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Migrating existing webshop (PHP, MySQL DB) to osCommerce - possible?


Bart Sanders

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Dear all,

My name is Bart Sanders (in The Netherlands) and I'm new to this osCommerce "block".

We run a webshop for 8 years now. It's based on "Freewebshop" (PHP, MySQL) which was developed by a Dutch programmer around 2007 and supported until some years ago.

You can have look here: http://www.motorwerk.nl/freewebshop .

Now we are considering to move our shop to a new "carrier" based on osCommerce. We need easy on-line payment, more security and lots of other stuff.

We have an existing database (MySQL) which uses categories->products structures, images,  holds customer accounts and so on.

Our question is:

  • Can we easily migrate this database to osCommerce?

Basically, import this DB and osCommerce shows us what we have now on the old platform.

Obviously, there are many more things to consider, discover, implement (on-line Payment!), but it would be a waste to have to start building our current DB from scratch.

Thanks for reading this post and we hope to see some answers!

Met vriendelijke groeten,

Bart Sanders

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Without seeing the structure of the live database, it is difficult to say for sure. But unless the current shop is a fork of oscommerce, I would say the answer is no. There are sites on the web that say they can convert any database but the cost for those run in the $300 - $500 range, last I checked.

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Of course it's possible, but it could end up costing you a pretty Euro. Someone will have to understand both your current database and the osC database, and figure out what each field in your current DB maps to what table and field in osC. Some data may have to be modified or even synthesized to fill out osC properly and completely. If you want to keep all your current customers and product data, and transfer it over, you will have no choice but to do this. It might be easier just to re-enter everything manually, but you won't know until you take a detailed look at your data.

By the way, do NOT use the official osC 2.3.4.1 download available on this site. Use only the community-supported osC 2.3.4.1BS Edge (a.k.a. CE, Frozen) version on GitHub (see my signature below for the link).

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Hi, thanks for your answers!

@MrPhil:

We have defined and filled the database ourselves back in 2011, following the make->category->product structure given by our current webshop (freewebshop).

It's about automotive parts. These parts come in well structured parts-lists. Converted these into *.CSV files and filled the database product related tables/columns by importing these *.CSV's  into MySQL. Then we have customers, orders, shopping carts and other database parts.

Here is a text-copy of the top-level:

fws_accesslog

fws_basket

fws_category

fws_customer

fws_discount

fws_errorlog

fws_group

fws_order

fws_payment

fws_product

fws_settings

fws_shipping

fws_shipping_payment

fws_shipping_weight

In my opinion such a webshop can be split into two major parts:

A. The part which has a defined structure for holding the things you want to sell (e.g. make->category->product structures).
This is the part which is "ours".

B. The part which has a defined structure holding things that the webshop wants to keep in the database. Customer data, logins, settings, payment information and so on.

B. Starts to become filled as the shop is being used.

Except for existing customers. We do not want to ask all customers "Please, register again beacuse we want you to...". So, here we need to convert.

A. Needs to be filled from an existing database into the new one. But there needs to be a minimal set of equal columns in order to be able to convert.

My approach in osCommerce would be to:

1. Get familiar with the DB-structure as osCommerce uses it (by default, or because it's fixed, or by modifications suiting our needs)

2. Do some testruns exporting existing tables into osCommerce

3. Assess if this is a feasible approach and then prepare for a full transfer. Basically export, have a bunch of CSV-files, import them.

4. Hopefully I will find a basic set of table columns which are equal in both databases. I expect so, a minimal set of data needs to be present in each webshop.

What do you think?

Thanks for the note to NOT use the osCommerce download version, just downloaded it. Will get the other one.

Regards!

Bart

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I'm sure it's possible, but I can't tell you how much work it will be to convert your old shop's data to osC. I wouldn't do it by trial and error ("testruns exporting existing tables") -- you really need to fully understand what the data is all about in the old and new shops, to determine whether and how you can move it over. Very likely the mapping from old to new will be fairly straightforward once you understand the data in both shops (unless FWS has a very strange setup). You still may end up discarding some data that osC doesn't use, or synthesizing some data that doesn't exist in the old shop (e.g., which mailing address format a customer uses).

I'm not clear what you mean by the "A" and "B" parts of the shop. There's information on the shop itself, and products which will go into the database (is that 'A'?), and there is customer data on past orders, addresses, etc. which you say you want to preserve (is that 'B'?). Speaking of customer accounts, were passwords "hashed" in the old database, or did they store plaintext passwords? If they were hashed, you likely will not be able to recover the plaintext password, unless FWS and osC use the same hashing system and you can simply copy over the old hashed password (unlikely, but possible). You might end up having to generate a new password for each customer, and email it to them (requiring them to change it within a certain time period), like a lost password recovery function.

A clarification on the osC version to use: Edge is still under development (but reasonably stable), while Frozen is a frozen milestone release that's not quite as up-to-date. I think Gary is working primarily on Bootstrap v4 and PHP 7.2 compatibility on Edge.

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