Migrating your existing subscription program to Ordergroove is a big step in offering your customers an amazing subscription experience. This guide will walk you through the steps to do the preparation work before the Ordergroove team starts your migration.
Before we start, it is important to keep in mind that depending on the quality of data coming from Recharge there may be an instance that not all active subscribers get migrated. In this case, someone from our team can help you get that taken care of. All you need to do is submit a support ticket.
Preparing for the migration
To ensure a smooth migration experience for you and your customers, you’ll:
- Create a Recharge API token
- Prepare a test customer/subscription
- Set up the Stripe payment gateway
- Verify Shopify checkout configuration
To make the process as seamless as possible, let's go through the process step by step.
Step 1 - Create a Recharge API token
Recharge's API token allows Ordergroove to extract data from Recharge and migrate it to our platform. To create one, follow the following steps:
- Open the ReCharge app inside Shopify
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On the left side nav bar, click Apps and then click API Tokens
- Click Create an API token button on the top right
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Fill out the form
- Token nickname is your name
- Contact email is your email address
- API Client Secret will be left blank
- Change the Scope settings to Read access for each permission. This allows Ordergroove to read the data to be migrated. You can leave Custom Notifications permission as No access
- Check the Terms of Service consent
- Click Save
You're all set, the Recharge API key is created.
Step 2 - Prepare a test customer and subscription
A test customer/subscription is a subscription in your Recharge program associated with you or one of your employees. Create a customer in Recharge using your information or a coworker's information.
We recommend going through the full process, testing out both Ordergroove and Shopify:
- Extract data from ReCharge
- Import the test customer/subscription into Ordergroove
- Place an order through Ordergroove into Shopify
- Confirm the payment processed correctly
Step 3 - Set up the Stripe payment gateway
Next, we need to ensure your Stripe payment gateway is set up correctly. This is a critical step in ensuring a migration goes smoothly so please note that the Stripe account connected to your Shopify store must be the same one that is connected to your ReCharge integration. The steps to set up Stripe as a legacy subscription gateway are listed below:
- Go to the following URL: {SHOP_URL}/admin/payments/legacy_subscription
- You will be redirected to Stripe to initiate the connection process.
- Once you're done, you'll be redirected to the payment settings page and notified that the connection was successful.
It is important to do this step after you have launched Ordergroove in your Shopify account. See our guide on the Ordergroove launch process.
Additionally, our Shopify and Stripe Error Troubleshooting can guide you through how to set up your Stripe payment gateway. If you still have questions, feel free to submit a support ticket.
Your migration is ready to be taken over by Ordergroove!
Step 4 - Verify Shopify checkout configuration
The last step before the Ordergroove migration team takes over is to ensure the Shopify checkout settings are configured correctly. Here are the steps to check your settings:
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Navigate to your Shopify store and click on Settings, located on the bottom left of the navigation
- Click Checkout on the left navigation
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Under the Customer information section
- If Shipping address phone number, Address line 2, or Company name field are set as Required, open a ticket requesting Ordergroove to enable the specific fields in Ordergroove.
- If Shipping address phone number, Address line 2, or Company name field are set as Don’t include or Optional, you’re all set!
What's next?
That’s all you need to do! Ordergroove will start the migration process from here and get back to you with an update.
What is happening behind the scenes?
We know migrating to a new platform is a big step in ensuring your customers have the best experience. At Ordergroove, we also want to make this a smooth process as well and sometimes, errors get in the way. But we’ve done many migrations and have a process in place to minimize the errors.
Here’s what a typical migration looks like behind the scenes.
The test customers/subscriptions
The test customers/subscriptions are invaluable. They ensure that a subscriber record can be migrated, an order can be placed, and the payment is successfully processed. This allows us to migrate the rest of your subscribers in confidence.
So, how does this work? First, the data is put through a test migration which is a spot check of required fields and basic structural validations of the data set. If that succeeds, there’s a high probability that the rest of the data should be imported with no issues. Once a test migration is successful, the test customer/subscription is imported.
If there are any issues, for example, regarding payment/Stripe configurations, you’ll most likely need to take some action such as double checking the Shopify configurations. In this case, the test customer/subscription process starts from the beginning and is repeated until successful. Once everyone confirms that payments are charged and orders fulfilled, we’re set to do the full migration.
The full migration
This process is similar to the test customer/subscription but en-masse: first a test migration, then the actual import. One can expect there will be errors at this stage, pending the data provided by ReCharge. But this is something our team will handle on your behalf. Depending on the errors, you might hear from us to help make a decision as to how they should be handled. For example, Shopify orders require a shipping address to have a phone number, but the data ReCharge provided has no phone number. You may need to reach out to the customer to provide that data or if you already have it, even better.
There will be a good amount of data that passes our validations by this stage. The test migration on a full data set can usually take 10-30 minutes, depending on the size of your data set.
After the test migration data has successfully passed validation, a final import takes place. Again, errors can be expected and we mediate many of them by re-running the import (we do not duplicate any data already migrated). This process can take between 10 minutes to a couple of hours depending on the data size. And not to worry, no data will be lost in ReCharge throughout this process.
In the event there are errors that cannot be resolved by simply re-running the import, our team will work with you directly to help find the best solution. This can range from 1-30% of your data. But keep in mind, your data is not lost and we are here to help get all your data migrated.