Kentico 12 to Xperience by Kentico E-commerce Migration - Feature Comparison & Toolkit Compatibility

Hello Kentico Community,

I'm planning a migration from Kentico 12 to Xperience by Kentico for a fully e-commerce website. While Kentico 12 has comprehensive e-commerce capabilities, I've noticed some features appear to be missing or changed in Xperience by Kentico.

Could experienced users or Kentico experts help clarify:

  1. What's fully supported in Xperience by Kentico for e-commerce (product catalogs, inventory, orders, payments, promotions, etc.)?
  2. What's missing or deprecated or Ongoing compared to Kentico 12?
  3. Will the Kentico Migration Toolkit work for this e-commerce migration, or are there limitations?
  4. Key migration challenges for e-commerce sites, including custom modules or integrations?
  5. Recommended approaches or workarounds for any gaps?

The site relies heavily on standard Kentico 12 e-commerce features, so understanding feature parity and migration tooling is critical before proceeding.

Any insights, documentation links, or real-world migration experiences would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Pawan Sharma

Tags:
Kentico Kentico Community Leader Kentico MVP Migration / upgrade
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Answers

Pawan,

Overall, the big difference right now between Xperience and Kentico 12/13 is out of the box integrations. In Xperience by Kentico - There are none, so you'll have to write an integration between Xperience and whatever Payment or Shipping integration. The hooks and everything is pretty much all there, and it was designed better in Xperience by Kentico, but you will have to do that.

There will be some nuanced things not there yet, mainly around Roles (which is releasing sometime soon).

The migration toolkit I haven't used, but from I hear it transfers pretty easily. Most of the commerce tables are pretty similar that if you ever needed to do some custom moving of things, it's not hard to write the SQL to do it. Xperience has some better ways to extend objects as well.

Key Migration challenges will be integrations, and rewriting the pricing workflows and such, which again is better designed in Xperience, and KentiCoPilot can probably help with a lot of it.

Commerce is always very specific, so if you want to hop on the community Kentico Slack channel and do a call i can try to go through things with you.

2
Accepted answer

Pawan,

In addition to what Trevor mentioned:

  1. You cannot directly migrate from KX12 to Xperience without going to at least KX13 first, especially IF you want to migrate any customer and order data. Documentation here
  2. I'd stay away from custom sql scripts unless you know how one object in KX12/13 translates to an object (or many) in Xperience. There are some simple things we imported like Contact Groups, because we had so many of them. Then we manually went through and added the conditional statements after since there isn't a conversion for them. Another example may be migrating KX12/13 Tags over to Taxonomy. We did some SQL work on the source (KX12/13) sites to add comma-separated strings to the content items so we could do queries later after the data was imported to be able to match those tags back up with taxonomy.
  3. The migration tool is very complex. While you can set it up pretty quick, in ALL of our migrations, the basic configuration of the appSettings.json file did not meet our needs. In all cases, we had to write custom code to migrate things properly.
  4. Digital Commerce in general has evolved considerably from KX12 to Xperience. I'd highly recommend reading up on the documentation. I've been told new training/documentation would be released very soon about digital commerce in Xperience, so be on the lookout for that very soon.

Long story short, educate yourself using the documentation within the Toolkit and Xperience and you'll be in a much better place.

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