Key Steps to Migrate to a New Auction eCommerce Platform

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migrating to a new auction platform

Video: Migrating to a New eAuction Platform

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Choosing the Right Development Team

Whenever a client team has an existing auction eCommerce or auction marketplace software and needs to migrate to a new system, it's important that they work with a partner who has the ability to bring all the relevant data over so they can continue to function their business seamlessly without any hiccups in the process.

In order to do that, it often requires a development team that is comfortable dealing with different technology than what they typically work with. The development team should be able to adapt to that technology so they can access the data.

It might be through a different type of data persistence layer, a different form of database, or there might be a different file structure for images, product data, spec files and spec documents, or any kind of supporting information, and primarily the data in the database, and/or via the API of the existing system that someone might be migrating from.

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Migrating the Data

With all of that, it's really important that the new eAuction eCommerce team be able to accommodate and work with whatever the client team is looking to bring over. In some cases, there isn't a need to bring much of anything over.

But in most cases, it is really important to bring over the existing customers, including their transaction history, and be able to pull in existing products and even previous auctions so that the sellers can just relist the auction. They shouldn’t have to recreate everything from scratch. They can just clone an existing auction and then modify it. These are all things that are really important to make it seamless whenever the new eAuction software goes live.

In particular, with a with an existing system, there may be data that’s very specific to that eAuction platform. The way that it's stored may be unique, so we recommend working with a development team that's comfortable with integrations and mapping and being able to work with very different systems.

data migration

In most cases, we've probably already worked/interacted with the alternative auction software that’s available, and made sure that we are comfortable with exporting the data because we've had to do that quite a bit in the past, with exporting from some of these SaaS based systems that only have APIs and bulk data exports, as well as the on-premises systems that might have SQL databases or SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server, etc.

We are comfortable interacting with those databases and determining what the data structure is so that we can review and map the fields appropriately to your new auction eCommerce platform, whether it's a B2C, C2C, or B2B auction model.

One of the key aspects of this and going through the different types of data is that we want to bring over all of the users and any user-specific profile information or fields that they've already filled out, especially for ratings and reviews, store information, seller or buyer information, and account verification to show they’re an accredited purchaser as they passed the certification process. It's also helpful to be able to keep the same username.

migrating the data

Of course, we recommend changing the passwords and not bringing the passwords over. In most cases, the passwords are hashed in such a way that we're not going to be able to export those. That is typically the only thing that we don’t recommend that we migrate.

Everything else can be migrated though, such as the email, the username, the contact info, etc., address, all of the order history, including the invoices and sales orders with all the line items, all the shipping and tax information, discount codes used, any of the auction history where we get detailed data on auction bids and who made the bids, as well as the categories, catalog structure, and product detail information for the auctions, and all the items that are used in the different auctions, and the ability to associate all of this to particular sellers based on the seller’s previous activity, as well as all of the site meta information so that we can ensure that the site itself is continuing to benefit from the organic SEO that would be expected for the site.

ENHANCE SEO AND PAGE RANKS

Setting Up for Success

In addition to that, we also recommend that whenever we do this site export, that we also do a full audit of the site’s performance from an advertising and SEO perspective and identify pages that are currently ranking that are used for advertising, and set up 301 redirects, aka permanent redirects, where needed, and/or canonicalized pages so that they are properly available for previous previously indexed and advertised URLs. And if there are new pages for certain topics, those new pages would get the domain and page authority from the search engines.

 

Migrate to a Better eAuction System

There's a lot of nuances that go into migrating a site. It's not just the auctions and the auction data. There can also be a lot of marketing information, other workflows that are part of the site, etc. We will work to identify that with you and the rest of your team so that we can ensure that there is a seamless process of transitioning from your existing auction eCommerce platform to your new auction and marketplace software that we’ll set up for you.