Store migration from CloudCart to WooCommerce

Many startup online store owners are looking for a solution to get their store on the market quickly and easily. Often due to lack of resources, time for research or the need to launch the store as soon as possible, they choose a SAAS (software as a service) platform such as the Bulgarian CloudCart, Seliton, NextBasket, Shopiko or those from abroad – Shopify, Weebly, Wix, etc.

Some of the pros are the low (initially) monthly cost, quick start, ready design, included hosting and support. As time passes and their stores evolve, clients begin to see more and more the drawbacks of such a platform – a closed system, difficult design customization (most platforms have a limited set of templates that all their clients use with an option to change the color scheme), lack of or underperforming marketing tools, lack of control over site speed.

Additionally, most monthly/annual plans are tied to the store’s sales volume and the more sales you have, the higher the fee will be. This way the platform knows what your turnover is, how much you sell, what invoices you issue and all sorts of other business information.

To this we can add the information that is shared with the platform about the site’s traffic – where it comes from, what it does, how much it buys. At CloudCart, for example, they directly put their own Google Analytics code into your site that collects this data (so they can then sell you the Analytics module included in the higher plan, which can’t be turned off and you don’t pay for it).

Over the last half a year, we have had many customers come to us complaining about these and other issues with their stores, asking us to upgrade their store from CloudCart to WordPress – WooCommerce. The other main reason for the outflow of customers from CloudCart is that they recently raised prices a lot and for almost every integration you have to pay extra. Precisely because of the great interest in switching platforms, today we will look at

How to migrate a store from CloudCart to WooCommerce

The transfer of the store to WooCommerce consists of:

1. Products – name, price, photos, gallery, descriptions, SKU, attributes/characteristics
2. Product categories and tags – with the same hierarchical structure
3. Orders – all orders placed so far
4. Customers – all registered customers of the store
5. Articles – if you have a blog
6. Pages – home, contacts, about us, terms and conditions, personal data, cookies, etc.
7. Design – now is the time to decide if you want to keep, refresh or redesign the store
8. SEO

Transfer products and categories from CloudCart to WooCommerce

Transferring products from CloudCart to WooCommerce is done through a single XML feed that contains everything about the products and the categories they are in. In CloudCart you can generate such a feed from https:/your-domain.com/admin/appsxml_feed_generator/feeds or Applications -> XML feeds generator.

Keep in mind that CloudCart creates a free feed of up to 100 products, so if your store has less than 100 products – great.

If the store has more than 100 products, you need to upgrade the limit and purchase an additional package:

The price list reaches a feed limit of 20,000 products.

If you have 200-300 products you can not pay extra and use a tag filter when creating the feed. You tag the first 100 products, generate the feed, download the file. Remove the tag on the first 100, put the tag on the second 100, generate the feed, download the file and so on until you have downloaded all the products.

When you have the full list of products, all you have to do is import it into WooCommerce. Here, we use WP All Import as the plugin gives a lot of options to map fields when importing products and we have had no problems importing from several thousand products – no matter if the product has variations or not (options – color, size, etc).

WP All Import takes the links to the images from the product XML file and uploads them to the new site with the option to import SEO descriptions if you have them. If there are embeddable images in the product description itself, WP All Import will also download and upload them.

When importing products with WP All Import, the categories and subcategories are automatically created as well, so this task is completed in one action.

If you have brands in CloudCart, you can map them to the corresponding product attribute in WooCommerce.

Transfer product collections from CloudCart to WooCommerce

CloudCart has a feature called Collections that is quite popular among store owners. It allows you to do just that – make “Collections” of products and display them on the site – a Collection with Black Friday specials, a Collection with discounted outlet products, etc.

The similar functionality in WooCommerce is called tag. Applying a tag to a group of products actually creates a Collection. Each tag has a link and can be sent to customers and displayed in the site menu or on a home or separate page.

Transferring customers from CloudCart to WooCommerce

CloudCart clients (at least for now) are easily exported to a .csv file from the clients menu -> Export button in the top right corner (https://вашият-домейн.ком/admin/customers).

You should receive the customer file in your email. After downloading the customer file, use WP All Import again to import into WooCommerce (Import Pro Package -> Users required).

Transfer orders from CloudCart to WooCommerce

Important: Before transferring orders, transfer the customers first so that when you import the orders, you can then contact the specific customers. Also transfer the products first so there is something to add to the order when importing.

Until recently, exporting orders from CloudCart was very easy – from the Orders menu -> Export button in the top right corner. Unfortunately, due to price hikes and more and more customers switching platforms and switching to WooCommerce, CloudCart made this a paid option as it currently costs €300,00 excluding VAT.

Unlike the product feed, where you are entitled to 100 freebies, there is no export option here except the paid one.

After downloading the orders file (usually .csv, .xlsx) use WP All Import again to import the orders into WooCommerce.

Transfer articles from CloudCart to WooCommerce

Unfortunately there is no option to export the articles and categories from the blog to CloudCart. For the articles to be overridden, you have to manually transfer each article. If you have few articles it’s ok, but if you have a lot of articles it would take more time.

Transfer pages from CloudCart to WooCommerce

The same applies to CloudCart pages – this is normal because WordPress uses a different builder and cannot export and import them automatically. This is also the time to improve some things in the store design, add new ones, remove unnecessary ones. In WordPress you have the complete freedom to create whatever pages you want, landing pages, forms, features, popups, banners, call to action sections and more. With any design.

Don’t forget to transfer your SEO descriptions and page titles from CloudCart to WordPress.

Save SEO when migrating from CloudCart to WooCommerce

Regardless of the reason why you are upgrading your store from CloudCart to WooCommerce, the most important thing is to keep your SEO information and rankings. To that end, follow this checklist:

1. Product SEO – the product XML feed contains SEO meta descriptions and product titles, so when importing with WP All Import be sure to add it. It’s a good idea to have an SEO plugin pre-installed – Yoast, RankMath or other.
2. Category SEO – here you need to manually carry over SEO meta descriptions and titles.
3. SEO of tags/collections – here you need to manually transfer SEO meta descriptions and titles.
4. On-page SEO – here you need to manually transfer SEO meta descriptions and titles.
5. 301 Links – CloudCart has a different link structure than WordPress, so you’ll get new links when you transfer. So it’s important to have a complete list of the old links and do a 301 redirect from the old to the new.
6. Don’t forget to transfer all the pixels, Google analytics.
7. Don’t forget to transfer the new sitemap to Google Search Console as well.

Difference in links between CloudCart and WooCommerce:

How to set up a 301 redirect:

The 301 redirect is put in the .htaccess file of the main WordPress directory and looks like this:

Redirect 301 /page/za-nas https://моятсайт.ком/za-nas

You can use a plugin, but the best way is through .htaccess.

In conclusion

CloudCart (and other SAAS platforms) is a great platform, but it has its drawbacks. Our observations are that CloudCart is starting to become a very closed platform and any way they want to retain a customer, one way is to restrict them from exporting their data from the store or make it too expensive to discourage them from migrating. However they try to hold you, remember that all business data (customers, orders, products, invoices, etc.) is entirely owned by you, not CloudCart.

After the recent drastic price hikes, many store owners are rethinking whether to switch to WooCommerce.

Migrating to another platform contains many elements and is not an easy task and it is important to plan well and do it professionally so that the store becomes even better. We are here for you if you have any difficulties or if you want a complete migration from-to, just email us.

Note: CloudCart features, pricing, screenshots and processes described are current as of 12/17/2023.