An OSC to Zen Sojourn

[edadk]

Well, it's been a long journey, but I've finally arrived.

The story starts in late 2002, when I downloaded and tested an early copy of OSCommerce (pre-MS2.2). It wasn't long before we opened up our OSCommerce-based shop in early 2003. Over the years, we grew a lot more than we ever anticipated, and moved up through various tiers of hosting - shared, high-end shared, vps, entry level dedicated server, better dedicated server.

But running a 2002 version of OSC was a dead end with no place to go (although to be fair, I think that's changed lately), there were various security concerns, and changes in the way internet retailers must do business were on the horizon.

So in 2008, I downloaded Zen Cart and started working on moving the store. Turns out there were a lot of things that had to be moved - customers, orders, products, wishlists, gift certificates, coupons, specials, downloads, and of course the entire look and feel of our OSC store.

I started with one of the OSC to Zen conversion scripts available, and that gave me a good start. But from there, I still had to do a few things:
- add a master category to each product (there was no such thing in my version of OSC)
- import specials
- import newsletters
- import cross sell data
- import products attributes downloads
- import address book (OSC didn't have a default address book entry for each customer, so I had to create one)
- import comments from existing orders
- import wishlists
- import osc coupons and gift certificates, including redeem status and current balance
- update order totals
- make a template that had the same look and feel as the OSC store

Once I got that squared away, I installed a bunch of addons:
-Edit Orders
-Lightbox
-Credit card sidebox
-Cross Sell/Advanced Cross sell
-Recover cart sales
-Sales Report
-backup mysql
-Admin login as customer
-monthly sales and tax summary
-user tracking
-syscheck

I also had a number of other customizations from OSC, some of which I wrote myself, and those had to be transferred over also:
-product's wholesale cost.
-custom reorder level for every product
-reorder report that takes the custom reorder number into account.
-out of stock report
-total stock value report which gives total wholesale and retail value for my entire inventory as well as total number of pieces ever sold and in stock right now.
-add quantity in stock and number of orders customer has placed, to packing slip
-froogle feed

I probably forgot a few things from these lists, I try to write it all down but sometimes things get overlooked.

It took a while (and some critical help from a Zen team member) but I managed to get everything working. I practiced making the changeover probably 50 times. I wrote out all the instructions and got to the point where I could run a complete changeover in a couple of hours. But I was very afraid of making the switch. After all, everything was running ok, why mess with something that's not broken. So I waited another year and just kept practicing the changeover once a week or so.

Right around the time I was thinking that I should be bold and make the move, Zen Cart came out with v1.39a. Oh no, what do I do now, I have a working translation, but it's a version behind. No problem, I'll just set up another site, copy all the files, and then run an upgrade on the newly converted files. Not so fast, buster, don't forget all those template changes and file overrides. But a little patience and that too was sorted out. So now any changeover would involve the initial translation, then an upgrade.

Well, wouldn't you know it, then comes 1.39b, 1.39c and then 1.39d. Uh oh, now I'm really in trouble. I managed to shortcut that whole thing by making a third site, copying my v1.39a over to there, and copying the latest files and fixing the overrides/templates. So now the procedure is to translate from OSC to 1.38a, upgrade to 1.39a, then 1.39d.

I ran through that a dozen times or so without any problems, so I was thinking that I was once again ready so I picked a date and got everything prepared.

One of the main things to prepare for was the change to the way product images are handled in Zen Cart. In OSC, you enter your image name in the product detail, and then there was an addon for big images, which I also had installed. So each product had 2 image names stored. I worked that out by using a bulk renaming utility. Fortunately I had previously made small and large image names similar, so changing the image names wasn't too hard. I moved all my thumbnails out of a saved directory, and renamed all the large images in a single operation.

With all the prep work done, about a month ago I made the big move. Closed up shop at 9am and had Zen Cart running on the site by 1pm. It took another few hours to make some minor adjustments, and then we were off.

I 301'd the old links and within a couple of hours the search engines had a field day grabbing the new links. With around 7k actual products total (about 5k products usually in stock and about 25k product entries if you include linked products in other categories) in about 100 categories, the search engines spent several days scraping everything they could find. That put a big load on my server, more than I expected. Server loads moved from a normal .0x up to 2, 3, and sometimes higher. I anticipated that there'd be some extra load since Zen Cart is more advanced than what I was using, but with those kind of numbers, the server was slowing down.

So I took the opportunity to move to a faster dual core server and doubled the ram. Now I'm again cruising along at mainly miniscule loads, at least most of the time. With an average of 20,000 page views a day from about 900 sessions/day and over 23 million page views total, the database gets a pretty good workout. I would imagine that there's things that could be done to streamline things a bit, but I have the extra horsepower in the server, so I'll let the processor deal with the load for now. (Numbers posted for reference only, not trying to impress anyone - there are much bigger stores out there).

Now that the store has been running on Zen Cart for a month, I'm confident everything is working right, so I can relax a bit. I'm extremely pleased with Zen Cart, it's got more features than I used to have, and a lot of tasks are easier than they used to be. It was a really good move to make even though it was a little scary. The support on the forums from both team members and knowledgeable regulars has been great, so thanks to everyone who participates here.

I've also made my second (what I'll characterize as significant) donation to the Zen Team, it's the least I can do for what they have provided.

Ian, I can't thank you enough for your help last year, I wouldn't have made it here otherwise.

Linda, thanks for all the great features you originally added to OSC and then incorporated into Zen Cart. You made the translation work a lot easier.

Kim and Chris, you've answered my forum questions, even my stupid ones, with insightful and cheerful assistance.

And to everyone else, thanks for being here, the reference material in the forums and all the great add-ons make Zen Cart the best solution possible.

I won't be posting a link to my store, I don't have any need to advertise, and my store layout is a lot like many others, so there isn't a lot to see as far as customization. I do have interesting products though, so if you'd like to look around, pm me and I'll send you a link to the store.

Now, if I can provide a little help to others, the circle will be complete.

Ed

[Kim]

Ed,

We are really happy to hear that you finally made the switch. Thanks for the story, it will help someone else to make the journey (maybe a little faster? )

We appreciate the donation and hope to see you around the forums giving another some encouragement and support.

[stevesh]

Great post. You're a lot more thorough that I am - I tend to be a 'push the button and see what happens' kind of guy .

No hint, though, about what kind of stuff you sell ?

[edadk]

It's good to finally have Zen Cart online, Kim. I figured that posting the story might give someone else the push they need to move over.

Steve, you're welcome to go have a look, just pm me for the link if you're curious. I just didn't feel like it was necessary to advertise.

And I'm not so thorough, I definitely didn't write everything down. I've already thought of a few things I did that I didn't record.

Ed

[Ajeh]

Hi Ed ... glad to see you are now on track with Zen Cart and happily up and running ... thanks for the store of your experience in the transition ...

[edadk]

Hi Ed ... glad to see you are now on track with Zen Cart and happily up and running ... thanks for the store of your experience in the transition ...

Well, it really did go easier than I could have imagined, and the results were well worth the effort, so I'm very glad I made the move.

Hopefully others will be encouraged to take the leap if they've been hesitating.

Ed