Import from other shopping cart

I am trying to import customers, products, orders and categories from a shopping cart that was built by my hosting company. I thought it would be an easy import like moving from oscommerce to zen cart, but I was wrong.

The hosting company said,

"The shopping cart is a custom-built application and used MySQL database for all its products and listings. You can use myPhpadmin to pull out all the customer and product information and details. Zen Cart also uses a MySQL database but has a different table structure than that of the current custom-built application, so you may have to use the .csv export 1 table at a time to import into the appropriate areas of the Zen Cart DB."

I guess it is fairly basic, but I don't want to go through everything line by line and basically have to retype everything. I am sure there is an easier way, but I just don't know it for this type of cart. I tried the csv export, edited it to match the Zen Cart structure, but no luck. It kept giving me errors on import.

Anyone have any ideas or experience with this sort of thing? I am willing to hire someone to move everything over.

Thanks!

blueyonder:

I tried the csv export, edited it to match the Zen Cart structure, but no luck. It kept giving me errors on import.

Data migration can be a complex task and the way to approach it is best determined by the amount of data to be migrated and whether it is a one-time-only migration or whether it needs to be easily repeated.

Having said that, it seems that you do have a basic idea as to what needs to be done (csv export, etc), and you are stuck at the implementation stage.

Perhaps the best approach would be if you could let us know what the error messages say when trying to import, and possibly supply a small sample of the csv data you are trying to import.

Cheers
Rod

To add a bit to Rod's spot on assessment...
If you manually create a couple of categories and in each a couplle of products you can get the 3rd party module - -eassy populate - -
BBone up on how to use it - there is a wiki artivle on it

Export your manually created listing then open this csv and you can see the required structure
Open also your current csv and copy and paste into the ZenCart structure sheet your additional items

Upload this to your ZenCart through the admin panel

Took a while and a bit of manipulating, but I finally got easy populate to work! :)

The products are loaded, but all the options for the products are not there. Can these be moved over too?

I also could not use easy populate for orders or customers from what I could tell. Anyone know if this is possible?

There are about 105 orders and 163 customers that I would like to upload.

Thanks for all your help.

he products are loaded, but all the options for the products are not there. Can these be moved over too?
By "options" I suspect that you mean attributes??
The free version of EP does not handle attributes but there is a paid version that does
I also could not use easy populate for orders or customers from what I could tell. Anyone know if this is possible?
EP dosen't do this in either version. The zencart tables are cross indexed to the nth degree which you should be able to assertain just from reviewing the table names
Getting the customers linked to their orders linked to the products and linked to their attributes is a monumental task from data in some other structure.
I can be done, but you had better have a full understanding of how ZenCart uses and cross references the tables

Thanks. I will look into the paid version.

Orders are no big deal. If I can't import them it does not matter.

What about customers?

What about customers?
Each cstomer needs a password and it is not in plain text
Would be difficult to add passwords correctly

Best to explain/apologize to them that you have a new cart and they will have to re-create their information