The Big Chalupa: How to Successfully Migrate a Large eCommerce Site

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June 15, 2010
Guest Post By Heather Rast, Director of Marketing at Clickstop, Inc.

50 Percent Planning, 50 Percent Execution

Some sites are easy to migrate. Those with little to no PageRank or few product lines make it relatively simple to set up shop on a new content management platform or shopping cart program.

Other sites can be much more complex for a myriad of reasons. History of the domain, the legacy shopping cart program, quantity of indexed pages, and fragile keyword positions. Given every eCommerce company’s quest for the SERP Holy Grail, significant changes to elements of a site’s framework can make brand managers, IT staff, and CFO’s alike jumpy, and for good reason. Google giveth, and Google can taketh away.

Never fear. With solid migration planning, prudent use of informative tools, consistent communication, and a phased approach, it is possible to migrate your baby without shuttering your e-business. Here’s how:

Case In Point: US Cargo Control

My employer, Clickstop, owns several brands in specialty categories. Branded products are available for purchase online and through our customer care center.

The flagship brand is a site which sells cargo control products, lifting slings, moving supplies, and rigging equipment. Customers range from an over-the-road owner/operator of a single rig to fleet owners and on to the U.S. Coast Guard. The site US Cargo Control went live in 2005 on the ZenCart shopping program. Over the past six months, Clickstop has steadily migrated its eCommerce sites to the NetSuite platform. The goal is to consolidate back-end processes for increased efficiencies, process gains, and more robust CRM capabilities. May 11 Clickstop launched US Cargo Control with a new design and back end.

In terms of what the migration entailed, consider this:

• Over 4,800 301 redirects from old site to new.
• Over 4,800 category, product, and information pages.
• Over 11,000 product images, illustrations, and supporting graphics.
• Approximately 3,500 individual products to create in the new shopping program.

How does a project of this size take flight? Here are a few tips:

It Takes A Village

Nancy was right when she suggested that responsibility for inciting growth and imparting change didn’t fall to a single individual. Migrating an existing Web site should involve people from the entire company, from front line staff to administrative and fulfillment persons.

1. Scrum the project. Scrum is a variation of Six Sigma and TQM principles primarily targeting agile software development. At its most basic, scrum is a method for identifying necessary work, establishing requirements, determining a priority, and consistently reporting (and evaluating) incremental progress toward goal within a pre-determined time frame called a sprint.

2. Identify project taskmasters. Leaders may not necessarily be the typical department management. This can give talented individuals a chance to rise to a new challenge within the team while providing management with some buffer from the tactical day-to-day work. Scrum relies on consistent interaction between contributing team members, usually in the form of twice-weekly stand-up (status) meetings. The meetings give taskmasters the chance to provide oversight and support while ensuring progress against goal.

3. Set reasonable objectives. Companies anxious to bask in the glory of what a more usable, attractive, and function-rich site has to offer might be tempted to set aggressive objectives and timelines, but that would be short sighted. In the early ease of practicing scrum, it’s important to set manageable timetables and expectations so that the team can achieve collective success. An overly aggressive timetable would invite naysayers and undue stress for some. A passive timeline could make some feel like they’re part of the never-ending project.

4. Define ‘done.’ Depending on your point of view, a site may be ready for launch when a customer can successfully check out 90% of the available products. For others, ‘done’ means the new site is ready when all aesthetics, styling, functionality, and back-end components work seamlessly. When planning the project sprint, leaders should collectively determine an acceptable release point, followed by an itemized list of tasks to accomplish or clean up in a subsequent sprint.

5. Test and retest. Few things are more stressful than performing under pressure, particularly when revenue is on the line. Don’t put yourself in the position of figuring out how to complete a sale of a product shipped to an APO box when the customer is on his cell phone in Russia at $.25 a minute in a different time zone. Don’t do it. The development team shares a lot of advantages by being intimately familiar with the project. But oftentimes, those removed from the project have a more objective point of view and can lend fresh insight. Especially if those doing the final-stage testing are the sales, customer service, and administrative folks who have to navigate the site daily.

The migration process for US Cargo Control took three months to execute once a visual design and information architecture was completed (add another three to six weeks, depending on stakeholder size). About nine people were involved, from company ownership to graphic designer and technical support. Resource commitment ranged from 20% of available daily hours to 100% and included one third-party application to estimate shipping charges.

A large site migration is definitely possible, and the sooner the project is taken on, the sooner your company can reap the rewards. Don’t forget the postmortem review as a way to capture feedback from the folks in the project trenches. The feedback you learn can be invaluable for the next project.

Heather Rast is Director of Marketing at Clickstop, Inc., a multi-brand, multi-channel merchant operating in several specialty categories including moving blankets, cat trees, and radiant barrier insulation. Clickstop’s goal is to grow sales and improve margins for its brands through strategic use of inbound marketing techniques. A seventeen-year veteran integrated marketer, Heather also writes the Insights and Ingenuity blog where she covers brand building, customer experience, and social media for business.