The e-commerce software market was valued at $6.16 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $20.19 billion by 2028. The rising adoption of e-commerce software is due to benefits such as managing shipping and inventory, adding or removing products, calculating taxes, fulfilling orders, and maintaining a website.
The e-commerce software continually increases in sophistication, creating the need for store owners to migrate their stores to more robust and scalable platforms to stay competitive.
As a result, e-commerce re-platforming also keeps evolving. One aspect of this is the emergence of smart update services.
What is the Smart Update option?
One of the major concerns for store owners considering migrating their store to another e-commerce platform is business disruption during the replatforming process. The last thing you want is to lose business during the migration process.
Platform migration tools like Cart2Cart cater to this eventuality by allowing store owners to continue business during the migration process – the migration happens in the background. Still, for customers, it's business as usual.
However, what happens to the data generated by the business conducted during replatforming? Cart2Cart has an answer for this too – the Smart Update option.
The Smart Update option allows store owners to update store data that changed during or after the Full migration. So, while you kept on conducting business on your old platform, which led to changes to product quantities sold or order statuses, Smart Update updates the new store to reflect these changes. So nothing is lost.
How does Smart Update work?
Smart Update follows these steps:
- Your current store keeps doing business, during the migration process, generating new orders, sales, and acquiring more customers.
- The Smart Update function compares data fields in the old and the new store.
- Any new data that appears on the current store, is immediately migrated to the new store.
Smart Update can synchronize data once or periodically until the target platform goes live. The data in the two platforms can be synchronized anytime, after a week, a month, six months, etc.
Data is migrated precisely as it is at the source store (for example, quantities) or according to the specified mapping (for example, order statuses). Also, you can select only the necessary fields for updating (for example, the number of products and the status of orders).
Smart Update essentials
- During the Smart Update synchronization, the fields in already migrated entities will be updated, and those entities that have not migrated will be re-migrated.
- Smart Update allows you to work in parallel with the target page (except for the fields that are selected for synchronization).
- All previously made changes in the fields of migrated entities on the target store will be saved if they are not selected for updating (for example, updated descriptions, meta titles, etc.).
Use Cases for the Smart Update Service
Examples of situations where the Smart Update Service can be useful
Cart2Cart supplies Smart Update services for products and orders.
Products – you can update any product quantities or stock status changes.
Orders – you can update the order status and the shipping number. You can also update the status history and the tracking number.
Smart Update vs Remigration
Smart Update and Remigration are two different services. Smart Update is implemented when your source cart (your old store) continues business during the platform migration and generates new data. This new data is transferred to your target store (new store) after the Full migration.
Remigration, on the other hand, is implemented when you need to repeat your store migration because something went wrong during the process.
Reasons why store migration sometimes fails:
- Faulty setup of the source and target stores
- Corruption of the migrated data
- Missing data or fields
- Hosting issues
Differences in cost and time investment
So both actions happen after Full store migration, but what happens with the data is different. With Remigration, the Cart2Cart service clears all the data on the target store so Full migration can start from scratch. With Smart Update, the Cart2Cart service preserves new and old data on the target store.
The cost between the two services is calculated differently. Remigration is charged at 50% of the initial Full migration, while Smart Update is free within the 1st month after the Full Migration.
Remigration takes longer than Smart Update because the migration process must be started all over again and will include more data now (original data plus newly generated data). In addition, you must first clear all the data on your Target Store before starting the remigration.
Smart Update? alternatively, is not so time-consuming because the process only transfers your store’s new data. This service automatically detects newly-generated data on your Source Store and transfers them to your Target Store. This represents far less data, so it goes faster.
Common Concerns about the Smart Update Service
The Cart2Cart Smart Update option helps with data synchronization between platforms. However, the Cart2Cart Remigration method of synchronizing data between platforms has a caveat.
With the Cart2Cart Remigration service, you can easily add new data to the target platform, but all previous edits to the migrated entities on the new platform will be lost.
So, this method of synchronizing data between platforms is only recommended if no changes were made to the migrated entities after migration to the target platform.
Of course, clients can also decide to update data manually. In this case, the following must be kept in mind:
- Manual updates are time-consuming
- The chances of errors increase exponentially
- Involving professionals to do this will add to the costs, exceeding the more accurate automatic options
Final thoughts
When the Full migration has been completed, but the old platform is still live and generates additional data, the data between it and the new platform must be synchronized, including, for instance, product quantities, shipping, or order details. The Smart Update option is the most accurate and safe way to accomplish this.
If you have decided to migrate your store to a more robust platform, we suggest that you don't attempt to do this manually. While it's entirely possible, the process is prone to human error that you can avoid by simply using Cart2Cart's automatic platform migration service. It's a user-friendly option that transfers data securely and accurately.
October 30, 2024 
