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Importing Customers Into Magento From ZenCart

Once again we use a CSV file to import existing customers into our new Magento shop.

Firstly create a test customer and add an address for them.

Export the file. This we will use as our template.

ZenCart doesn’t have a CSV file for customer details but it does have similar fields in the database and this can be accessed through your server. I go through cPanel and select phyMyAdmin.

The two fields you need are address_book and customers. Select your database then, at the top of the screen select export.  Select address_book, check the CSV  option (or CSV for excel) and save the file. Repeat for customers.

You now have two separate files with all the necessary information to be able to compile a Magento customer file ready for importing.

It is then a case of copy and pasting from the zencart customers into your Magento CSV template. To do this faster combined the two files into one.

Open your address files then select the first blank cell at the end of the data – mine was M1.  Then select data, from other text, your customers file and insert as comma separated into your worksheet starting at the first blank cell (M1 in my case).

Now read across and the customers details should more or less match. Basically name, address, email and password login.

For those lines that do not match I delete the first few cells on a row (A-L) and shift them up. Usually that realigns them. Doing it this way every line will need to be checked carefully for the correct customers details but it will save time copying and pasting later on as we can now do entire columns in one go.

Once finished delete the CSV files as this is information that, while secure on a host, is not secure on a personal computer.

Export ZenCart products, Import Magento products: Summary

Here is a summary of the CSV file downloaded from ZenCart, edited then uploaded to Magento.

If you are new to Magento you may wish to read first my previous posts on importing basic products into Magento from ZenCart, configuring the Magento CSV file and importing categories and images.

Overview:

Creating a Magento product CSV from a ZenCart file is straightforward and easy.

I open a sample Magento file and then copy and paste the Zen-cart columns, deleting the column when it is copied over to keep track.

Then simply bulk copy and paste the remaining Magento specific rows – it only takes about 4 copy and pastes. Change the image details then sort out the categories. Upload and done.

Magento Headings    Information Required               ZenCart Equivalent

store                            default: admin

websites                    name of every website using this product

eg myweb1, myweb 2 (comma separated)

attribute                    Default

type                             simple

category_ids           the number of the category     v_categories_name_2

simply find and replace to convert them

sku                               model number/stock code       v_products_model

has_options             0

name                            product name                          v_products_name_1

meta_title  meta_description   url_key url_path page_layout options_container

I leave all these blank although you could copy and paste them from your ZenCart database if you wanted.

gift_message_available  default: Use config

price                            cost for buyers                                    v_products_price

special_price  /  cost    I leave these 2 blank

weight                         weight for shipping purposes  v_products_weight

status                          Enabled           ensure this is set for all products else they do not show

tax_class_id            Taxable Goods

is_recurring             No

visibility                   Catalog, Search

enable_googlecheckout           set all to Yes or No if you want to use Google checkout

description              product description                 v_products_description_1

short_description     either copy in description again or leave blank (I leave it blank)

meta_keyword custom_layout_update  special_from_date   special_to_date news_from_date news_to_date            custom_design_from  custom_design_to

I leave all these blank

qty                              number in stock                       v_products_quantity

The following depend on your set up. Most will be 0 or 1. Below is mine:

min_qty                    0

use_config               1

is_qty_decimal       0

backorders              0

use_config_backorders           1

min_sale_qty         1

use_config_min_sale_qty       1

max_sale_qty        0

use_config_max_sale_qty       1

is_in_stock              1

low_stock_date     ( I leave this blank)

notify_stock_qty     0

use_config_             1

manage_stock        0

use_config_manage_stock      1

stock_status_changed_automatically 0

use_config_qty_increments    1

qty_increments     0

use_config_enable_qty_increments    1

enable_qty_increments           0

product_name             I don’t know why this appears again copy  and paste column H name

store_id                     1

product_type_id   simple

product_status_changed         I leave this blank

product_changed_websites    I leave this blank

image                          /image.jpg        v_products_image

Use the image name with the / and ensure jpg is lower case.  If you have directoryname/image.jpg then simply find and replace all directoryname/ with / to leave /image.jpg

Copy all the image files to /media/import and ensure permission on the files is 777.

small_image            copy and paste column from image

thumbnail                 copy and paste column from image

Export ZenCart products, Import Magento products Part 3

Categories in Magento

It was frustrating setting this up and whatever I did the categories would not show on the main page.

The best thing I found was to ignore the default category and not use it, instead make your own default category. I called mine Main Products and then created subcategories (which will be the main categories of the shop) called Consumer Electronics and Outdoor Fun and Games. Subcategories of these were then made which will form the drop down menus on the front page.

Then  simply ensure the shop view uses these categories.

Use the menu:

System>Manage Stores>Store name

then select Main Menu as the categories.

Fairly simple in the end but took a lot of patience to get there. Another Magento user unfriendly feature.

Next task is to copy and paste the CSV from ZenCart products to product numbers.

It should be straightforward to find and replace the old category name with the new category number. In Magento simply click on the category in the admin menu and it shows the ID number at the top of the edit page.

Images.

Magento appears to handle images well so I am not going to use thumbnails or different sizes but only one image and let Magento handle resizing.

They can be copied over from ZenCart quite easily using the information from v_products_image. You probably have something like a products directory and imagename.jpg so your CSV file looks like products/imagename.jpg

Copy the complete image directory with all your image files to /media/import/

Mine is therefore media/import/products/.  Copy and paste the Zencart CSV column to  the Magento CSV column called image. In the Magento CSV column the directory name needs to start with / so simply do a find and replace on the whole column. I did find products/ and replace with /products/.  If you use the Zencart small medium and large image sizes you will also need to find and replace .jpg with _LRG.jpg otherise you are almost done.

small_image            copy and paste column from image

thumbnail                 copy and paste column from image.

Thats it!

Export ZenCart products, Import Magento products Part 2

Once your products are in Magento you will probably want to change settings.

For example all my products had a quantity of 0 and were not visible or included in searches. To get started quickly I want to change everything to in stock and display the items in the search and catalogue.

Once again we can do this by exporting and importing a file rather than go through everything individually.

Change 1 item to the way you want it by editing the first product on the page.

Catalogue>Manage products>Edit a product.

For one product I changed the following in the product edit from the menu on the right hand side:

General: Status to Enabled, Visibility to Catalogue, Search

Prices: Tax Class

Inventory:  Quantity, In stock yes.

These are the basics but your item will still not show in Magento. You need to assign the product to your website, or store view even if you only have 1 website/view. This is by using the catalogue, products menu, ticking the box by the product and updating attributes then using the websites option.

I found a detailed explanation of it here: how to display products in Magento and assign products to a store view. They also show a video on where to click if you are not sure what to do.

This is another example of the strange quirks of Magento and how user unfriendly it is. Now we know how to do it and have a product in better shape, lets export the file.

System> Import/Export Profiles>Export All Products>Run Profile

The file is found on the server var/export.

The first product should now have all the values in the columns set up correctly so its simple a case of copy and pasting those values in excel.

My changes to copy and paste down the columns are :

B websites

T status, U tax_class_id, V is_recurring, W visibilty, X eenable_googlecheckout

As these are helpfully together in one block we can copy the whole row from T to X and paste is downwards. I changed all mine to:

Enabled Taxable Goods No Catalog, Search Yes

I have also taken this opportunity to once again paste the stock quantity in from the Zencart file. Ensure the is_in_stock column is all set to 1.

Save the file then re-import it as shown in previously in part 1 importing products to Magento from Zencart.

Products should now be in stock, enblesd, searchalble and showing on your site.

Next I shall be making categories and assigning products to categories using the same export/edit/import method.

Export ZenCart products, Import Magento products Part 1

How to import/export products from ZenCart to Magento with a csv file?

Firstly, in ZenCart, export your catalogue using Easy Populate to a CSV file.

Admin>Tools>Easy Populate:

Download Complete tab-delimited .txt file to edit (Attributes Not Included)

In magento I have created a sample product just to see which headings are needed in the CSV file.

Create a category, product and export it to a CSV file in Magento.

System>Import/Export>Profiles>Export all Products>Run Profile

The file will be located in /var/export/. Now open the csv files from Magento and ZenCart to compare the fields. It’s just a case of copy and pasting in Excel the required columns from the zencart file to the magento file.

Some of these are obvious and can be easily copied and pasted from ZenCart file. For example v_products_model is the same as sku so i simply copy and paste the entire column into the magento file and rename it sku. The same goes for v_products_name_1 and name

NB: for some reason name in the magento file appears twice so needs to be pasted over twice. Mine was at column M name and again at column BM product_name (I’m sure it will be obvious why at some stage).

Some columns need to be copied and some do not – lets worry about that later in part 2. For now just get as much copied and pasted as you can, remembering to change the Magento column names if you paste over them.

Some of the obvious ones:

v_products_price – price

v_products_weight – weight

v_products_description_1 – description

v_products_quantity – qty

There is a strip of rows from AN (min_qty) to BG  (enable_qty_increments) with 1 and 0 values in. For now I am going to copy these values in this row across and then paste it downwards to fill these values in for every product.

Lets leave it there for now. Some columns need to be filled in but we can do it later.

Important Values you must have:

For now the most important column is SKU. Every item needs a unique stock code so ensure there is an sku value for every product.
In the first column store – all values are admin
In the third column attribute all values are Default
In the fourth column type all values are simple

You can change some of these values later if needed but they have to be copied and pasted down to all products otherwise errors will occur and the products will not import.

Save the file in CSV format.

Upload it to Magento using the admin menu: System>Import Export> Profiles>Import all Products>

Upload the file. by browsing and then selecting Save and continue. Mine is called magentoproducts.csv .This uploads it to the server.

Now select the Run Profile menu on the right and in the file pull down menu should be your CSV file. Run the profile and wait – it is quite slow.

How did you do? I hope you got few errors. Mine worked pretty well and only rejected a few SKUs. I was pretty impressed at how straightforward this was.

In part 2 I will look at exporting, editing and re-importing the products file.

store websites attribute_set type category_ids sku has_options status tax_class_id is_recurring visibility enable_googlecheckout name meta_title meta_description image small_image thumbnail url_key url_path custom_design page_layout options_container gift_message_available price special_price cost weight description short_description meta_keyword custom_layout_update news_from_date news_to_date special_from_date special_to_date custom_design_from custom_design_to qty min_qty use_config_min_qty is_qty_decimal backorders use_config_backorders min_sale_qty use_config_min_sale_qty max_sale_qty use_config_max_sale_qty is_in_stock low_stock_date notify_stock_qty use_config_notify_stock_qty manage_stock use_config_manage_stock stock_status_changed_automatically use_config_qty_increments qty_increments use_config_enable_qty_increments enable_qty_increments product_name store_id product_type_id product_status_changed product_changed_websites

Moving to Magento

Your competitor has a new website with a modern, individual look and many useful functions. You have an open source 2 or 3 column standard layout that looks like any other shopping site available and offers only basis functions  Which website is a customer going to browse?

While osCommerce and ZenCart are not difficult to use or to understand how they work, are they rather dated and unable to do what customers require of a modern shopping website? I think its time to move on and I have chosen Magento.

It is a challenge. Magento works very differently and offers many more functions  with more ways to customise than either ZenCart or osCommerce could hope to offer. The downside? It’s complicated.

Rather than go live, I have installed it at home on my own server in order to test and understand how to manage the front and admin side.

My aim: to run 3 websites using one installation of Magento with one database, offering a selection of products through sites that look and feel different.

I am starting with the free 1.4.1 version and I’ll keep you updated on how i get on. Hopefully if you are a Magento beginner like me it will help you too.

In addition, the importance of SEO cannot be emphasised enough for any website. As well as marketing and promoting your online store, your cart software has to have great SEO compatibility and I think Magento is over and above ZenCart and OsCommerce.

Multiple Pages and Website Optimiser In ZenCart Part2

Google Optimiser gives  a piece of code to insert at the beginning and end of the original ez-page and another piece of code at the end of the 2nd alternative ez-page. This can be easily copy and pasted using the ZenCart admin.

Now for the tricky part.

Having selected the add to shopping cart stage as the ‘measurement of success’ page i placed the tracking code in /includes/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/template/tpl_shopping_cart_default.php. This file will need to be copied from the template default and uploaded to the server in YOUR TEMPLATE folder.

This file has 2 functions: display the cart when an item is added and display the cart when it is empty. So, to measure page success when something is added to the cart, the Google code needs to go in the middle of the file before the ‘cart is empty’ function.

I inserted the code around line 174  in tpl_shopping_cart_default.php just after the shipping estimator section as shown below.

Once edited upload the file to your server and save an additional temporary copy to your desktop.

Validating the file.

Google will not be able to validate the performance success page so this needs to be done manually with the saved copy of tpl_shopping_cart_default.php as illustrated below.

Verify all the information in the optimiser and let your experiment begin.

It may need some tweaking but now the pages are in place I can edit the ez-page easily through ZenCart admin section as long as I don’t disturb the Google script allowing experimentation with the page content.

Multiple Pages and Website Optimiser in ZenCart Part1

Having braved google analytics, the bounce rate of an ez-page is high and I want to change it. But what to?

Well, by looking at how and why people visit a page and, from the overlay, where they click I can make assumptions at why there are there and now i want to meet their expectations.

But hold on. How will I know my new content will be an improvement? Why not offer multiple variations of the same ZenCart page and see which one is more successful?

Once you have a Google analytics account you can go directly to Google Website Optimiser and set up testing. I am using a simple A/B page to begin with.

One page is made in EZ pages and consists of the normal, but revamped, page. The other is again an ez-page but one that google will redirect to rather than publicly linked and clickable.

Having created two pages and selected a ‘results’ page (i used adding an item to the shopping cart as a result to measure page performance http://allgiftsdirect.co.uk/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart) it is time to add the tracking code. That stage is a little more tricky so I’ll cover it in part 2.