Importing Customers (sort of)

[xiexiema]

Greetings,

I have a digital download product.

I have a customer base of about 300 on an existing set up which is based around phpBB users. The system I am using integrates with PayPal via IPN but is very flaky and not supported well at all.

I really want to move to Zen cart ASAP.

There are about 500 members on my site and 250 or so are customers.

I know that when I install Zen Cart it will read my phpBB database and import / integrate all the members from there.

However, I can see no way of setting certain members as "customers" who have paid for my product. (thus enabling them to continue to download new versions etc.)

I could export all of the customers user names if that would help.

I have looked at a few addons etc. but nothing seems to do exactly this.

So my question is.

Is there any way to:

Install Zen Cart and have it use an existing phpBB database as for members? (I think the answer is yes).

Then allow me to choose certain existing members as "paid customers"? (this is the stumbling block).

I hope this makes sense and would appreciate any response.

Thank you.

[xiexiema]

Ok after a bit of reading I realise that my phrasiology is probably incorrect:

If I have liked my Zen cart to my existing phpBB customer base (of which there are about 500)...

What would be the procedure to add orders to all my existing customers (250 - 300) So that they can still download my product and appear as legitimate customers?

I am Ok with phpMyAdmin but not too hot with MySQL.

Once again, any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

:-)

[xiexiema]

Not to worry guys. (Not that anyone did LOL)

I installed the cart anyway but the phpBB integration didn't work at all.

After following all instructions and indeed getting all the correct results, none of my existing phpBB users could log in to the cart at all. (That included me using my main admin account).

I then read here that many people have found the phpBB connectivity broken in the latest version of ZC. So after a few more hours I gave up and deleted the cart. :-(

This was a phpBB3 forum btw.

[yellow1912]

ZC can not use phpbb user database and vice versa. Even with a "bridge", they still use 2 different tables.

1. You need to port all current customers from phpbb to ZC
2. You need to bridge the 2 softwares so they just have to login/logoff/register at one place only (either ZC or PHPBB)

Regarding the bridge:
First, PHPBB3 is not working well with ZC. If you want to bridge ZC with phpbb3 you have to figure out how to login to phpbb3 from ZC (and also how to register).
Second, if you want your customers to be able to login/logoff/register to ZC from phpbb you can make use of the bridge I wrote:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=95643

[xiexiema]

Thanks yellow1912,

Your explanations make perfect sense. I only wish you had the chance to post that before yesterday evening. LOL but I was impatient as usual :-)

Thanks again for taking the time to reply and I hope someone else may also find this useful too.

All the best