How to deal with converting a two store site into a one store site

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

AKA, buy pass the "choose store" screen.

Client used to have two stores, now just uses one. Whenever there is a bad link, it goes to the store selection page. Waiting on FTP access to see what the NTFD page setting is, but the larger question is how to you make this a One Store domain (and possible keep the old order history)?

[Kent Multer]

Off the top of my head, I'd try using .htaccess or maybe URI Management to map the discontinued store's URLs to the remaining store with type-302 redirects. Importing the orders from the discontinued store could be tricky. It will probably require a module or script of some sort to remap things like product and customer IDs. -- Oh, and before that, of course, you'll have to bring all the products and customers from the discontinued store into the remaining one. That could be tricky, because there may be some duplicates of critical data, such as product codes and customer logins or email addresses, between the two stores.

I think it's feasible; I've written modules to do similar types of data transfers. The client only needs to run the module once, but it saves them many, many hours of manual data entry.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

The bad links would all contain a Store_Code= with the old store code correct? The preferred option would be to perm redirect it to a landing page about that store is discontinued, but if you need all the URL's to stay the same but have a store code swap, that would be possible using a combo of three rewrite conditions and rules to grab the old code out in the three possible scenarios where the code could appear in the query string; 1) Detect Store_Code=OLD&(.*) then rewrite to %1&Store_Code=NEW to bring the rest of the args back in, 2) Detect (.*)&Store_Code=OLD&(.*) and rewrite to %1&%2&Store_Code=NEW, 3) Detect (.*)&Store_Code=OLD$ and rewrite to %1&Store_Code=NEW

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Thanks,

The old urls look like this:

/sitemap-743.html
/product-list-706.html

Also, any incorrect, or say discontinued product link brings up the Choose Store page instead of the NTFD page.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

How did the old url's function if there are multiple stores? Did both stores use entirely different URL formats with no catch all and unique rewrite rules? If so you can just append the store code to the old URL's?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Don't know yet, still waiting on FTP access. Will update ASAP