Consolidating Two Stores Into One Store???

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

How difficult / impossible will it be to consolidate two stores down into one store?

Is there a specific workflow for doing this?

How difficult / impossible would it be to get customer and order info from store B into store A?

Since I am 99% sure that my store is running MySQL, would it instead be best to NOT try to merge the order info / customer info, and instead just set up MySQL on my local computer and then have the tables recreated locally so that I at least have an archive of orders?

I would at the very least need some sort of way of archiving information in case we ever get audited. Would the reports that can be exported be enough to hold up to a tax audit? (I know I am asking tax advice instead of Miva advice here, but play along with me here if you can.)

Thanks in advance.

[Kent Multer]

Customer info can be imported from one store to another, but there would have to be some checking to make sure that you don't end up with conflicts, e.g. if some customers already have accounts in both stores. Order info will pose a problem if you need the order ID numbers to stay the same, since there will probably some IDs that are used in both stores. It's feasible if you can live with some compromises.

It's always possible to make a backup of a database and save it for future use in an audit. But reading the data will be difficult unless you have a working store to run with it. There may be a way to back up the entire store in a form that can easily be installed on a server at some time in the future, in case you need to pull some reports. The Miva hosting gurus can probably advise you on that.

HTH --

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Thanks, Kent.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Not the easiest thing to do, but if you're comfortable getting MySQL running on your computer, you could use the store backup tool to copy down the database, load it in, and then run Miva Empresa on your computer to access the store locally at a later date.

Alternative; have the live store copied to a dev site, have our staff rid the dev site of any unnecessary files, such as the entire store images directory which is typically the most storage consuming, and any content not part of the store. That should leave you with a site that has a copy of Merchant that you can use the admin of, but otherwise is useless and doesn't consume much space since it's been stripped of all but the required Miva Merchant application files.

Alternative two; export the orders to CSV, import into Excel. Can export customers too. It wouldn't give you that same mapping from customer to orders, wouldn't have the payment info (if you're storing that encrypted in the store), etc.

Or, the original question, yes, the data could be combined, but it can be a difficult thing, especially if there is any overlap between customers and/or order id's between the two stores. It would typically be handled as a paid project our managed accounts program or design club (hour blocks) would handle.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Thanks so much for the detailed response!

I am pretty good at getting WAMP and LAMP installed on windows and linux boxes so that is a possibility.

And just so I remember correctly, Empressa is the engine that runs Miva Script, right?

I will think about the Dev store though because that sounds like a good idea. Chances are that I WON'T need to actually combine past orders and customers from Store B in with Store A. Mostly I will just be combining products from store B into Store A.

Thanks again!

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Not the easiest thing to do, but if you're comfortable getting MySQL running on your computer, you could use the store backup tool to copy down the database, load it in, and then run Miva Empresa on your computer to access the store locally at a later date.

Alternative; have the live store copied to a dev site, have our staff rid the dev site of any unnecessary files, such as the entire store images directory which is typically the most storage consuming, and any content not part of the store. That should leave you with a site that has a copy of Merchant that you can use the admin of, but otherwise is useless and doesn't consume much space since it's been stripped of all but the required Miva Merchant application files.

Alternative two; export the orders to CSV, import into Excel. Can export customers too. It wouldn't give you that same mapping from customer to orders, wouldn't have the payment info (if you're storing that encrypted in the store), etc.

Or, the original question, yes, the data could be combined, but it can be a difficult thing, especially if there is any overlap between customers and/or order id's between the two stores. It would typically be handled as a paid project our managed accounts program or design club (hour blocks) would handle.

I know this is an old post, but I hope we can follow up on this:

So are you saying I can take Site B (a live store on domain xyz.com) and then have the people at Miva convert it to a development store of site A (domain abc.com) and it will keep the data intact on the dev store for having a record of transactions and such???

[ILoveHostasaurus]

That is theoretically possible, but depending on the scope, could be quite labor intensive. For example, orders, customers, etc. not only have cross references, but if third party modules are involved, there could be even more relationships that must be accounted for within the database tables.