PlayAbly Episode 5: Avoiding Costly Mistakes in Shopify Migrations: Insights from PlayAbly’s CEO

In this episode of the PlayAbly podcast, CEO John Cheng joins us to dive into the complexities of website migration, particularly for ecommerce brands transitioning to Shopify. Drawing on his background from Unity and years of experience in the gaming industry, John shares insights into the most common pitfalls ecommerce businesses face when migrating platforms—especially when moving from WooCommerce or WordPress to Shopify.

Listen as John discusses real-life horror stories from brands that underestimated the technical intricacies and explains why a well-planned migration strategy is essential to avoid losing SEO, conversion rates, and more. Learn how to identify a reliable migration partner, the importance of QA processes, and how to make the most of your migration for long-term growth and optimization.

Whether you're considering a platform migration or in the midst of one, this episode provides actionable advice for protecting your business during this crucial transition.

For more insights and to explore how PlayAbly can help optimize your ecommerce experience, visit PlayAbly.ai.

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Transcript

PlayAbly Podcast Episode 5: Avoiding Costly Mistakes in Shopify Migrations: Insights from PlayAbly’s CEO

Kajal: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the next episode of the PlayAbly podcast. You guys are in for a special treat today. Joining me is PlayAbly founder and CEO, John Cheng. John, can you introduce yourself and your background a little bit so people get to know you? 

John: Hey everybody. Excited to be here. PlayAbly is not just a company for us, but a a team and family that's worked together for.

Many years across many different companies, our team and our background actually comes from the gaming space, a company called unity where I ran machine learning and AI and where we built games and an ad platform that were specific to game developers. And we have taken everything we've learned there, our engineering team, our design team, and our know how.

And we're taking that and applying that to e commerce applying that to brands to help them to grow with, [00:01:00] novel, exciting new ways to engage their audiences just like game developers do. And we're really excited with everything that we're building for you guys.

Kajal: Thanks, John. And today we are talking about site migration. I think we've seen a trend of a lot of the clients that we work with and a lot of other companies that we're talking to making the move from WooCommerce, making the move from WordPress over to Shopify.

And these are existing brands that are doing, 50, 000 a day, 100, 000 a day in sales and don't want to lose what they've already built up. Don't want to have the customers have a bad experience. And we've heard some horror stories and experienced some horror stories. So that is what we're talking about today.

John, what are the biggest mistakes that eCommerce makes when doing Shopify migration Yeah, 

John: unfortunately, we have seen this happen more often than not. [00:02:00] Which is we get brought into brands who, have a brand new Shopify site or in the middle of a migration and they just realize that the conversion rate has dropped off a cliff or that checkout isn't working or that, the load times are actually double what they were with the old site and in a panic.

They're looking to roll back to what they had before, even though they spent 50, 75, 100, 000 on the migration. Because fundamentally the work that was done didn't take into account that what's happening is you have an operating business. You are in a position, as you're saying, where you're driving substantial sales, people are interacting with your site.

And so what you're doing is trying to Chenge the wheels, Chenge the tires on a car that is currently driving. And you can't do that piecemeal, you can't do that without a fully formed [00:03:00] plan. You can't do that in a way that doesn't account for the fact that There are live experiences going on 24 7 and anything you do could affect that and could affect.

Your bottom line in a way that's really painful. So the biggest mistakes we see quite simply are that these these projects are done in a haphazard manner without planning for things like qa. Without paying for things like code backup and release patterns and frankly aren't done on an iterative way in an iterative process without the testing ahead of time.

So maybe we'll have a chance to talk about like best practices when it comes to some of the data things that we'd like to see happen, but just from a fundamental technical perspective. You have to plan how the code is going to move, what pieces are going to move, and in what order, and how they're going to be tested for, for months before you actually write a line of code in Shopify, right?

[00:04:00] So that's what we see that doesn't happen. We see firms come in and promise that they will move a site over in three weeks. From end to end and we look at that and we're just like, that is impossible because you have a business that, you know, with a certain degree of uptime that needs to happen and we come from the gaming space, like I mentioned, where These games are live operations and they're driving millions of dollars in sales a day and the amount of planning and execution needs to happen to, to do some of these port migrations it's a much bigger endeavor than I think a lot of a lot of the founders we talk to and work with are aware of before it happens.

Kajal: And I think we've seen it too, where companies come in and give a quote of, three weeks, as you said, two weeks, even a month, and haven't even seen the inside of their site yet. Haven't even gotten access to see how the site is set up because they know we've gotten into some customers [00:05:00] websites.

We're like, Oh, my gosh, there's a hundred plugins here. There's, all these things that are built on top of each other. And to just de-tangle that aspect of it before, give, being able to give a quote, whether it's monetarily or time-wise should, be a red flag. But I think it isn't for a lot of people, they hear three weeks or see a number that they can afford and then, wanna go ahead with it.

Who should e commerce owners look to, to do these types of migrations? 

John: It's hard, right? Because one of the things that most, that attracts most founders to Shopify is the fact that it is low code, right? The fact that you can get a lot done without having to write a lot of code coming from a Magento or a WordPress or someone like that, where you have a lot of code that you potentially had to deal with in the past looking for engineering teams that have experience with With code, but with a Shopify background, that's pretty [00:06:00] rare.

So what you want to do is evaluate. The questions that they're asking you to your point, Kajal, about what your site currently looks at, right? So if they don't have a 3 to 5 page questionnaire about your business, about your side, about the technology behind it, about the plug ins They're probably flying by night, right?

The they're going to be surprised, two weeks into the project when, as you said, there's 15 plugins just for the checkout process because you have a specific fulfillment partner or because you have a specific API that you tap into, and that's going to not only extend the amount of time that it's going to require for the transition, but.

They're also going to miss things, right? They're also not going to be able to transfer over critical business functionality that you're going to figure out, a month, two months later after the launch, isn't there anymore when for some reason, this product fulfillment or this pen is not being [00:07:00] fulfilled.

You're going to get a lot of nasty surprises, right? So the three things I would look for is number one, you've got to get references. You've got to see Sophisticated sites that they've moved what the starting project was and what the end product was number two You know think about and look at the questions.

They're asking you how sophisticated they are Does that show the experience that they're doing and number three? I would dive into that plan specifically along two points one of which is what is their qa process? What is the qa for the new build? That they're going to ask for. And number two, what is their launch plan?

Are they going to light this thing up three weeks from now? And suddenly you're going to move over to this new site and all is going to be well, or do they have an editor process where they're going to test pieces of the site with parts of your traffic? Are they going to move over the most visited pages in a systematic manner?

Are they going to iterate [00:08:00] those pages in a way that makes sense before there is a hard launch date. Several weeks down the line. Is that a system that they've developed or have they actually never done this in a way that actually makes sense? And to be honest, I think 99 percent of the projects we see don't have any of these things.

Kajal: Yeah, I know that one of our clients actually left and then came back to us what was one of these people who had one of these issues the GitHub. How important is GitHub? 

John: GitHub is, GitHub, GitLab, it's, source control is fundamental to software development. And. If you're not experienced or haven't developed a lot of software, you might think of it as a nice to have, whereas we think of it as mission critical.

So GitHub, it's just so you know, source control is the ability to capture versions of your site or capture versions of the [00:09:00] code. That not only track what Chenges have been made, but allow you to roll back to a previous version. If God forbid, something goes wrong with a site that you've launched.

So as most of Shopify does not have this natively built into it, but if you're running a million dollar, 10 million, 500 million business, like this is, table stakes. And the example I think you're referring to was a brand that wanted to save some money. Someone came in, made a bunch of promises about what they could do and how they're going to do it.

Promised a month, three months in, they finally get something launched and lo and behold, they figured out it was performing worse than not only the previous site, but the load times and the conversion rate were down significantly. So they said, Oh, We got to do something. We're going to miss our quarters numbers.

We, let's just go back to the old site. Number one, they didn't have the code stored. Number two, the theme had Chenged in terms [00:10:00] of what that old site was built on. And so they're caught between a rock and a hard place and not being able to do either one. And so in a panic, they called us up and calls it, can we actually do the project that we want to do?

It actually made it 10 times worse than that. They had this, now spaghetti code built. Site that was worse than their original site. But now that we had to untangle all that took twice as long, frankly, cost twice as more. Eventually we've got them to a place where, yeah, the promises of the Shopify platform were able to be unlocked.

But it wasn't, the walk in the park that they had been promised and that we had won them. 

Kajal: And I know during that migration as well, they had lost a lot of the SEO cloud that they had built up their SEO that had built up for them. Just, it wasn't something that was thought about over in the migration, the thoughtfulness.

And so their rankings went down and in a highly competitive space in which they were of like. Household feeding items, there [00:11:00] was direct competition and they at once were the giants there and now we've seen them drop. So I think it's important to have somebody who really understands all of the technical parts of the site.

John: Yeah. And I think SEO is a great example of that because yeah, the engines don't crawl every day. And then the algorithms don't take into account information. That goodwill that you've built up over the lifetime of your business. If you are to lose that, you might not ever get back to that same place that you were at before.

And you'll see that, the organic piece of your business informed the success of your paid and every other marketing strategy that you had. And so if you don't think about the keyword structure, if you don't think about the backlinks, if you don't have those planned in the new Shopify theme in a way That carries that over.

Yeah. You're destroying parts of your business that you've worked so hard to build that, it, that doesn't have to happen, right? Like when we account for it ahead of [00:12:00] time, in fact, you can do better with SEO on the new Shopify site because you have a higher quality ranking because your load times will be faster.

All of that is, is the promise. You just have to think about an account for it ahead of time. Rather than trying to pick up the pieces later when, the body blow to your business, it could be something hard to recover from. 

Kajal: And I think a lot of people also think of it as a set time, it's three months and then the launch and they'll be done.

But how important is it to have a plan for ongoing support optimization in QA after migrating? 

John: Yeah, I would look at it in two ways, right? One of which is the decision to migrate. Is an opportunity to not just move over your existing site, but to refine it and to better understand who you're moving it for.

Like we are big proponents of really understanding their personas and how they [00:13:00] interact with data and how that what the information architecture needs to be so that we do all that user testing ahead of time so that we can design a better site for them on Shopify. Tangent conversely, after launch, that is the time where you then measure how those personas are actually interacting with the site.

How are they getting the information that they need? Are the images attracting the attention that they want, that we wanted? So setting metrics ahead of time about what that performance should look like, having a plan to look at the heat maps, Of what people are doing on the site and to have constant monitoring of that, because obviously that Chenges over time as your traffic Chenges and as shopping behavior and macroeconomics Chenge.

So the iterative process for us, let's say, just let's say it takes three months to transition a site. [00:14:00] The three months after that are not only the most critical time in terms of ensuring performance, but they're also the biggest opportunity to take a step up with your business in terms of refining what we've now built and really being able to speak one to one to these different personas in a way where maybe you have middle aged women in the Midwest as one persona type, and they want to see images and graphics in a certain way, but then being also able to serve an audience, a younger audience, with that same website, with that same Shopify.

Store such that both audiences are not only accounted for, but feel like they have a home with your brand, right? I think it's personalized for them. Exactly. And it's that, that, to the earlier point is an iterative process, right? No one knows human behavior until we see it in the wild, until we see it tested.

And I think that's, that, [00:15:00] that's a that's the most exciting opportunity for us with our brands is that iterative process. After we've moved on to Shopify, have the basics knocked out, have the infrastructure in place, have the SEO type event to iterate that site for those different personas is where we see that, two to three x increase that, that, that we're all targeting.

Kajal: So I think we've talked about whole ton of points here. If there was one piece of advice that you can give to someone about to start a Shopify migration or even thinking about it, what would that be? 

John: Yeah, I think the number one thing that you want to do is to make sure that you have a fully thought out plan that really decomposes your business in a thoughtful manner from a technology perspective.

And to lay out how, like we talked about how you're going to not only transition that technology to Shopify, but also how you're going to test and iterate it. [00:16:00] And if you're not capable of putting together that plan, because you've never done it before, you don't have the engineering team to come up with that plan is to make sure you find a partner who understand these key tenants and is able to work with you on that, right?

The one piece of advice I would have is don't. Don't underestimate, don't shortChenge how important of a move this is. And to be very clear, we are in 90 percent of the opportunities. We are very supportive and think and believe that moving to Shopify for many of the brands that we come across makes a ton of sense, absolutely.

You should do it. You just had to do it in a thoughtful manner. You just had to do it with an experienced partner and you just have to understand the magnitude of the Chenge, right? It's like picking up your store and plopping it in a brand new location, a brand new building with nothing built out yet.

And that just doesn't happen [00:17:00] instantly overnight. And if people are making you promises that sound too good to be true. I just encourage you to diligence that because it is your lifeblood. It is your business. And if it, it sounds too easy maybe get a second opinion. 

Kajal: Thank you, John, for joining us today.

Really appreciate it. And we'll catch you next time on the PlayAbly podcast. 

John: Awesome. Thanks for having 

me.