Helpful guidelines, general time estimations, and steps required during a Migration
Before the Migration—Keep your team and the Pico support team informed.
What you'll need to provide the Pico Support team, your teammates, and developers you are working with in order to have a seamless migration:
- Plan / timing to remove old platform code from their site. Be sure to confirm a date with all team members of when your previous payment platform will be removed from your site. Budget time to remove all previous code instances from all pages so that readers won't experience confusing or conflicting prompts.
- Pico loaded on staging site, if applicable. We recommend this for those installing on non-Wordpress CMS platforms. (This step is optional If you are currently working with a certified Pico development partner and are using a different staging setup.)
- Export of sample subscription data. This export allows for the estimation of how long a full upload of all records may take.
This export example should include:
Subscription Data- This will help us map the form offered plans to the new plans to be offered and configured in Pico.
List of “free” users to whitelist- Depending on how your migrating readers are recorded from your previous provider we may need to determine which reader records will need to have free access (given Whitelist access) accordingly.
Newsletter- This value should be assigned to subscribers based on what previous access they had, If they belong to any groups, and how many.
Gift subscriptions- Gift subscriptions will not be migrated, however, these records can be whitelisted, until the gift subscription is recreated on Pico.
During your Migration—What the Pico Support team will provide:
1. A review of your previous subscribers file export. This ensures that the information being transfer is as closely matched so you can continue offering uninterrupted service to your readers. The Pico support team will coordinate with you on discrepancies or request clarification to edit in order to support a successful migration.
2. Timing for the Migration process window
Once all parties have a shared expectation of steps required and corresponding information, we'll target and share the expected Migration completion date. This will help set a migration window period, where you and your team will have time to plan, prepare, and test settings and strategies beforehand. You should also email users that will be affected. We've provided templates to help with expectations Before: http://help.trypico.com/en/articles/3388399-migration-email-template-1-we-re-updating-our-subscription-system After: http://help.trypico.com/en/articles/3363136-migration-email-template-3-your-account-has-been-updated
3. Confirmation of your Stripe account or plan to export old tokens.
If you are already using Stripe, we'll review your existing account, your configurations in Pico, and confirm that everything is ready for the migration date, so that there are no unexpected complications during the migration.
If you are migrating from a system that uses a different payment gateway, we'll coordinate with the previous provider, and inform you of the steps included to transfer over payment tokens. This often requires a two-week minimum process, in addition to any other steps.
The Migration Required Steps Checklist
An advanced Two Weeks Notice period
We require at minimum two weeks notice to schedule the migration with our team, depending on our current migrations queue, so that we can be available to prepare, assist, and run the process.
Contacting your current provider
You will need to reach out to your current provider to schedule a time for them to stop all payments.
⚠️NOTE: This must happen as the first step in the migration once it's underway, so that we can get a final export of subscription data, and avoid double charging your current users. If you would like us to reach out on your behalf, will need your approval in advance to contact your current provider if your current provider/platform is unaware of the migration.
Payments are stopped, What to do during the Migration window period
Once payment stops on the old platform, there will be scheduled downtime until subscriptions are up and live on Pico.
A typical Migration window period is (two weeks until the completion date)
During this window you'll have the option to:
- Delay enabling a paywall on your site until the Pico migration is completed
- Allow old subscribers to pay on Pico, and we will not import payment twice when running the migration. If this is a Stripe to Stripe migration, there should only be around a day of downtime. If it’s not from Stripe, this could be 10-15 days.
- Test and configure any Pico settings such as Mailchimp integrations and email campaigns
For more information on how to prepare your readers in advance see "Migrating to Pico" here or check out the Migrations FAQs here.
Have Questions?
🤝 If you have any questions about Migration expectations, feel free to contact 🤝[email protected]