining your category structure.

To create your categories manually, follow the guidance found here.

To create your categories in bulk, follow the guidance found here for using the category import system.

If the platform you are migrating from offers a category export feature, you can use this export to help you upload your data to ShopWired. The export will need to be altered to ensure it meets the format requirements of ShopWired’s category import system.


Products

Once you have created your categories, you can then create your products.

To create your products manually, follow the guidance found here.

To create your products in bulk, follow the guidance found here for using the product import system, paying particular attention to the field guidance for the import.

If the platform you are migrating from offers a product export feature, you can use this export to help you upload your product data to ShopWired. The export will need to be altered to ensure it meets the format requirements of ShopWired’s product import system. The column headings in your export will need to be changed to match the appropriate column heading for the import.

If you have reviews for your products that you would like to import, you will need to install the product reviews app and then use the product review import system, following the guidance found here.


Step 5 - Import customer information

If you would like to move your customers’ data to ShopWired, you will need to use the customer import system. If you sell to other businesses (B2B), you should use the standard customer import system to import any retail customer data, but you will need to use the trade customer import system to import your trade customers.

If your current provider allows you to take an export of your customer data, then you can use that export to quickly complete this process. Once you have taken an export of your current customer data, you will need to ensure that the file is in the correct format, with the correct column headings, for successful import into ShopWired. You should follow the import guidance found here for retail customers and here for trade customers.

If your current provider doesn’t allow you to take an export of your customer data, you will need to manually enter the customer details into the spreadsheet.

For your customers’ security and data protection, passwords for your old website cannot be transferred to your new website. Instead, you should send an email to your customers, informing them that you've changed your website provider, so to access their accounts on your website they will need to reset their password by visiting www.yourdomainname.com/account/forgotten-password (replace yourdomainname with your actual domain name).


Step 6 - Choose and customize a theme

Without coding work, you can’t migrate a theme to ShopWired from another provider, so you’ll need to choose a ShopWired template theme and customize it to suit your brand. Alternatively, you could utilize the services of a designer and a coder to create something bespoke to your company’s needs.

ShopWired currently offers 20 themes for you to choose from, all of which are free of charge. You can install up to 8 themes in your account, but only one of them can be your live theme.

To customize your theme select Themes > Installed Themes from the menu. For the theme you want to customize (which is likely to be your live theme), select Theme Settings. The customizing options which are available to you will depend upon which version theme you are using. For version 4 themes please see the guidance here. For version 5 themes please see the guidance here.

If you are looking to customize your theme in a way that isn’t offered in the customizing options for your theme, we recommend contacting our development partner Coding Masters for a quote.


Step 7 - Configure content pages and blog posts

To transfer your content pages to your ShopWired website, you can copy the content from your previous website and paste it into the relevant page on ShopWired.

When your ShopWired account was created, the following content pages were automatically populated:

  • Terms & Conditions
  • Refund policy
  • Delivery policy
  • Privacy policy
  • About Us
  • FAQs

To find these pages select Website > View Pages from the menu. To add your own content for each page, simply select the page from the list, remove the content already in the ‘Content’ box and paste in your own. When you paste the content, you may need to adjust the formatting. If you don’t want to keep any one of these pages, you can delete it from the ‘Your Website Pages’ page.

Links to these pages are automatically created in the menus for your website. You can change your website's menus by following the instructions found here.

You can create a new content page by selecting Website > Create New Page from the menu. You would then need to link that page to a menu on your website.


Contact Us page

When your ShopWired account is created, a ‘Contact Us’ page is also populated. This page automatically displays the contact information you have added in the settings of your ShopWired account. To change the title, introduction and instructions that display on the page, you will need to edit the relevant text snippet in your theme settings.

The page also contains a contact form that your visitors can use. When a visitor completes this form, you will be sent an email to the email address configured in the email notifications settings of your account.


Blog posts

If you want to have a blog on your ShopWired website, you will first need to install the blog app.

For any blog posts that you wish to transfer to your ShopWired blog from your old website, you will need to copy the content from the posts and paste it into new posts in your ShopWired blog. You should check each post to ensure the formatting is what you want it to be.


Step 8 - Set up the checkout process

In order to accept payments on your website, you will need to configure delivery rates and set up at least one payment option for customers to use.

You can also configure specific settings for the checkout on your website by following the guidance found here.

Delivery rates

For customers to be able to checkout, you will need to configure delivery zones and rates. Delivery rates will need to be added to each delivery zone that you ship to. For an explanation of delivery zones please read the guidance found here.

Delivery rates can be based on either:
• The total weight of items in the customer's cart (you can also set a maximum cart value for each weight-based delivery rate)
or
• The total value of the items in the customer's cart (you can also set a maximum weight for each value-based delivery rate)

When the delivery rate exceptions app is installed, for each delivery rate you create, you can choose to make that rate only applicable to some products or choose to exclude some products from the rate.

In addition to delivery rates, you can set free delivery or a specific delivery charge for each product within your account.


Payment gateway

ShopWired integrates with over 40 payment gateways. You can see a full list here. Which payment gateways are available for you to use will depend on the region in which your store operates. You should register with and then configure each payment gateway that you want your customers to be able to use to pay you. You can add as many as you want.

We recommend that you use Stripe.

If the payment gateway that you currently use is not one that ShopWired currently integrates with, you can either switch to a payment gateway we do integrate with or contact us to see if we would be able to integrate with your current gateway (there would be a charge for this service).


Offline payment

If you want customers to be able to checkout without making payment through the website, you can enable an offline payment option for customers to select. To learn how to enable offline payment, please read the guidance found here.


Step 9 - Set up 301 redirects

You should set up 301 redirects if there are any URLs on your ShopWired website that are not the same as the URLs on your old website. This ensures that your customers won’t run into any 404 page not found error pages when clicking links in search results or in any advertisements you have taken out.

To learn how to set up your 301 redirects please read the guidance found here.


Step 10 - SEO planning

If your website has a good position in search results for particular keywords, you'll understandably want to keep those rankings. With a well-planned migration you should be able to keep those rankings, and in some cases possibly even improve them.

However, you should be aware that for the first few weeks after launching your ShopWired site, the rankings might be 'jumpy' and unsteady. This is normal and to be expected. Here’s our recommended process for keeping your SEO rankings:


Record your current rankings

Before launching your ShopWired site, you should record your current search ranking positions in a spreadsheet. When recording rankings it’s essential that you use a ‘private browser window’ to obtain an accurate representation of what your true rankings are. This is because search engines actively promote websites that you’ve previously clicked on in search results (so your search ranking would be artificially inflated when you view it normally). We recommend using a private browser in Google Chrome to record results. In your spreadsheet you should list each keyword, its position (don’t include sponsored adverts) and the date.

We also recommend taking a screenshot of important pages on your current website (such as your homepage) in case you need to refer back to them once you have launched your new website.


Build your website

Search engines look at a wide range of factors when determining where a website should appear in search results for a particular keyword. The most important factors are onsite content (how much keyword rich content you have) and offsite links (how many legitimate external websites are linking to your website). When migrating to ShopWired the offsite links to your website won’t change, but it’s essential to ensure that these links do not land on a 404 error page after migration. To avoid this you will need to ensure you have correctly set up 301 redirects if any pages on your website have a new URL.

As much as possible, you should try to preserve the content that exists on your current website. For example, if your current website has content on the homepage, then you should have the same content on your new ShopWired homepage. Content positioning is also important, as search engines place more weight on content that appears towards the top of the page. You should try to ensure that your content is placed in roughly the same position on your new website as it was on your old.

Additionally you’ll want to check these points for your new website:

  • Your site architecture - that the same pages are linked to in the same places as on your current website
  • Your site speeds - that the loading times aren’t too high for both desktop and mobile. You can use tools.pingdom.com to check your site speeds.
  • Your technical SEO - that your homepage and other pages have properly formatted title tags and meta descriptions. To set these tags you will need to install the free SEO control app.

After launch

After launching you should wait one week, and take a new record of your keyword positions. Then take a record each week for the next three weeks. After this four week period, search engines should have crawled all of the pages of your new website, so your rankings should have stabilized. Compare these rankings to the original positions (before launch).

If you find that for some keywords you have decreased in ranking by a position or two, then you don’t need to worry as there are possibly a few small tweaks you can make to regain those positions. Please contact us for assistance.

If you find that your results have significantly decreased, please contact us so we can help.


Step 11 - Change domain name settings

The final step before launching your website, is to change your domain name settings so they point to your new ShopWired website. These settings will need to be changed in the account that you have with the domain provider that your domain name is registered with.

Listed below are instructions for how to change your domain name settings for some of the most popular domain name providers:

• GoDaddy
• 123 Reg
• Fasthosts/UK Reg
• Names.co.uk
• 1&1
• UK2.net
• LCN

If you are using a domain name provider not listed above, please read the guidance found here.

If you have trouble changing your domain name settings, please contact us so we can help you.

Once you have changed your domain name settings, you should generate your SSL certificate, which is included for free with every plan.


Step 12 - Launch your website!

After completing steps 1 - 11 your store and website will now be ready to launch! If you would like a member of our onboarding team to review your website before you launch, please contact us.