Migrate Miva Merchant 5 to CS-Cart 4

Had a customer who wanted to change from Miva Merchant 5 to  CS-Cart 4. They really liked CS-Cart’s control and ability to makes changes quickly and wanted to make the move.  So how to get this done without hundreds of man hours and downtime? Cart2Cart service to the rescue. They provide secure SSL Amazon EC2 based demo and complete real time migrations for many cart solutions. We tested in demo mode and all was good, had a few issues with the full migration that I detail below.

Miva Merchant migration details:
http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/supported-carts/2495-miva-merchant

Miva Merchant to CS-Cart Migration:
http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/shopping-cart-migration-options/2530-mivamerchant-to-cscart-migration

Steps for Demo or Full migration

1. Register with Cart2Cart
2. Review Miva and CS-Cart Migration links above
3. Start a Demo or full migration to familiarize with the process
   1. https://app.shopping-cart-migration.com/to-cs-cart/migrations/
4. Export these files from Miva via email or FTP
   1. categories.dat, customers.dat, oders.dat, products.dat and provide.xml
   2. * Close your source store first if beginning a full migration!
5. Download, unpack and upload Connection Bridge to your CS-Cart Target Store root
   1. Target store should be closed
6. Start the Demo or Full migration:

   1. Source Cart Setup

   2. Target Cart Setup
   3. Entities Selection
   4. Import Source Data
   5. Demo Migration
   6. Confirm Migration
7. Demo will test 10 of everything and you can review in your Target store
8. Full migration may take a long time, be patient!
9. If all goes well that’s it, you’re in business!
10. Step 10!

My migration by the numbers

1. 109 Product Categories, 847 Products, 639 customers, 350 Orders, 1947 total entities
2. Time: 1hr 4minutes
3. Cost $79

Issues experienced

1. After the full migration we had 1 product and 1 product only and an issue with all users
   1. CS-Cart has a generic Company entry “ACME Corp” with an ID of 1 (not zero)
   2. This is your Store Name – all products and users must be associated with it
   3. But – products and users imported to CS-Cart without a “company_id” field and thus were all assigned ID 0
   4. We resolved by backing up and then updating the Users and Products tables with the following SQL Code
   5. Boom we’re in business! (whew)
      
      UPDATE cscart_users SET company_id='0' WHERE company_id='1'; UPDATE cscart_products SET company_id='0' WHERE company_id='1';

      1 2 3 4 5 6 7

      UPDATE cscart_users SET company_id='0' WHERE company_id='1';   UPDATE cscart_products SET company_id='0' WHERE company_id='1';

2. Product page images – the default product page was using our Miva Thumbnail image for some products and was very pixelated from re-sizing. These products had two images and we simply deleted the second one leaving the default image with CS-Carts auto re-sized versions used as needed. A pain but easy.

3. Miva Merchant Export Instructions are incomplete which caused the process to hang indefinitely on the Currency step

   1. Orders.dat instructions are missing the key step to “Export Field Names As Header”. I re-exported and problem solved, C2C said they would update their documentation. 
   2. Support is in Russia so depending on your timezone it can be a bit frustrating.

That’s it! Issue #1 was a bit troubling but once identified was very easy to solve, hopefully it helps someone in the future. We’ve been running smoothly with no issues since the above. All in all a wonderful, if a bit exciting of a process.

Wish I’d seen this before we did ours – 20% Off !
http://blog.cs-cart.com/2011/05/04/easy-migration-to-cs-cart/