Migrate your osCommerce, CRE Loaded or Zen Cart store to Magento for as little as £1280. Get in touch today and we can discuss your particular requirements and help you at every step of the way in your migration to Magento, without a doubt the best open source ecommerce platform available today.

If you are thinking of upgrading or migrating from your osCommerce, CRE Loaded or Zen Cart based store to Magento then you should definitely get in touch with us.

Edmonds Commerce have years of experience working with osCommerce and its derivatives and know the platform inside out, back to front. We have done all kinds of things with osCommerce and still have a large number of clients still using the platform with great success.

However Magento is becoming more and more of an attractive option. It is new, modern, powerful and is definitely on the up. Certain Magento features, such as the multi store would be so hard to achieve with an osCommerce based store (or CRE Loaded, Zen Cart) that a migration to Magnento is the only realistic option.

Edmonds Commerce are one of the UK’s leading Magento specialists, we have worked on a large number of Magento sites for a wide range of clients in all kinds of industries. We spotted Magento on the up when it was still in its infancy. We knew that osCommerce was getting a bit long in the tooth and the market was wide open for its successor as the most popular open source ecommerce platform.

A few years later and it has certainly achieved that status, eclipsing osCommerce in every way apart perhaps from the number of sites running it. Having been around for a long time and being very successful, there are still a large number of sites using osCommerce (or CRE Loaded, Zen Cart). However we are now seeing more and more new and existing clients looking to move away from osCommerce and onto Magento.

We are able to help you perform and smooth and seamless transition from one platform to the other. We can migrate all the necessary data over and get your new store working perfectly and to your satisfaction before making a seamless switch so you suffer no down time.

If you would like to get some Magento training we are also able to help you with this, offering both classroom based Magento training in Leeds, West Yorkshire and online training for those for whom Leeds is a bit difficult to get to.

If you would like to know more or get in touch
Please click here to go to our contact form and get in touch with us regarding osCommerce to Magento migrations by osCommerce and Magento experts.

If you need to move your osCommerce (and derivatives such as CRE Loaded and Zen Cart) based site to a new server, here is a quick explanation of our approach which enables you to handle the migration without any downtime and no loss of order or customer information despite the fact that in the propagation period, visitors may visit the new server or the old server.

This propagation period is due to the fact that DNS servers around the globe may have cached your old DNS record, which points your domain name at your old IP address. These caches can stay alive for up to 48 hours meaning that you can not be certain that a visitor will definitely go to your new server within this period despite the fact that you have updated your domain name to point at your new name servers.

First – Copy the Files + Database:

Of course you need to copy all of the site files from the old server to the new server. The slowest and least reliable way to do this is via FTP. By using FTP, you have to actually download all the files on your old server to your local PC and then upload those files from your local PC to the new server. This can take a long time, especially the uploading part (thanks to the asynchronous nature of ADSL).

For the database you need to create a dump file via the command line or exporting from phpMyAdmin. Like FTP for the files, if you use phpMyAdmin then you have to download the dump file to your local machine and then upload it to the new server.

A better method for moving the files and database dump is to use SCP to copy files directly from the old server to the new server. I have written an article explaining this technique here: Basic Server Migration Using SSH + SCP.

Configuring the New Server
Unfortunately osCommerce based sites often require register globals to be enabled. They also use the old fashioned long arrays. That means that you will probably need to edit the configuration of the new server to enable these old PHP features.

This is an example vhost.conf (don’t forget to create the vhost_ssl.conf with the same settings) for Plesk.

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/********.co.uk/httpdocs>
php_admin_value open_basedir /var/www/vhosts/******.co.uk/dbCreds:/var/www/vhosts/******.co.uk/httpdocs:/tmp
AllowOverride All
php_admin_flag register_globals on
php_admin_flag register_long_arrays on
</Directory>

Note that I have specified a non webaccessible folder called dbCreds which contains the database credentials. I can then simply include this file from within the includes/configure.php and admin/includes/configure.php files.

Ensuring No Loss of Customer or Order Information
To make sure that you don’t lose any customer or order information, we need to take a couple of extra steps. First though an explanation of what can go wrong:

During the propagation period, there is a distinct possibility that you will be taking orders on both servers. If you don’t take any extra steps, then you might have orders and customers on both servers that have the same id number on the database. This can then make transferring the missing orders from the old server to the new server problematic.

A simple solution is to simply edit the autoincrement value on the orders and the customers table. I would normally suggest using a big jump in increment like 1000. This will mean that new orders and customers created on the new server will have id numbers that are 1000 higher than the old server. By doing this, we can then import any missing order and customer information over, safe in the knowledge that the id numbers will not clash. Of course, if you expect to create 1000 orders or customers within a couple of days then you will need to make a bigger increment increase on the new server. You are probably also turning over vast amounts of cash

Once the propagation period is over, lets say 3 days after you update your name servers, you can use this little script I created to help you to export the missing orders from your old server to your new server

Server Migration Orders / Customers Synchronisation

Get Someone To Handle it For You
Of course, if you prefer you can book someone to handle the migration for you. If you would like us to take care of your migration, just get in touch.

It seems that there are many UK webmasters who struggle to find a reliable UK based web developer who specialises in PHP. I have heard stories of people who claim to be osCommerce experts but in reality they simply know how to install a few contributions and that’s about it.

If you are looking for a freelance osCommerce developer, especially if you would prefer to deal with someone else in the United Kingdom then you would do well to get in touch with me. I now have a long list of happy clients who have had their osCommerce sites improved, speeded up and automatically populated with huge catalogues.

So to clarify. Edmonds Commerce is a Freelance web developer who specialise in osCommerce and is UK Based.

Furthermore, Edmonds Commerce also specialise in all osCommerce Derived Systems including CRE Loaded, Zen Cart etc.