Migrating from Magento to Medusa: A Developer's Guide

At Rigby, we have experience with various ecommerce platforms and have often encountered challenges when it comes to customization. For Magento, its rigid structure and overcomplicated XML layout system often made even simple modifications a complex task. For instance, customizing the checkout flow or adding a seemingly straightforward feature like a gift-wrapping option required complex PHP and XML modifications. These changes frequently led to issues during system updates, creating ongoing maintenance headaches.

When we discovered Medusa, we found it solved all of these problems with its flexible, API-first approach. With Medusa, customizing core functionalities became significantly easier, allowing us to make changes using simple frontend adjustments and additional backend code, without touching core system files or dealing with upgrade complications.

In this article, we will provide an overview of the two platforms based on our latest technical whitepaper Migration from Magento to Medusa, outlining key migration considerations, and propose a phased approach to transitioning between these platforms.

Medusa vs Magento: Key Technical Differences

Magento has long been a popular choice for ecommerce, but its monolithic architecture and complex customization process can challenge developers. In contrast, Medusa's modern, composable approach offers several key advantages:

Performance

Medusa's lightweight, API-first architecture enables faster response times compared to Magento's monolithic structure. Our performance tests show that Medusa's API is, on average, 6 times faster than Magento's. We conducted these tests using the k6 load testing tool, with Medusa and Magento running on identical server setups to eliminate hardware as a variable.

95th percentile (p(95)) times from all tests reveal the significant differences in performance:

• For single product fetches across 50 iterations with a single user, Medusa performs 4.3 times faster than Magento.
• When the load increases to 10, 25, and 50 users simultaneously for 30 seconds, Medusa consistently outperforms Magento, running 6.0, 11.0, and 7.3 times faster, respectively.
• The performance advantage extends to fetching 15 products simultaneously, with Medusa performing 6.0 to 7.0 times faster across different user loads.

Architecture

Medusa's modular design allows you to compose your tech stack using best-of-breed services and easily swap out components as needed. This flexibility gives Medusa a significant advantage over Magento's tightly-coupled architecture, which can make updates and integrations challenging.

Customizability

Medusa provides a powerful customization framework and a robust plugin system, enabling you to extend and modify every aspect of the platform. Customizing Magento often involves complex workarounds and heavy lifting, whereas Medusa's architecture is designed for extensibility.

Developer Experience

Built with modern JavaScript frameworks and adhering to standard development practices, Medusa offers a more intuitive and enjoyable developer experience compared to working with Magento's proprietary patterns and PHP codebase.

Medusa's flexible design makes it easier to build custom ecommerce. You can create exactly what you need, faster and with less hassle.

Given these significant advantages, you may consider migrating from Magento to Medusa. How do you approach such a transition?

Planning Your Magento to Medusa Migration

Before diving into the technical migration process, it's crucial to plan your strategy thoroughly. Here are some key considerations specific to migrating from Magento to Medusa:

Catalog Compatibility

Assess how well your existing product catalog structure aligns with Medusa's data models. Identify any custom attributes, complex product types, or unique configurations that may require special handling during the migration.

Extension Evaluation

Take inventory of your Magento extensions and determine which functionalities Medusa's core features or existing plugins can replace. For any critical custom extensions, consider whether you can rebuild them as Medusa plugins or integrate them through APIs.

To facilitate this process, it's helpful to export a list of your Magento extensions. You can do this using the command line by executing:

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php bin/magento module:status > modules_list.txt

This command generates a text file listing all your Magento modules. With this list, you can systematically work through each extension, noting:

• Which features are out-of-the-box in Medusa
• Which will be handled by external tools
• How you plan to implement each functionality in Medusa (core features, existing plugins, custom development, or API integrations)

Phased Approach

Given the complexity of most Magento setups, we at Rigby highly recommend a phased migration approach to minimize risk and ensure a smooth transition. By leveraging Medusa's modular architecture, you can migrate your storefront and backend components incrementally, allowing for thorough testing and validation at each stage.

API Integration

You can leverage Magento's REST APIs to synchronize data and logic between the two systems during the phased migration. Plan how you'll integrate these APIs with Medusa to ensure data consistency and real-time updates.

Phased Migration Using Medusa Modules

One of the key advantages of Medusa's architecture is its modularity, which enables a phased migration approach. This allows you to incrementally replace Magento components with their Medusa counterparts, minimizing risk and allowing for thorough testing at each stage.

It's important to note that you should tailor the phased migration plan to your specific business goals and needs. For example, if your current platform struggles with product discoverability, you might prioritize migrating your product catalog and integrating a smart search system into a new, flexible Next.js frontend. On the other hand, if you're experiencing low conversion rates, you could prioritize migrating your cart, checkout, and fulfillment processes to Medusa to improve the customer experience and streamline your sales funnel. The modular nature of Medusa allows you to target key areas for improvement and migrate them independently.

However, as a general starting point, here is our suggested Rigby approach to phased migration:

Phase 1: A New Storefront and Headless CMS Integration

The first phase of the migration involves setting up a new frontend and connecting it to your existing Magento via an API. This allows you to develop a new, modern storefront using a frontend framework like Next.js or Gatsby while still relying on the backend functionality of your existing system.

During this phase, you also integrate a headless Content Management System (CMS) to manage your content separately from your ecommerce platform. This separation of concerns allows for greater flexibility and easier management of your content across multiple channels.

Phase 2: Product Catalog, Inventory, and Pricing Migration

In the second phase, you migrate your product catalog, inventory, and pricing data from your Magento ecommerce system to Medusa. This involves exporting the data from your existing system and importing it into Medusa using custom scripts.

After the data migration, you connect your new storefront to Medusa's API, partially replacing the connection to the Magento ecommerce system. This ensures that your storefront now fetches product, inventory, and pricing data directly from Medusa.

To enhance product discoverability, you can integrate a smart search solution and implement extensive filtering options. If needed, this is also a good time to integrate with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to fetch inventory data and establish a connection with a Product Information Management (PIM) system to enrich your product information.

At the end of this phase, your storefront displays products from Medusa. However, when a user clicks "Add to Cart," the Magento ecommerce system still handles the cart and checkout logic, along with payment processing, fulfillment, and customer account management. This requires cooperation between the two systems to ensure a seamless user experience.

Phase 3: Order Processing and Fulfillment Migration

In the third phase, you migrate the entire order processing and fulfillment logic from your Monolith ecommerce system to Medusa. This includes cart and checkout functionality, payment processing, order management, and any integrations with ERP or fulfillment systems.

You need to rebuild these functionalities within Medusa, leveraging its flexible order management system and built-in integrations with various payment and fulfillment providers. You'll need to re-implement any custom business logic or integrations within Medusa.

After completing this phase, your storefront fully integrates with Medusa, handling the entire user journey from product browsing to order placement and fulfillment.

Phase 4: Remaining Logic Migration, Clean Up, and Decommission

In the final phase, you migrate any remaining functionality, such as customer account management and loyalty programs, from your Magento ecommerce system to Medusa.

Once you're confident in the stability and performance of your new setup, you can completely switch over to Medusa and decommission your Monolith ecommerce system.

Partial Storefront Migration with Next.js Rewrites

If migrating your entire storefront at once seems too daunting, you can use Next.js rewrites to perform a partial storefront migration. This approach allows you to migrate your storefront incrementally, focusing on the most critical pages first.

Start by migrating your homepage, product listing pages, product detail pages, and content pages to the new storefront powered by Medusa. To maintain a consistent user experience, adjust common page components, such as the header and footer, to match the design of your existing website.

Leave the cart and checkout pages as they are, still powered by your Magento ecommerce system. These pages are more complex and directly impact conversion rates, so migrate them carefully and test them thoroughly before making the switch.

As you gain confidence in the new setup, gradually migrate the remaining pages, including the cart and checkout, until your entire storefront runs on Medusa. This incremental approach minimizes risk and allows you to validate the migration's success without compromising your conversion rates

Conclusion

Migrating from Magento to Medusa is a smart move for businesses looking to modernize their ecommerce platform. By following a phased migration approach and leveraging Medusa's modular architecture, you can make the transition with minimal risk and disruption.

The key is to plan carefully, break the process down into manageable steps, and prioritize the most critical areas first. Start by migrating your storefront, then move on to your product catalog, order processing, and finally, clean up and decommission your old system.

If you're considering a move from Magento to Medusa, we invite you to explore our whitepaper "Migration from Magento to Medusa: A Complete Guide for Chief Technology Officers (CTOs)" for a deeper dive into the topic.