‘Why is it so expensive to pay a developer to migrate my store?’
Migration
First of all ‘migration’ is a misleading word as there is no magic button. Migrating from one e-commerce platform to another simply means building the whole site again.
The devil is in the detail
Re-creating a website design to match its present state often means catching up with several years of design tweaks and modifications by the site owner. For example, if a site owner has added extra images, links, videos or html styling, these areas have to be first identified and then re-created manually.
In other words your site design doesn’t truly end at the homepage.
Exporting and Importing Products
Product data – Product Name, Description and Prices, are exported into a CSV and then re-imported into the new software but all extraneous html has to be stripped out before a clean import can be achieved. This html then has to be re-created manually (See last paragraph)
Shipping, taxes and countries
These settings can often be quite complex and the new platform may handle these differently – no two platforms are ever truly ‘like for like’
Cross Browser Testing
Everything also has to be thoroughly tested across IE, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome for layout and functionality.
I hope this helps to explain a little
Typically most e-commerce sites have one shared help page for returns policy, shipping details and terms and conditions. I have just seen the newly redesigned (again) ebuyer.com website and the help section gets in own drop down. They have broken down the help pages into 5 sections and then also a page for contacting them via a form, e-note and forums.
