Migration season has arrived — but this time, it won’t feature feathered fowl flying south for Winter. Instead, this migration season will see thousands of businesses making the switch from Magento 1 to Magento 2, as Magento ends support for all 1.x versions of their software in June 2020.
Migration isn’t without hurdles. Upgrading to the newest version of the platform means spending time, money, and energy on moving your organisation’s website to the new version of the eCommerce platform, building new themes from scratch, and dealing with new extensions and SEO indexing issues.
The good news? Along with its own fair share of challenges, migration also comes along with a host of benefits and advantages.
Sites on the Magento 2 platform, for example, will see up to 50% faster loading times, as well as improved responsiveness on many platforms and channels. The update also includes a more intuitive and user-friendly admin panel, increased flexibility, and enhanced security, along with several other new B2B and B2C features.
This may all sound a bit daunting, but Product Information Management (PIM) solutions, like Akeneo, can help make the process less changing. Here, Akeneo brings you 5 ways a PIM solution can help make your Magento migration efforts go over without a hitch:
1. Make it easy
PIM solutions like Akeneo PIM are designed to make the process of managing product information easier — and that includes migrating to Magento 2. Organizations using a PIM complete the migration process by simply importing product data from Magento 1 to Akeneo, enrich the data, and re-export it to Magento 2. This keeps the migration process super easy and clean!
2. Ditch the duct tape
Simply enriching data isn’t enough, however. You must also ensure you aren’t leaving gaps in product data by providing incorrect information — or worse, giving customers inaccurate or inconsistent product information. Stop making “duct tape fixes” to product data in your eCommerce platform, and instead, take the time to enrich product data in the PIM and start over with a clean database.
3. Implement good (data) governance
Once your data is clean, correct, and complete, you need to institute good data governance policies and processes. While this may seem like an overwhelming task in and of itself, it’s crucial to offering customers a compelling experience. Doing so, however, requires a solid foundation of high-quality product data — which you can’t begin to build without a proper data governance policy.
4. Boost efficiency and productivity
With good data governance in place, your team should begin to realize the potential of your PIM — especially when it comes to productivity. Magento is not a place for marketers and is not designed to work deeply on product information. PIM helps eliminate menial, meaningless tasks, leaving marketers free to focus on adding compelling information and data to products.
What’s more, Akeneo PIM also comes packed with features designed to improve and even automate your processes and workflows. This helps save you time, ensures complete and accurate product information, and organize your team.
5. Ease expansion efforts
With automated workflow and improved processes in place, your organization can begin to use your PIM to widen your horizon and expand to international markets. Akeneo PIM includes localization and translation features designed to make cross-border expansion effortless. You can also seamlessly open new channels, embracing omnichannel commerce while improving your customer experience by providing a compelling product experience all across your channels.
Make migration simple
While migrating to Magento 2.0 will provide brands and retailers with a host of new features, capabilities, and improvements, making the switch can sometimes seem like an overwhelming task. But by leaning on a PIM solution, you can not only make the migration process easier than ever, but clean and improve the quality of your product information and data, increase efficiency and productivity and even pave the way for future expansions.
That way, migrating to Magento 2.0 won’t stop your organization in its tracks.
Interested in learning more about PIM? Download Akeneo’s PIM 101 eBook today.
This post has been written by:
Tanguy Meriadec, Sales Consultant at Akeneo
Want to learn more about M2 migration?
Check out Akeneo’s blog for a guest blog post from Vaimo!
