Moving from Zen Cart to Woo Commerce

[BaseballGuy]

Hello,

I'm being told by my coder that upgrading my Zen Cart eCommerce site to the latest version is going to cost upwards of $800 (due to all custom code on my site).

They are telling me that it would be cheaper for me (not only from a future upgrade standpoint) if I were to switch over to WooCommerce.

We went over taxes, shipping and a few other items and found workable solutions....however, the question regarding the current URLs came up.

Do you guys have any suggestions on how to deal with the old Zen Cart URLs and maintaining those in Woo Commerce?

Or should I just 301 redirect old URLs to new URLs?

More specifically, how do I 301 redirect the old URL's to the new ones efficiently and quickly? Is there a script or tool I can buy or?


Or should I start anew?


This eCommerce site gets very little traffic (50 visitors a day) and doesn't rank for any major profitable keywords.

[BaseballGuy]

Anyone?

[brotherhood of LAN]

No experience with the products themselves, but it'd seem a 301 is not necessary. Much better to do the working internally and not lose any link juice from redirects of legacy software.

If either of you are already familiar with the URL structure of each then using an internal .htaccess rewrite could be an easier workaround. Simply funnel all page requests to one file, do your mapping and then include the newer software.

This may range from being trivial to unworkable... but worth considering.

[BaseballGuy]

That's impossible to hand-re-create the URLs from scratch.

I was thinking of scraping my current site, importing the images/descriptions but not sure what tool to use in order to create a massive list to 301 redirect to.

[lorax]

How massive is the list of 301s?

[BaseballGuy]

~1000 products.

My coder asked me to ask you guys how you would recommend I go about this? He wants to charge me to create a custom script.....since we are essentially building a new ecommerce site (wooCommerce).

The only thing we will be "carrying over" from the old Zen Cart site are the following:

1. Products/descriptions/categories
2. Customers/Orders

[MLHmptn]

Implement 301's by utilizing Zen Carts sitemap to get your URL's for categories and product pages, then build a spreadsheet and 301 the old URL's to your new URL's, save as a text file.

Sadly you'll have to do this manually.

[lorax]

If a custom script is what he wants, ask him for his opinion on accuracy. Nothing like this ever goes 100% according to plan so make a plan to clean up. The issue here will be was it worth doing custom script versus just moving everything by hand and ensuring it's all correct. Personally I'd be more inclined to move everything by hand and review each product. I'd do it in bite size chunks over months so it wasn't too cumbersome. This way I'd get to touch everything and review it.

[jrockfl]

My first question would be, do you need to upgrade to the latest version of Zen Cart?

I think you could programmatically create all of the 301 redirects quicker than trying to do it all by hand.

Personally, if I had to upgrade then I would pay the $800 to stay on the same platform then switching around and possibly loosing income and or rankings.

[Maryb21]

First of all, a cheaper way to upgrade your Zen Cart would be simply to move to a new Zen Cart installation would be cart2cart (pay for).

Second of all, are you sure that WooCommerce is the best alternative? They have like one currency, one language and lack a lot of other features a decent e-commerce solution should have. I'd rather suggest moving to let's say OpenCart. It's much more functional, yet easy to handle.
Still, it's your choice.

As for Zen Cart redirects, you can do that part either manually or with some solution. You can search for some more, just google or browse some corresponding forums.

have a great upgrade

[edited by: lorax at 1:54 pm (utc) on Jan 30, 2013]
[edit reason] No links please [/edit]

[softwaredev]

Should you think of going ahead with Magento if given a new start to your eCommerce website? As you said you get only 50 visitors a day which is not a good figure for selling prospects. If you thought of migrating then probably you should give a go ahead to Magento.

[edited by: lorax at 12:08 pm (utc) on Feb 7, 2013]
[edit reason] removed link [/edit]