Migrating your Lightspeed Ecom to E-Series (Ecwid)

Lightspeed E-Series, or Ecwid as it was called before joining the Lightspeed family, is a powerful ecommerce solution for you to sell online. Once you upgrade your store to E-Series, you need to make sure everything is performing well.

This guide will navigate you through the basic setup that needs to be done after the update since not all of your store data is migrated automatically. You will have 90 days to set up your store. This upgrade is only available for customers in North America.

Before you begin: What data migrates from C/R-Series to E-Series

During the upgrade, part of your store settings and catalog data will be transferred to E-Series, while some information needs to be created or updated manually. Lightspeed engineers try to make the upgrade as smooth as possible. Still, there are some technical limitations for what can be transferred so you may need to set up some things manually.

What data is migrated

• Store settings: your store and company name, address, phone number, currency, weight and distance units
• Catalog: products and their titles, description, images, prices (including original, sale and wholesale prices), weight and dimensions, attributes, product options and variants, related products, inventory level (for R-Series stores stock level is automatically synced from R back office)
• Product reviews
• Product categories
• PayPal and offline payment methods
• In-store pickup, cash-on-delivery and weight-tier based shipping methods
• Customer data: name, address, email, phone number, billing and shipping address, customer group (E-Series only allows customers to be in one group at a time. If your client were in several groups, they will only appear in the first group they were added in)
• Google Analytics tag
• Facebook (Meta) Pixel
• Cookies policy
• Your customers' accounts. They will be able to login to their accounts by receiving a login link to their email
• All active discount codes
• Site theme (currently only available for the Ignite and Conform Plus themes)
• Product SEO details
• HS Codes

What data is not migrated

• Order history
• Service tickets and appointments
• URL redirects
• Apps
• Site domain
• URL structure (that is needed for SEO)
• Taxes
• Integrated shipping methods
• Integrated payment providers
• Employees permissions to login to the back office. You will need to create staff accounts.

You or your employees will have a 30-day setup period to prepare your store and site to go live. During that period, you will have access to your C-Series admin. Sections below will navigate you to the on-point instructions to overcome settings gaps. Steps are organized in a way to help you get your site and store fully ready before you connect a domain and go live, but you can start with any step.

For more information about migrating your data and how your data syncs, you can refer to:

• R-Series Help Center.
• C-Series Help Center.

Step 1. Migrating your store to Lightspeed Ecom

The first thing you need to do is to migrate data from your old store to a new one.

Please note that if your online catalog contains thousands of items, it may take time to transfer data.

Here are the steps you need to take to update your R+C or C-Series store to Lightspeed Ecom (E-Series):

1. Contact your account manager to get the migration tool activated on your C-Series account.
2. From your R/C-Series admin, switch to C-Series in the top-left product dropdown.
3. In the left-hand side menu, click Upgrade to E-Series to get to the Upgrade to E-Series page.
4. On the Upgrade to E-Series page, click the Create store button and follow the wizard.
   To get step-by-step instructions on upgrading, please refer to the Upgrading to Ecom guide.
5. When the migration is complete, you will get an email notification and the E-Series item will appear in the product switcher in your admin.
6. From your R/C-Series admin, click the product switcher dropdown in the top left, and select E-Series to open your new migrated store.

That’s it. After you migrate the data from your old store to a new one, you proceed with setting up your new store.

Step 2. Connect payment methods in your E-Series store

To make sure that customers can pay you, you need to set up a payment provider. A payment provider lets you accept credit card payments securely. Your offline and PayPal payment methods are transferred, so you have to connect other providers.

On the Payment page of your E-Series admin, you can set up how to get paid. The most popular payment solutions are integrated with E-series:

• Lightspeed Payments. If you already have Lightspeed Payments, you can connect your account to your store.
• Stripe
• Apple Pay and Google Pay
• and more

Learn more about setting up payment options →

Step 3. Set up shipping methods in your E-Series store

Setting up shipping rates and shipping methods correctly before you launch your site is one of the most important things. Correct shipping rates help to avoid unexpected shipping costs or overcharging customers.

On the Shipping & Pickup page of your E-Series admin, you can set up your shipping methods. That includes getting live-time rates from the most popular carriers, setting up local delivery, customizing shipping zones and their rates. The in-store pickup and cash-on-delivery methods that you had in C-Series are already connected.

Here’s an example of live-rate set up:

These articles will help you get your head around shipping:

• Understanding shipping in Ecwid →
• Initial shipping and delivery setup →
• Adding and managing destination zones →
• Setting up real-time rates →
• Setting up flat rates →
• Setting up free shipping →
• Creating product-specific shipping rates →

Step 4. Configure taxes in your E-Series store

Depending on your location, there are different rules and regulations about sales tax that apply to your products. To make sure that your store meets those rules, take some time to set up taxes.

E-Series has more robust and accurate tax settings. For example, you can set up different tax rules per product type (food/alcohol/baby clothes); different city/county/state tax in the US per address.

You can enable automatic tax calculation. As a result, the up-to-date tax rates of your region will apply to all products. As an alternative, you can set up manual taxes to create a complex taxation scheme tailored to your business.

Learn how to set up taxes →

For a deeper country-specific tax setup overview, visit the Country-specific tax setup section of the Help Center →

Step 5. Design your site

When you upgrade your store, you have two options depending on what site theme you had in C-Series:

For Ignite and Conform Plus themes, your site is transferred as is and you don’t need to set it up. Still, you can explore the new website editor and adjust the design to your liking.

For another theme, your site is not transferred, and you have to re-build it. Since you will retain full access to your C-Series during the setup period, you can open C and E-Series side by side and copy paste the information based on your liking, or copy text to documents and photos to your device, and then add them to the new site.

In E-Series, the site with an embedded online store is called Instant Site, and here’s an example of how it may look:

Your Instant Site is pretty flexible to customize. Here’s what you can do:

• Choose a ready-made template for your type of business. It’s like the themes in C-Series.
• Add goal-focused sections like customer reviews, contacts, or announcement taglines.
• Create a navigation menu to highlight your brands and categories.
• Translate your site into different languages.

Building your site or adjusting its design is pretty much straightforward:

1. Choose a template for your site if you set it up for the first time.
2. Add sections like customer review, promo, announcement bar, or others.
3. Replace pre-made content with your own texts and images and arrange sections to your liking.
4. Publish the changes.

That’s it. Remember that until you click the Publish button, your site will not be visible to visitors.

Watch the quick video to get a quick overview of the Instant Site Editor, or read the detailed guide on configuring design of your Instant Site →

Step 6. Connect domain to your E-Series site

When you upgrade your Lightspeed Ecom, your C-Series site remains connected to your domain. At the same time, you get a new E-Series Instant Site located on a new E-Series free domain that ends with “.company.site”. For example, flowers-in-oregon.company.site.

You have 30 days to disconnect your domain from the C-Series site and connect it to your new site. Connecting the domain usually takes from several hours to two days.

To connect your domain to your E-Series site, you need to make manual changes in your E-Series admin and in your domain admin.

Alternatively, you can buy a new domain right from your Ecom admin. It will be connected automatically, so you don’t have to set anything up.

Learn how to connect domain to your Instant Site →

Step 7. Adjust your SEO settings

When you upgrade your Lightspeed Ecom, you get a completely new site. If your previous site had any SEO product descriptions, they are transferred automatically.

However, the URL structure of your previous site is not transferred. Since your new site has a new URL structure, Google considers it as a new site, even if it was transferred automatically (that happens for Ignite and Conform Plus themes). That potentially can affect their SEO rankings, making your site appear lower in the search results that will lead to losing traffic and potentially having less sales.

To avoid losing traffic, you can adjust SEO settings. Your main move here is to ask Google to recrawl your URLs. Although Google will recrawl URLs eventually, it may take a few months. Manually requesting a recrawl can speed up the process of improving your search results ranking.

Learn more on how to improve SEO for your site →

Step 8. Launching your online store

Once you set up payment and shipping methods, connect your domain, design your website, and are satisfied with the final look and feel of your site, you’re finally ready to launch your online store to the public.

To make your new site visible to everyone:

1. Go to your Ecom admin, and click Website → Edit site.
2. In your site editor, click the Publish button at the top right corner.

You can always edit your site or even hide the store for maintenance.

Step 9. Shutting down your old C-Series

After you set up your new store, your last step is to finalize the migration and shut down C-Series.

To shut down your C-Series account and move your subscription to E-Series:

1. From your R/C-Series admin, switch to C-Series in the top-left product dropdown.
2. Click Upgrade to E-Series. This will completely shut down your C-Series and move your subscription to E-Series.

Next steps

Once you complete the setup, you can explore what your new Ecom has to offer. Your two best resources here are:

• Ecom (Ecwid) Help Center. Detailed articles divided by topics such as Orders, Customers, Marketing, Instant Site (this is your website), and so on. A dedicated video tutorials section if you prefer to watch over reading.
• Ecom (Ecwid) Academy. You will find here easy-to-follow video guides and tutorials on different topics. We recommend starting with the Getting started with Lightspeed Ecom course.

Here are what topics you can explore:

• Adding, updating, and deleting products →
  Before adding products. If you use R-Series, you can add new products both from your E-Series admin or R-Series back office. The products will sync either way. However, if you need to create a product with variations, you need to do it from the R-Series back office since E-Series doesn’t allow creating product variations.
• Selling digital products, services, gift cards →
• Creating product options →
• Creating product variations → (for ex-C-series merchants only. If you use R-Series, you can create variations from your back office)
• Processing orders →
• Using barcodes to quickly find and update products →

For better store management, you can try the Ecwid mobile app. It’s basically your store admin that fits in your palm.